David Farnell said:
ph0b0s123 said:
I have said this a few times on this site, but I would like to see the Japaneses government do something intelligent with legislation, to reduce the amount of drawings of minors being produced. I would love them to legislate against making money from the drawings. This would hopefully have the affect of reducing the amount without having to rely on censorship. You can make the drawings, you just can't get any money for them.
Well, directly saying "You can't earn money for drawing [fill in the subject matter]" is just another form of censorship. But Japan already has (really vague) laws that limit pornographic drawings. These could perhaps be expanded/adjusted. But as you note in the first part of your comment, that might not even be desirable. If allowing these awful comics to exist results in fewer children being harmed, then it seems better to let them exist. (Clearly, we need some good studies on this.)
I don't think it is as bad as censorship to the remove financial incentives for creating the material. No-one is making the material itself illegal, just the financial gains from creating it. This will result in a halfway house where the material still exists (for the reasons disused in your previous post), but at a reduced amount and you know it's creation is being done for reasons other than financial gain. I just don't want people, being rewarded financial for making abuse drawings while not wanting to bring down the ban hammer at the same time. I think it would be a good compromise. This could only be done at first in Japan though to have a major impact as they are about the biggest exporter of such material, I believe.
What I have not seen anywhere, from any group, be it government or children charity is an evidence based reason as to why this victim-less material needs to be banned. The main reason I have seen is 'we find this material at homes of people who have abused children'. Which if the only reason is dumb, since that supposes that only people who abuse children look at this material. If that was true in Japan child abuse would be epidemic, even with the under reporting. In the same way only people who blow themselves up, have korans in their homes, so why not ban korans, because we know for a fact that not everyone who owns a koran is going to blow themselves up. This mis-logic is why in the only US court case, I am aware of so far, on this material even the judge stated that the man in court was obviously not a p@edo, but that the law said he had to punish him anyway. That's not good law, it is supposed to target and reduce the threat of abuse to real children not punish people who would never do such a thing.
My biggest problem with the new cartoon laws though is that it makes illegal depictions of an act that in it's self is legal. I.e sexual relations with someone 16 or 17. Legal in most US states and the UK. But both these countries have made illegal drawings of sexual relations of 16 and 17 year olds. The message, if you are interested in 16 or 17 year olds don't look at pictures of non-real ones, that's a no no. Go out and have sex with real ones as that is preferable. Yes, let's incentive people having sex with under 18's rather than looking at drawings of non real ones. Sometimes the law is stupid. That and I think it is easier to guess whether a drawing is under 16 than for under 18.
