Child pornography

This week, in the course I’m teaching on freedom of speech on the internet, I’ve asked the students to write an entry in their blogs where they link to a web site which they think should be banned. Of course I have to say something about this too. When, in my opinion, does a web site go to far?

An obvious candidate is child pornography. I have four children. The safety of children is important to me. And above all: I don’t want my kids to know that there are people out there who do these kinds of things to children. (For a rather tame example of child pornography, see above — yes, that’s me!)

Producing kiddie porn should obviously be illegal. The production necessarily means committing crimes against children, and the people involved should be put away. But I’m less happy about criminalizing the consumption. Can certain kinds of sexual arousal really be said to be against the law? Surely the law works very badly in the secret world of sexual perversions. It’s not traffic congestion we are talking about here or safety-standards for electrical appliances.

This week, in the course I’m teaching on freedom of speech on the internet, I’ve asked the students to write an entry in their blogs where they link to a web site which they think should be banned. Of course I have to say something about this too. When, in my opinion, does a web site go to far?

An obvious candidate is child pornography. I have four children. The safety of children is important to me. And above all: I don’t want my kids to know that there are people out there who do these kinds of things to children. (For a rather tame example of child pornography, see above — yes, that’s me!)

Producing kiddie porn should obviously be illegal. The production necessarily means committing crimes against children, and the people involved should be put away. But I’m less happy about criminalizing the consumption. Can certain kinds of sexual arousal really be said to be against the law? Surely the law works very badly in the secret world of sexual perversions. It’s not traffic congestion we are talking about here or safety-standards for electrical appliances.