Something mighty strange is going on. The lines between virtual and real self, fantasy and reality, and freedom of speech and safety are being blurred by a string of unusual child pornography rulings. Let’s start at the beginning. The culture around us defines who we are. Even if you rebel against it, or find yourself identifying with another culture, you are still reacting to the signals and behaviors of those around you. Children have nothing to go on but what they’re given, and they soak this stuff up like a sponge.

Now, it’s no big secret that consumer culture increasingly supports the sexualization of children. Baby Bratz Dolls and Little Prostitute T-Shirts are just the tip of the ice-berg. The bitching and moaning of concerned housewives aside, this is simply motivated by that all-powerful bottom line. Sex sells, and when the adolescent market is saturated with it, you have to go younger to get more sales. Maybe this is the slippery slope that parents were so terrified by when Elvis began gyrating his hips. Kids who don’t fall in line stand to be ostracized by their peers. The drive to be sexy follows this marketing trend, and at once legitimizes it by default. I remember being eleven and having groups of kids gang up on me, and occasionally physically assault me because I didn’t wear Nike Airs. This Lord of the Flies-esqe mentality works very well with the cult of the brand.

Still, moralize this all you want – I obviously don’t feel so hot about it myself – but somehow I doubt you’re going to see Baby Bratz going away anytime soon. For better or worse, it’s a cultural fact, and for the time being, it is here to stay.

In this kind of cultural atmosphere, it’s obvious that children and adolescents, who already behave in sexual and sexually exploratory ways behind closed doors, are going to feel somewhat vindicated in this kind of behavior in digital mediums as well. They are going to take sexually evocative photographs of themselves and send them to the boy they’ve been ogling. (Probably no more evocative than the pop idols they watch on M2, or the porn they sneak off the Internet.)

This is of course at logger-heads with other “bastions” of American civilization: the legal system, and the reactionary Christian far right. They seem to have taken a legitimately heinous crime: the sexual abuse of children, and turned it into something else.

If these kids are “acting out,” the thinking goes, then it is the children who must be punished. You got it. Children and adolescents tried for sexual crimes against themselves.

Several weeks ago, I read a story about “Amber” and her boyfriend “Jeremy,” who had sent naked photographs to each other. Somehow the police was alerted, and they were charged with child pornography.

I accepted the fact that this lone story could possibly be hoaxed. After all, very little specific information was provided that I could use to fact check. But then I dug a little deeper, and I found account of these kinds of rulings all over the place:

For example:
http://www.shortnews.com/start.cfm?id=53589
http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/1419575/
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/youthrights/sex/2004040701.php

Sure, just because there are twenty stories rather than one doesn’t mean that these are actually happening. The reports I heard on NPR could’ve been April Fools jokes. It could all be a conspiracy, like the Moon Landing. Look: this is happening. And it’s fucking bizarre.

After a long string of these articles, I came upon this one.

That headline says it all. Now I’m concerned, and more than a little confused. Admittedly, I’m no lawyer, but I do know this: the crime of child pornography is based upon the idea of one
or more adults, who are legally defined as having the right to make certain decisions for themselves, taking advantage of one or more individuals who have not been so defined. This is the crux of the insanity. The crime depends on two or more unequal agents.

Let me state this again. The entire basis of it is the idea of one party taking advantage of another party who is not legally able to be complicit in such action, even should they choose to be.

This teenager has the unusual, and in this case incredibly unfortunate ontological status of being two people at once: a child, who is abused, and an adult, who is taking advantage of that “inner child.” Alternately, in an equally insane failure of sense, these acts may be construed as a “crime” against pedophiles. Is it just me or does this belong in a Phillip K. Dick novel?

This law was created to protect children and adolescents from abuse. Now it’s being used to put them in jail for acting in accordance with what some of this hypocritical, mixed-signal society is telling them to do. Why are these lawsuits happening? Some of it is the cultural effects I mentioned, but it also stands to reason that that the religious far right is now fighting their culture war by proxy against the advertisers.

Was she acting out? Yes, as most adolescents will do. Is she possibly in need of therapy? Possibly. Is she a sexual offender, fit to be jailed right alongside the fifty year old minister that rapes his choir boys? Only in this world of warped best interests and secret agendas.

It’s deranged, short-sighted, and more than a little bit sad. But the story doesn’t end here… as these rulings have a far reaching effect, and a lot of companies are trying to fall in line with these kind of rulings.

Linden Labs are being forced to deal with the legal status of “virtual” sexual activity. In the virtual world of Second Life, where bipedal she wolves fellate technocolored clowns, it has suddenly become very dangerous to participate in any “age-play” activity. (These groups are usually groups of adults, some of them pretending to be children.) The grey area here, and it is a notable one, is that on the one hand the “sexual” activity going on here it totally hypothetical. People create avatars and, with a script and a couple mouse-clicks, make them get it on, like two girls playing “makeout” with barbies. However, on the other hand, some of the adults who enter into this kind of roleplaying are legitimate sex crime offenders, or are working their way up to it. This investigation is ongoing.

Finally, Six Apart’s popular blogging site Livejournal is recieving serious heat for their decision to take the  advice of the Warriors For Innocence, and carry it to a whole new level all on their lonesome. They have gone and deleted many accounts that simply list interests that may be considered questionable, a Lolita group (that is, discussion of the Nabokov novel), and so on. According to the users of Livejournal, this has become a freedom of speech issue, although I am fairly convinced that Six Apart simply received the advice to err on the side of caution from their legal department. Given that the TOS of the site states that they can delete any journal for any reason whatsoever, much of the noise generated by their users is just that. If they don’t like it, they can go somewhere else.

But the implications of this decision are still troubling, as it means that we live in a world where thinking or pretending something are considered the same thing as the act. Yes, this is the very philosophical nightmare which Phillip K. Dick imagined.

The bottom line here is that our laws are simply not up to the task of dealing with the issues that virtuality and new technologies bring to these issues. From a “letter of the law” perspective, some of these situations move from common sense to science fiction, yet to these teens, the punishment is all too real.