Swedish Courts: Imaginary Children Aren't Real

Recommended Videos

Jabberwock xeno

New member
Oct 30, 2009
2,459
0
0
A part of me wants to think that this, combined with the NY ruling that accidental/unknowingly viewing or possessing the real thing means that common sense may be starting to prevail on this subject.

Though I have faith that this ruling will be upholded for Sweden, efforts have gone into hyperdrive to reverse the NY one. Seems the only thing that can unanimously unite both sides of our political system is fearful ignorance.

TL;DR:

Hurrah for Sweden's common sense!
 

Jabberwock xeno

New member
Oct 30, 2009
2,459
0
0
BrotherRool said:
I'm not going to go find it now, but there was a study that found that making CP legal to view and own actually led to a decrease in reported child abuse.

This makes sense to me, as it provides an.. "alternate method of relief" than abuse.
That said, for the most part, abuse still has to take place for such images to be created.

Also, I feel it's important to note that peadophile =/= abuser.

EDIT:

Sorry for the double post.
 

BrotherRool

New member
Oct 31, 2008
3,833
0
0
Jabberwock xeno said:
BrotherRool said:
I'm not going to go find it now, but there was a study that found that making CP legal to view and own actually led to a decrease in reported child abuse.

This makes sense to me, as it provides an.. "alternate method of relief" than abuse.
That said, for the most part, abuse still has to take place for such images to be created.

Also, I feel it's important to note that peadophile =/= abuser.

EDIT:

Sorry for the double post.
The problem with the snip here is I've said a lot of things and been quoted by a lot of people :D I'm afraid I can't actually work out where I am with you in conversation or which part we're talking about :)

In any case, yeah I've been remanded for the peadophile thing, I was using it completely incorrectly in my head.

If this conversation comes from one of the earlier parts, what we've arrived at so far is that there have been a few statistical studies that have suggested that the availability of explicit materials seems to lower rates of sexual assault and some more controlled studies which suggest the opposite. There are problems with both approaches and particularly with what we're talking about here, because cases of rape and child molestation are infamous for not being correctly reported and hard to find reliable data on anyway.

Whilst it intuitively provides a relief, you could also equally argue that it makes people feel more comfortable with their positions on such a thing and convince themselves that it's okay and that they should seek it out from more direct methods. As I said, studies have shown that expressing your anger and relieving it, often actually just makes you more angry more often. If you relieve yourself regularly it devalues the meaning of that relief and you need stronger forms of relief to do the same amount of work. As I've said there've been studies that show that this may well be directly applicable in the case of sexual materials.

In another example, people who don't swear receive more psychological satisfaction from it than people who swear regularly.

In the end, I've come to the conclusion that no-one knows the answer to this stuff, which is really unfortunate because any policy you legislate could be beneficial or it could make things a lot worse and there's no telling which is the case.

It's a little simpler with actual real juvenile pornography though, because the making of it is clearly exploiting children and in no situation would you want to create an economic demand for it. But in the case of fictional images, the case continues to be hard to see way through :(
 

ccggenius12

New member
Sep 30, 2010
717
0
0
Charli said:
Don't like that kind of stuff, still glad the guy got off.

(See you can dislike something without being a self righteous ass, world. Stop thrusting your dick of opinion onto everyone else without properly considering the ramifications and restrictions your ill constructed beliefs will sow.)
I see what you did there...

OT: Preposterous! This man is clearly violating the rights of innocent fictional children. He should be strung up for even considering that children that do not exist could possibly be sex objects!
 

antipunt

New member
Jan 3, 2009
3,035
0
0
Shoqiyqa said:
Eri said:
Imaginary kids are not real?
You should probably tell the United States that next.
First you'd have to get a few senators and congresscreatures without an imaginary extra father appointed.
*oompf* clever, clever

on topic: obligatory 'this thread reminds me of my old days in Gamefaqs' comment
 

PayneTrayne

Filled with ReLRRgious fervor.
Dec 17, 2009
892
0
0
Charli said:
Don't like that kind of stuff, still glad the guy got off.
Are you sure you don't want to phrase that a little bit differently?

