There are always victims
.The question of accessing child pornography was recently in the news due to the trial of Chris Langham. He was convicted of downloading indecent images of children. The material was said to be really severe, so severe that the showing of clips to the jury ceased when one juror was sobbing, and others looked visibly distressed. There were apparently downloaded images of girls as young as 7 being sexually abused and tortured by adults.
It is self-evident that those who view such images provide the market for those who produce the abhorrent material. That indirectly fuels the process by which the hapless children featured in the films are abused. There is probably virtually no dissent from the proposition that this activity is a crime and has victims.
However it may well be that the next step requires steps to deal with situations where no children are featured in the films at all. It is now possible to do realistic cartoon or other simulations so that images are produced that, whilst utterly repellent, do not involve any children being abused or featured. In those circumstances, what should the position of the law be? Should that be a crime, or are people’s tastes, however repulsive, their own affair so long as they do not cause or take advantage of direct harm to others?
That involves an additional policy question. Is the only potential victim of such viewing the children featured in the film, or is there the possibility that wrongful acts will be stimulated or encouraged?
A Ministry of Justice sponsored report was published on 28th September 2007. The topic was "The evidence of harm to adults relating to exposure to extreme pornographic material ("EPM"), prepared by Professor Catherine Itzin and others. Although this does not deal with child pornography, EPM dealt with 'actual scenes or realistic depictions of: explicit intercourse or oral sex with an animal, explicit sexual interference with a human corpse, explicit serious violence in a sexual context and explicit serious sexual violence'. The aim was to see the effect of such material on adults viewing it, whether there was any evidence that it causes or contributes to offending and whether it causes harm to those adults participating. Essentially the findings were that there could be harmful effects upon those men with a history of or predisposition towards sexual aggression. In other words the harmful effects could occur upon those who might be most inclined to want to see the material.
The conclusion therefore is clear. Anything which might tend to increase the risk of offences against children should be prevented unless there are strong public policy reasons to the contrary (for example, the risk of offences to children is increased by not giving a life sentence without parole to everyone ever convicted of a sexual offence against children, wherever on the scale it fell, but most people would I would imagine regard that as an overly extreme response). There can be no such public policy in favour of viewing child pornography, whether it is featuring actual children or not. With false images there may not be victims within the films, but there are likely to be victims somewhere along the line.