Safety and Virtual Girls

Again, I've been wanting to touch on this theme. I did an experiment. When "child pornography" is Googled, the first page consists of either of definitions of what it is, or articles which tell stories of sting operations or rampant depravity. This article establishes the problem as local and the efforts to stop it "like shooting fish in a barrel." To a degree, I'm sure this is true, but this is only talking about its dissemination, and likewise, most articles are like this. It is uncommon to see child pornography articles written with the perspective of the survivor, and from the results of this little experiment, it appears that those testimonials are only used to bolster the arguments of activists who are staunchly anti-porn in general, using the mere possibility of child exploitation to rule out the capacity for porn's responsible, empowering creation and use. Conversely, this article, which cites a study that encourages the decriminalization of digitally manipulated images of child porn to reduce actual sex crimes, seems to view the Internet as a medium of protecting children, if one fraught with moral dilemmas. It seems no one can agree, but then again, are they even asking the subjects? An image represents a person. It is attached to a person, and can follow them for the rest of their lives. I'm not convinced that sites that relish the exploitation of minors are everywhere, but they certainly exist, and we must contextualize their existence not within the scheme of possible crimes that the images may encourage, but rather, the victimization that happens by the images existing at all. Those girls (and boys) should be kept at the forefront, not unknown hypotheticals.