But seriously, I'm glad to see that the human race is using common sense.
 

Thespian

New member
Sep 11, 2010
1,406
0
0
Grey Carter said:
In both trials, the prosecution argued that the images Lundström possessed could be used to entice children into performing sexual acts, and that real children could have been used as models for the drawings. I'm going to assume that last argument sounded marginally less insane in the original Swedish.
Fair enough. It's just like that time when I got arrested for having a kitchen knife because I could have used it to cut President Obama's throat in his sleep.
 

rayen020

New member
May 20, 2009
1,138
0
0
can this guy get back to his job/hobby/sexualfetish or whatever he had all that manga for now? I mean this whole thing was stupid. Right up there with charging parents who were into BDSM with child abuse.
 

Sozac

New member
Jan 19, 2011
262
0
0
Most of you guys seem happy that the the charges were dropped, and I honestly don't know how bad this stuff was (the image that led me here was Goku with his nipple covered in a censor), but I don't see how it was common sense that he should automatically face no repercussions. While drawing and doing aren't exactly the same, which is obvious, haven't we sort of collectively decided as a species that this kind of thought and expression is pretty harmful. I'm not saying he should be punished for it with fines because that won't help anything, but if he is a pedophile, then shouldn't he get help. Instead, their courts the precedent that drawn child pornography (and I'm assuming this would go for drawn rape) is ok. He can sugarcoat it by saying they were trying to "prohibit certain expressions of the imagination", but I can't see any good coming from this. I may be insane for thinking this, but my common sense tells me that allowing this won't help the pedophiles out there. Even though Enthuril and BrotherRool both had a lot of evidence on either side it seemed to be inconclusive as to whether it helps them or makes them worse. But I'd rather play it safe and keep a ban on it or at least search for some alternative means to help people like that. So until it is decisively proven, if it ever is, it is incorrect and misleading to say that this material is not harmful.
 

Aurora Firestorm

New member
May 1, 2008
692
0
0
Frankly, I don't support child porn whether or not it involves real children, if only because I refuse to support any kind of pedophilia.
 

ph0b0s123

New member
Jul 7, 2010
1,689
0
0
Happy this blow against the idea of thought crime has been struck. Thoughts are not crimes, actions are. Now if only other countries would take notice, looking at you UK.....

No-one seems to get that if you set the precedent that crimes can happen to non real people, it will have a big impact on video-games? No-one seems to get that we as gamers should be very concerned by this idea.

I love the hypocrisy on these forums as well. People who one minute argue that you are crazy to think, that being exposed to violent videos make people violent. Then turn around and think it is logical that being exposed to drawings of child (including 17 year olds, as the law is written, even though the age of consent in Sweden is much younger), will make you want to abuse children. Can anyone see the disconnect between those two positions.

'Well even if there is no conclusive evidence better safe than sorry?' Hope legislators don't get the same idea with video games.

People here are so disappointing....
 

Guffe

New member
Jul 12, 2009
5,103
0
0
KeyMaster45 said:
Hmm, several posts of people affirming that they agree with the ruling. Pffft, that's boring. I offer up a bounty of 57 internets to whomever can build a reasonably sane argument against the ruling.
HE DRAWS PICTURES OF CHILDREN, HALF NAKED!!
The man should be sentenced to death!
 

Charli

New member
Nov 23, 2008
3,443
0
0
PayneTrayne said:
Charli said:
Don't like that kind of stuff, still glad the guy got off.
Are you sure you don't want to phrase that a little bit differently?

But seriously, I'm glad to see that the human race is using common sense.
No, I really am that immature.
 

