Child Pornography in the Digital Age: A Conceptual Muddle
Child Pornography in the Digital Age: A Conceptual Muddle
Benn, C 2019, ‘Child Pornography in the Digital Age: A Conceptual Muddle’, in Frank Jacob (ed.), Pornography: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Peter Lang GmbH Europaeischer Verlag der Wissenschaften, Berlin, Germany, pp. 261-285.
New technologies allow us to act in new kinds of ways, and enable new kinds of harms. Advances in digital communications and artificial content generation have enabled troubling advances in child pornography; despite its obvious abhorrence, responding to and regulating this content is made more challenging by the ‘conceptual muddles’ at the heart of how we legislate to prevent child pornography: the concepts at the heart of our existing policy tools either do not clearly apply to this new virtual content, or have to be redefined.
New technologies for producing, storing and viewing child pornography have given rise to many policy vacuums, which the law has tried to fill. However, these technological developments have also given rise to many conceptual muddles that we have to solve in order for those policy tools to effectively respond to child pornography. In this paper, I address the ways in which technology has affected our understanding of three concepts at the heart of the category of child pornography: (i) what it means to be an image; (ii) what it means to be an image of a child; and (iii) what it means to be a sexual image of a child. These conceptual tools can help us more effectively fight back against this exploitative content.