Talk:Child pornography

This article was deleted by an administrator and restarted as a stub on 22:07 2007-05-28, due to the presence of a problematic search term. The result of the deletion review was to refer further disputes to ArbCom. Revisions prior to the first that contained the term may be restored.

More information

The article should be edited to give more information about the life-destroying effects of paedophilia. For example, the victims of paedophilia are six times more likely to commit suicide and are eight times more likely to repeatedly attempt suicide throughout their lives. The victims of abuse in childhood are three times more likely to suffer from depression or to commit suicide with the victims of paedophila being the most affected with a 40% higher number of them suffering from depression than the victims of all the other types of abuse. This is important information and will give the reader a much greater understanding of the issue, including the damaging effects mentioned above.Link to Proof of Life-Destroying Effects of Child Pornography

Thank You! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.46.138.129 (talk) 17:31, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

billion-dollar market

Right in the beginning of the article the reader is confronted with the thesis, that there is a multi billion market for child pornography. There are woping 7 references to support this, creating the impression of this beeing a proven fact.

Two years ago I would have believed this, but last year there was a discussion about fighting child pornography in Germany, where the government claimed the existence of a "multi-billion euro" market. This was discussed in public and the result was - there is no evidence to support this claim but there is some evidence against it. Of course there is a market and there is no doubt that there is money made by selling child pornography on the internet but the dimension is not there.

The german government refered to numbers by the UN and the IWF, but those were not created using a methodology suitable to estimate this market (the methodology was basically "guessing").

Because of this lack of evidence, there is a government funded study running on the university of hannover. This study collects information from police to investigate the structure of the child pornography market. The study is not completed yet. Arnd Hueneke who leads it is cited in spring 2010 (http://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Deja-vu-971943.html) to dispute the existence of such a market.

I have also reviewed the references:

• [17] is a news article, which refers to a 100% dubious source which doesn't carry the information anymore
• [18-19] are news articles, which make claims without sources
• [20] is a book, which refers to the "Department of Justice" making a claim about a 3 billion market.
• [21] is a book, which provides no source for its "multi-billion dollar" claim. The rest of the book provides lots of references and statistics but I have not found one supporting the thesis
• [22] is a book, which is dubious because it is 18 years old. This is far before the WWW
• [23] is a book that refers to "recent estimates"

Summary on the references:

• Sources 17-19, 21 and 23 make claims on this topic without source. While 21 and 23 are books with enough credit, there are no cues, that there authors have any specific knowledge for there statements on this topic. The impression is that this statements were made as platitudes. This is for sure not enough to be a wikipedia source in this case. Those references should be deleted.
• Source 22 I could not read, but I think the reference should be removed unless someone can comment on the contents
  
• Source 21 is refering to the "Department of Justice". This book has abviously no value as a source if the original source from the "Department of Justice" could be found. Unfortunately I could not find it using google. I did find some sites referencing the "Department of Justice" with either 3 billion or 20 billion dollar market.

On the Department of Justice home page there was only this article ("Child pornography on the internet", http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/RIC/ResourceDetail.aspx?RID=27). This article says, that the problem is "hard to estimate" and the other numbers mentioned would not support any multi-billion dollar claim.

Summary of the comment:
I propose to either remove this thesis completely or at least to present it in a way, which does not create the impression of beeing a scintific fact supported by 7(!) valueable sources.

Naaram (talk) 22:44, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

Thank you very much for for your excellent and rigorous research, Naaram. You have convinced me and I support your proposal. Herostratus (talk) 04:46, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

I hope, that someone can change the page as I don't have the requiered 10 edits so far. Naaram (talk) 07:03, 10 July 2010 (UTC)

Well, good luck getting that past the zealots who have commandeered this article. Try making even the minor change from "Child pornography is a multi-billion[...]" to "Child pornography is estimated to be a multi-billion[...]". Try adding the University of Hannover source to sources 17-23. I guarantee that it won't be long before one of the resident moral crusaders shows up to revert your edit, claiming that any source apart from the ones he's cherry-picked is "fringe", and that including any viewpoint that doesn't support his mission is "giving undue weight" (their mission, in case you hadn't already guessed, is not writing a factual, dispassionate encyclopedia article). Then try engaging them in a debate and you will be branded a pedophile who is trying to rationalise his behaviour.

The CP article is a good illustration of a fundamental flaw of Wikipedia: Wikipedia does not care about empirical evidence. All that Wikipedia cares about is this vague concept of "verifiability", even if it contradicts empirical evidence. Here, we do not even attempt pursuing an ideal as outdated as ... the truth (gasp!). The problem is, if some source that has been deemed authoritative enough makes a multi-billion dollar claim, then Wikipedia will report this multi-billion figure as fact. Period. Even if the source has quite blatantly pulled the figure out of their behind. And even if the source itself admits to this. The fact that most sources who study this subject have an agenda and irrational zeal of their own only makes things worse. --TheChatteringClasses (talk) 23:32, 13 July 2010 (UTC)

The whole article seems to have a particular bias, but memorable "gems" like this are the icing on the cake. The idea child pornography is a "$20 billion dollar industry" seems unlikely to me, even from a common sense point of view. Given the evidence presented here, I would like to add another vote to suggest this statement requires immediate attention, and possibly stronger security on the article. --Gnathan87 (talk) 02:37, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

another (very well referenced) source, which tracks the sources of the "billion-dollar", "fastest growing" and "20% of internet porn" claims. http://libertus.net/censor/resources/statistics-laundering.html 202.76.179.34 (talk) 12:15, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

Border Between Child Pornography and Regular Pornography

I'm sorry if the article already has this information, but what is the age division between child pornography and regular pornography? Is it a fixed age, or varies by country, or got to do how the subject is decipted (ie. A 17-year old posing as an adult is consider legal while a 18-year old posing as a 15-year old is illegal). --71.149.142.183 (talk) 13:53, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

The US and UN define it as 18. Germany defined it as 16 up until a while ago but changed it to 18. Some nations just don't have laws about it or ban all pornography. K. the Surveyor (talk) 23:07, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

So basically a teen porn business could just move their models to Germany and no one will be the wiser? 71.149.142.183 (talk) 21:27, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

typo alert

To Admins: Please change the word "analsis" into "analysis". User.Zero.Zero.Zero.One (talk) 10:42, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

 Done, thanks. Keith D (talk) 12:59, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

definiton (record of abuse)

Child pornography refers to images or films (also known as child abuse images[1][2][3]) and in some cases writings[3][4][5] depicting sexually explicit activities involving a child; as such, child pornography is a record of child sexual abuse.[6][7][8][9][10][11] Abuse of the child occurs during the sexual acts which are recorded in the production of child pornography,[6][7][9][10][11][12][13] and several professors of psychology state that memories of the abuse are maintained as long as visual records exist, are accessed, and are "exploited perversely."[11][12] -Top of the article

This seems to be saying that all child pornography is record of sexual abuse. I know that at least in the US, images depicting children naked are considered child pornography, even if the children were not involved in sexually explicit activities. Perhaps the summary up top should be more general, with different specific definitions listed? 69.144.20.148 (talk) 02:42, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

Do you have a source for that? Not to be rude, but mere nudity doesn't constitute legal child pornography in the U.S. I supposed you could make a case for child nudity as a way the term is used in slang or even as a common perception, but not as a legal term. Wickedjacob (talk) 16:42, 15 December 2010 (UTC)