General Vagueness

New member
Feb 24, 2009
677
0
0
BrotherRool said:
General Vagueness said:
to make this short, correlation isn't the same as causation
[snip]

However if I create a controlled experiment where I choose to turn the tap 100 times and see what happens, a correlation there has a stronger implication of causation. It's because the independent variable has been consciously changed, so is less connected to other things. Naturally it's still not a complete implication of causation but it removes lots of incidents where you would have coincidental correlation, because often that stems from a third variable, that both observed variables are related to.
Is there an experiment that gave people this material and then observed that they had a reaction? If not there's still a hole there, like with any claim that a given stimulation causes or elevates a given behavior: the person might be (and IMHO probably is) more likely to seek out the stimulation if they already have whatever the character trait or behavior is.
 

BrotherRool

New member
Oct 31, 2008
3,833
0
0
General Vagueness said:
BrotherRool said:
General Vagueness said:
to make this short, correlation isn't the same as causation
[snip]

However if I create a controlled experiment where I choose to turn the tap 100 times and see what happens, a correlation there has a stronger implication of causation. It's because the independent variable has been consciously changed, so is less connected to other things. Naturally it's still not a complete implication of causation but it removes lots of incidents where you would have coincidental correlation, because often that stems from a third variable, that both observed variables are related to.
Is there an experiment that gave people this material and then observed that they had a reaction? If not there's still a hole there, like with any claim that a given stimulation causes or elevates a given behavior: the person might be (and IMHO probably is) more likely to seek out the stimulation if they already have whatever the character trait or behavior is.
This is why I don't study psychology, because almost every psychology experiment in the history of psychology is fundamentally flawed cos of selection bias.

I mean a couple of days ago I took part in a charity experiment that I found about through emails that promised no reward.

And since it's unethical to experiment on people without their consent, this will always be the case, except in broadly statistical experiments and as we've already said, then we have correlation problems.

You can't even do stuff with rats. I took part in another experiment recently from a psychologist who realised that most space-awareness psychology comes from rat experiments and decided to ask the basic question 'Do humans think like rats?' and it turns out, they don't.

Anyway in this case it seems like most of the pornography causes more violent behaviour experiments it tended to be participants been deliberately exposed over periods of time. Hopefully with control groups which should weed out irregularities in people more likely to seek the stuff out outside of experiment time too
 

DjinnFor

New member
Nov 20, 2009
281
0
0
This might stir up some controversy. But that's okay, it needs to be said anyways.

NuclearShadow said:
This sort of material should be outlawed as it is depreciating children in sexual acts. It isn't for artistic value but instead for sexual gratification from the idea of children in sexual encounters.
Outlawed?

"I don't think that word means what you think it means"[footnote]Just to establish what the word Outlaw typically meant historically, it means that you are going to strip someone of their legal privileges and forcibly cast them out of society and into the wild; sort of like deporting someone without actually sending them anywhere. I understand you probably didn't mean that literally; what you really probably meant was to make said material a "crime" to create and possess, sort of like actual child pornography.[/footnote] is, I think, an appropriate phrase to quote here.

Let me walk you through the procedure of what happens when someone is suspected and then convicted of a "crime", so that you can appreciate the gravity of the statement you just made.

Depending on the nature of the crime in question, you might receive something known as a "Summons To Appear at Court", which is a euphemistic way to say "We will have armed men kick down your door and kidnap you if you don't come quietly"... or they may just bypass the request altogether and go straight to the door-kicking and kidnapping.

Either way, if you resist said kidnapping, you will be beaten, tazed, gassed, and so on until you have been incapacitated. If you foresee this possibility and attempt to protect yourself in any meaningful way with any sort of weapon, you will probably be shot. Large pets who rush to your defense will most likely be executed, and your children may be kidnapped as well and sent to an agency created to house children of adults much like yourself.

Once you have been kidnapped you will be hauled off to an internment camp to be processed by your kidnappers. You will probably be forced to inhabit a smelly, overcrowded, temporary cell (assuming you live in the U.S.) for some time until pretrial arrangements have been taken care of or proper space has been made for you, both of which aren't likely to happen for a long time. In order to pressure you into pleading guilty, you will be forced to pay a deposit before being allowed to leave (to entice you to come back at their request) that is set to an amount you probably can't afford, usually in cash only.

