Limits of Child Porn Regulation

Friday, April 07, 2006

It's a thriving, depraved industry that's seeing little resistance from the majority of countries around the world. A bleak report from Security Pipeline:

At a press conference in Washington, D.C., the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children and other participants presented a study on Thursday that reveals the woeful inadequacy of child pornography laws around the world.

The ICMEC's global policy review of child pornography laws in 184 Interpol-member countries shows that more than half have no laws that specifically address child pornography and in many others the existing laws are insufficient.

The ICMEC study found that possession of child pornography is not a crime in 138 countries. In 122 countries, there's no law dealing with the use of computers and the Internet as a means of child porn distribution.

Only five countries - Australia, Belgium, France, South Africa and the United States - have laws deemed adequate by ICMEC to address the issue.

As ahead as the United States is with federal laws against producing/possessing child porn written in the books, it hardly prevents Americans from accessing the contraband; much of it produced and distributed in foreign countries where offenders can easily get away with exploiting children.

The federal government went so far as to pass the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 which made it a crime to possess "virtual" child porn, a law that encompassed drawings, cartoons and computer generated images. The Supreme Court rightly struck it down in a 6-3 ruling on free speech grounds, suggesting virtual pornography can be construed as art if no real minors are being used.

"Real" child pornography, however, is still federally outlawed as far as interstate commerce is concerned, but the problem for law enforcement is catching the offender in the act, being that most perverts don't download child porn in the public library.

And if Americans have such an easy time finding child porn, one could imagine how easy it is in countries with less effective law enforcement.