[LINK] .uk - Net blamed for rise in child porn

[Danny Yee]

David Goldstein wrote:
>  * Danny, it has been shown there is a link, probably a strong
> one, between child abuse and child pornography

That doesn't make them the same thing, however, and going by the
media stories this report seems to have done its best to conflate
them completely.  (Incidentally, there'd be a much _better_ link if
"child pornography" wasn't defined so broadly -- if it were restricted
to the results of genuine child abuse and didn't include pictures of
naked 19 year olds who look a bit too young and other suchlike.)

The vast bulk of child abuse is not done for the purpose of child
pornography production, nor is it done by strangers, over the Internet
or otherwise.  Maybe it is a good resource allocation decision
to devote more resources to tracking Internet child pornography,
but maybe it's not, so it's a bit steep telling off police forces
for not dropping everything else when suddenly given 10,000 names
from a porn-ring bust.  (Also, if tracking Internet child porn does
deserve a disproportionate amount of resources compared to other
ways of preventing child abuse, that suggests that the Net has made
it _easier_ to catch those involved.)

And even if there were a _perfect_ implication from "child abuser" to
"viewer of child pornography", it doesn't follow that chasing child
pornography would be the best way to stop child abuse.  Imagine an
airport screening system, for example, that correctly labelled all
terrorists but had a large "false-positive" problem, marking 10%
of all passengers as terrorists... the false positives would chew up
huge amounts of security staff time, making the whole system a waste
of time.

Danny.