Your trial will be held by a robed adjudicator employed by the same people who kidnapped you, a prosecutor employed by the same people who kidnapped you, and a lawyer appointed to you by the same people who kidnapped you (if you are among the many less privileged who are unable to afford their own lawyers).

If you are unlucky, your crime will be one quite similar to one that these people, their colleagues, and their predecessors have taken to trial before in the past, and whose verdict at the time would condemn you today as well. If that is the case, all three of these people will advise you to plead guilty and refrain from requesting a jury trial, in order to save them time[footnote]This is not really an attempt to bash the voluntary participants of the legal system, though: given that they market themselves as promising to give you a speedy trial, and those that don't get a quick one tend to get shorter actual jail sentences due to credit given for time already served, and they get a lot of flak in the press for that, and the fact that there are so many crimes in the books by now that the courts and jails overflowing as it is, they tend to want low profile cases to go as fast as possible[/footnote], usually with threats of contempt of court or stiffer jail sentences for the more routine cases. Your own representative, if you can afford one, will similarly request that you refrain from a lengthy trial in order to save you in legal fees.

If you are deemed innocent, you will not be compensated or awarded anything for the mistake without going through yet another trial, this time civil rather than criminal. The people who put you through this ordeal will of course not pay anything out of their own purse; instead, your award, if you get one, will be bankrolled by the taxpayers.

If you are labeled guilty, you will be told the terms and duration of your kidnapping by the adjudicator. Your accommodations may be nice or harsh, depending on what "crime" you have been convicted for; you may reside in a small but well-maintained cell with a simple T.V. and nice meals, or you may reside in a violent, drug-infested hell-hole where you are summarily raped by large, burly men. Either way, the guards of your prison will generally treat you with contempt and society writ large will not shred a single tear for the heinous acts that have been committed on you.

That is what happens to people accused and then convicted of "crimes", stripped of all euphemisms. There are very few people I'd wish such a fate on. Murderers? Yes. Kidnappers? Yes. Molesters and sexual abusers? Definitely. Assault and Battery? Depends. Theft? Not really. Viewing or creating objectionable art without actually harming anyone in any way? Uh, no.

In reality, you're the one who has taken the "hugely objectionable" position. It is a very, very serious proposition to claim something ought to be "outlawed". Do not take it lightly. You are quite literally claiming that people ought to be kidnapped and imprisoned for a lengthy period of time, and quite possibly beaten, raped, blackmailed, extorted, and/or murdered, depending on the circumstances.

Depending on what you are requesting should be outlawed, you should expect someone to raise an eyebrow at you and openly object.
 

Sozac

New member
Jan 19, 2011
262
0
0
FelixG said:
Sozac said:
While drawing and doing aren't exactly the same, which is obvious, haven't we sort of collectively decided as a species that this kind of thought and expression is pretty harmful.
We as a species have decided exactly the opposite.

if "thought and expression" was harmful we wouldn't have any violent movies, games, books, stories ect. Besides, Thought is very rarely a bad thing. Its when those thoughts become actions is when there is a problem.

And it sets a good precedent. Because if they got away with this what is to stop them on the next moral crusade? What would be next? Standard porn? Violence in television? Violence in games? Cursing in movies? If one bit of expression if under attack, and no one stands up to it because they think its distasteful, who will stand up when something you enjoy comes under attack?

Just because we find it distasteful the man hasn't hurt a single person. So he is as likely a pedophile as a person who plays Gears of War is a violent murderer. So what should he be punished for if he hasn't hurt a single person and hasn't even tried to hurt a person. The items in his possession weren't even used to hurt someone in the past (Aka real pictures)?

And for me personally it is horribly depressing that someone would say that just to play it safe something should be banned when they have jack all proof that is is harmful, well there is no conclusive proof that violent games don't cause violent individuals so lets ban them too, or anything else we happen not to like. These are the people holding the world back. I need to go drink now.

