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Child Pornography or Art? Is there a line, if so where?

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muffy:
^ Whilst the leg injury analogy was possibly not the best, it did make a valid point: The initial reaction of horror after something like that happens can be nearly as damaging as the event in terms of later repurcussions, as Bob said rather well - this is the thing that will grow with the child into a feeling of self-disgust, inadequacy as a human being, and, even if they're too young to understand it at the time, a feeling that they're tainted and somehow less of a person as someone who hasn't been abused. For a 7 year old child, for example, to have their mother be too upset to cuddle them or to be able to look at them after an event...that's going to leave some intense emotional scarring. To have people whisper and speculate about how terrible it must have been isn't going to help a whole lot either*, and neither is a press debacle obsessing over paedophilia.
 
That's not to say 'ignore the problem and pretend it never happened' - that only creates a whole bunch of issues even more deep rooted than the first - self doubt in the strongest sense of the phrase as a starter - the only benefit being that the child in question may be able to deal with the repurcussions at a time in their life when they're more emotionally equipped to do so. It won't erase it from that child's mind, though - it'll manifest itself in all sorts of ways that the person won't understand. Schimmy made the point well - it should be the patient talking about what affects them, and not the other way round. Unfortunately, not all therapists subscribe to the same methods, and when it comes to child psychology, there is a much greater risk of the child having their viewpoint on events skewed by opinions of what the therapist expects them to be feeling.

This is where my issue with the press's obsession with all things paedophilia related comes in: a child goes through that, they go through hell. What they are then faced with, at every point in their life whilst dealing with this, is daily witch hunts against possible perpetrators, a constant reminder of what they went through, and the constant buzzing of hacks who couldn't write their way out of a paper bag salivating at a scandal.

To call it cheapening is misleading - to call it damaging would be more accurate. An artist takes pictures of children: it represents something, and the interpretation is, as with most art, down to the observer. Yes, there are tasteless images in abundance, and yes, there are cases wherein the artist is trying to make a statement which may be hurtful to some, provocative to others, but what the press does is jump on it, scream blue murder and effectively hack into incredibly sensitive issues that demand tact and a little thought.

If the mainstream press were to conduct itself similarly to this thread, that is to say with well thought out debates on the matter, a lot of thought and no metaphorical excrement throwing, then artists presenting their work would be met with a fair audience, fair praise and fair criticism. What it receives instead is people looking for the most degenerate parts of human nature and proclamations of 'evil' where such statements aren't due, and the matter of the art in question being dragged through the lowest common denominator of judgement. It's there to be viewed in context, not to a backdrop of hysterical obsessing over paedophillia.

(*I think this is possibly why I reacted the way I did to the earlier posts in the thread regarding life being worth living after sexual abuse - largely because after a person has gone through this, that is a question that has a tendency to raise itself all too often - and this is in no way a dig or an attempt to revive what is a spent and resolved debate, because the points that were made were extremely relevant and well thought out, and I respect them - think of this statement more as an explanation. And at no point did I interpret the comments as 'person x thinks person y should be dead'. Just to clarify.)

Barmymoo:
Sorry to resurrect a semi-dead thread but I was interested to see your reactions to this news story and it didn't seem like a good idea to start a new topic.

Although I don't believe child pornography is a good idea, I also don't believe that giving people the power to decide what is and isn't appropriate for the internet is necessarily a good idea either. The article doesn't say whether they will only block sites which condone child pornography, or whether they will also try to shut down sites if people put something up (like an inappropriate image on here, for example).

Anyway sorry again for necroing this thread.

waterloosunset:
as disgusyting as child pornography is, i dont think censorship is the way forward. to easy to abuse and extend. with all these new surveillance devices and tracking stuff, surely the police can locate the people who upload it all and arrest them, cutting it off at the source

Orbert:
Agreed.  Shooting the messenger iis not the way to address the problem.  Putting the onus on the ISPs when all they're doing is providing a service is stupid.  It's like all that extra time-wasting security the airlines were required to add, at their own expense, because all the federal terrorism-fighting money was being spent on the military.  The government has no idea where the problem lies or how to deal with it.

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