@DrewDad,
Not all child pornography involves abuse of children though. What about when children are the ones making it as with sexting? Plus being nude and/or engaging in sexual behaviours isn't abuse in and of itself. If pressured, forced, coerced into doing it then it's abuse. But just as we'd accept teens desire a glimpse at their father's Playboy in previous generaitons, and porn today, we achieve nothing dismissing teens as sexual beings.
It's onyl very recently than we've begun to claim children and teens aren't sexual. Yet don't all children discover their genitals and masturbate? They may not be imagining sex with others, but to claim they're not sexual is patently absurd.
Just as an artistic nude portrait has artistic value, the same sort of image or painitng does not lose artistic legitimacy by virtue of involving a minor. And while this example isn't what's being considered in proper child pornography, it shows how there are in fact exceptions. Additionally, not every nude minor is then pornographic as with 'nudist' pictures.
Only when people are engaging in overt sexual behaviours does it become porn. But this distinction was made clear decades ago over the whole Sears catalog thing which had children in underwear and these catalogs had been found in the possession of child sexual abusers. But by virtue of who used them, and for what, it isn't automatically then child pornography as the courts ruled then.
In the case of child porn proper as with adults and children engaging in overt sexual acts that's 'usually' abuse, but still not in and of itself. Unless sex itself is abuse, not every depiction of it is either. Could in theory involve married couples as with an example a few years ago in the US involving a 15yo wife and her 50-something husband think he was making home porno together. Was a legally sanctioned marriage, the sex was legal (because they were married,) yet the porn itself was illegal as she was still under 18. Was that "abuse?"
Reminds me of a pot story.