You make a strong argument, but I believe there is a difference between child pornography and violence in this regards. It's pornography, which is made for sexual stimulation. There is nothing artistically important, it's only purpose is sexual. This isn't Lolita (the book). But yeah, Gears of War may be considered violence pornography, it sort of gets away with it by making them mindless aliens. A lot of these games have started taking it too far by making decoys like terrorists and aliens to justify morally how happy it makes our primal instinct to kill things. I think Yahtzee wrote about this and why zombies work, but the point is, we might want to examine all the violence stuff just as carefully.

Also, you can't use that slippery slope fallacy with the whole "What would be next?" thing. There is no proof that any limitations on potentially harmful pornography would ever lead to reducing swearing in movies. That is just ridiculous. There will probably be a more tests of how thoughts and pornography influence our actions.

My gut tells me banning it is safer. Your gut obviously tells you something different. I may not have definite proof, but neither do you (unless you absolutely do which would be helpful), and that's when our guts decide for us. If I had definite proof against my gut, I would tentatively go with it. My mind is undecided really, but when pressed, that's when I gotta think with my heart and decide. And I'm naturally inclined to favor the more conservative outlook on this matter. You shouldn't be horribly depressed that people with different experiences have different reasons for different feelings because there is much worse stuff to be depressed over. I don't know if you want a justification with my exact personal experiences.

But to summarize, anything that is boiled down to how we're born and our natural humanity isn't always very good (Lord of the Flies-ish). My common sense tells me that because the action is bad how is something as similar as a drawing of the action supposed be the opposite. Since there is no decisive truism on causation for this matter, and pedophilia is caused biologically (it's their nature), I would rather not trust something harmful and innate.

Also, while you seem to justify your side by saying that we are only holding the world back. It's really all about phrasing. I could easily justify it in my own mind by believing that people like you want to unleash on the world all the bad and downright evil parts of human nature that we are trying to protect it from. But yeah, it's just phrasing really.
 

Alar

The Stormbringer
Dec 1, 2009
1,355
0
0
DjinnFor said:
This might stir up some controversy. But that's okay, it needs to be said anyways.

NuclearShadow said:
This sort of material should be outlawed as it is depreciating children in sexual acts. It isn't for artistic value but instead for sexual gratification from the idea of children in sexual encounters.
Outlawed?

"I don't think that word means what you think it means" is, I think, an appropriate phrase to quote here.

Let me walk you through the procedure of what happens when someone is suspected and then convicted of a "crime", so that you can appreciate the gravity of the statement you just made.

-snippity snip snip-

That is what happens to people accused and then convicted of "crimes", stripped of all euphemisms. There are very few people I'd wish such a fate on. Murderers? Yes. Kidnappers? Yes. Molesters and sexual abusers? Definitely. Assault and Battery? Depends. Theft? Not really. Viewing or creating objectionable art without actually harming anyone in any way? Uh, no.

In reality, you're the one who has taken the "hugely objectionable" position. It is a very, very serious proposition to claim something ought to be "outlawed". Do not take it lightly. You are quite literally claiming that people ought to be kidnapped and imprisoned for a lengthy period of time, and quite possibly beaten, raped, blackmailed, extorted, and/or murdered, depending on the circumstances.

Depending on what you are requesting should be outlawed, you should expect someone to raise an eyebrow at you and openly object.
Sir or madam, you've just put forth an extremely good explanation. Your description of what happens to 'criminals' should be used to inform our youths in high schools, as well as less educated folk.

I also find it completely ridiculous that people could think such actions make one wholly susceptible to this traumatic and frankly overblown, overused process.
 

lapan

New member
Jan 23, 2009
1,455
1
0
Like i already said i nthe other thread, this is a win for common sense. Drawn lolicon/shota hentais hurt noone. I'd even argue that denying pedophiles access to material that can satify their urges without hurting anyone could be a bad idea. If they have no way left, some of them could turn to criminal ways...
 

Sozac

New member
Jan 19, 2011
262
0
0
misterprickly said:
Now if only they would do the same for drawings of big breasted women.
Are those illegal in Sweden. It might help explain the pedophilia.



I'm sorry. That was a shitty joke, but seriously what you said doesn't make any sense.