Prohibited Sexual Behavior and Sexual Violence

Adult Sexual Contact with Children: Child Pornography 3

The commercial and psychological exploitation of children for pornographic purposes runs the gamut from seemingly harmless “nudist portraits” to scenes of extreme sexual violence. The producers of this material come from all over the world and from all walks of life. Indeed, occasionally even the children’s own parents are involved. There is a general agreement that all of these exploiters need to be tracked down and stopped.
However, the issue becomes less clear once we deal with teenagers who take sexually explicit pictures of themselves and share them with their own teenage friends. Not only the internet, but also the mobile picture phone now allows the transmission of images. As long as the senders are younger than 18, they are, in this context, legally defined as children. Therefore, they are guilty of spreading child pornography, and the recipients are guilty of possessing it. This means that the teenagers involved are both perpetrators and victims at the same time. Such exchanges can already be assumed to occur and to increase in the future, but they have not yet been very widely discussed. How the law and law enforcement will eventually deal with them remains to be seen.
This example is only one of many that point to possible problems with fighting child pornography. The following text gives some other examples.