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The Economist on the case



Thanks to John McElwee for pointing this out:

JUST LOOKING? 

Britain's child pornography laws are too harsh

ON TUESDAY this week, most British newspapers splashed
across their front pages the arrest of Pete Townshend,
a rock star, on suspicion of making and possessing
images of child pornography. Gerry Mepham, a maths
teacher from Portsmouth who was arrested in the same
police operation got less attention, although the
light aircraft he was flying later disappeared over
the Channel. 

It is not surprising that people kill themselves
rather than face charges, or even suspicion, of
viewing child pornography. No crime, not even murder,
is so vilified in the western world as paedophilia.
Being accused, even wrongly, of anything to do with
child abuse can ruin people's lives. 

British law defines child pornography as "indecent"
photographs of children. That can include those of
naked, but unmolested, children, depending on the
context--if the photos are cut down to emphasise the
genitals, for instance, or posted on a website. The
law has been tightened in recent years. The 1978
Protection of Children Act targeted those "making"
images, meaning photographers, but "making" is now
interpreted to include downloading. In 1994, the law
was revised to include computer-generated images as
well as real photographs. And the maximum sentence for
possessing an image was recently increased from six
months to five years. So now, if you click on a link
to a child pornography site and save an image of a
naked child, you could go to jail for five years.

There are two arguments for such harsh penalties for
those who look at child pornography: first, that
looking leads to doing, and second, that paying for
photographs of children being abused creates an
incentive to commit such crimes. Proponents of the
argument that looking leads to doing say that, in
America, 36% of those who watch child pornography are
also child molesters. Whether or not that
widely-disputed figure is true, it does not prove that
watching pornography causes abuse. What about the
other 64%? Maybe, for them, looking is a substitute
for doing. Interestingly, at the same time as child
pornography has become more widely available, so child
abuse has declined.According to the Crimes Against
Children Research Centre, a research group funded by
America's Department of Justice, between 1992 and 2000
the number of substantiated cases of sexual abuse of
children in the United States dropped by more than a
third. In Britain, child abuse declined
by 7% between 1991 and 2001.

The argument that voyeurs are necessarily part of a
chain of crime is a stronger one, though technology
has weakened it. Some of the images that people are
buying are computer-generated, so that making them has
harmed nobody. That's why America's Supreme Court last
year ruled the country's child-pornography legislation
unconstitutional. American law-makers are now working
on a new law.

British law should similarly draw a line between real
and fake pornography. It should make a distinction
between photographs which depict child abuse and those
of simple nakedness. And it should distinguish between
the curious (who may be revolted by what they have
seen) and those who've been at it for years. As the
law stands, downloading one image is as much an
offence as downloading 10,000. That still, though,
leaves the hardest case: the long-term user who pays
for pictures of real abuse, but sits there just
looking. 

Even this die-hard liberal paper regards him as a rare
justification for compromising the principle of
freedom of expression. The problem is that he isn't
just looking. Just as those who buy stolen goods
encourage thieves, so those who buy child pornography
encourage child rapists. The strongest of principles
weaken in the face of such crimes. 


=====
-Brian in Atlanta
The Who This Month!
http://www.thewhothismonth.com
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