Legalization of child pornography?

[TaraJo]

This is a really dystopian way of looking at it. If we really did record every single moment of our lives and indeed came upon such an event, I think the 12-year-old and her/his parents would be thrilled that someone could provide hard evidence and get the rapist into jail.

I'm forced to agree with this one, which is part of why I would hope no judge or jury would hand down a prison sentence for this. However, I've seen some really stupid rulings come from judges lately and I know how strict the law currently is about child porn.

On the other hand, if/when such technology is introduced to the masses, some laws will have to be rewritten to avoid a situation like this in order not to blame the innocent passer-by. But we don't need to legalize child porn.

Agreed. I don't think child porn needs to be legalized as much as I think sex laws in general in this nation need to be changed; maybe even scraping what laws we have now and starting from scratch.

This is an abysmal statement and a insult to all who have been raped. And what goes on between two (or more) people in the bedroom without being documented cannot be called porn, so why even bring up this?

Yes, it is an insult to people who have been victims of rape. However, from a legal standpoint, it is still statutory rape.

Well, no, that isn't porn, but it's related. Because teenagers, being sexual beings themselves, send pics to each other and sometimes those are pics of themselves or their peers while naked. Again, under current law, a 14 year old girl sending topless pic of herself to her boyfriend or a 16 year old boy who is sending pics of his penis to his girlfriend, well, they can be branded as sex offenders. This branding can be especially difficult to deal with since a 'sex offender' label carries with it life time registration on a sex offender registry and several state and local laws preventing them from choosing certain careers, living in certain places or even being around children at all.

Which, again, I'm not using to justify legalizing child porn as much as I think a reworking of the sex laws is in order. I've met a guy who was incarcerated because he was 15 and he had sex with his 13 year old girlfriend. I knew another girl whose parents hated her boyfriend and specifically waited until the 3 month gap between his 18th birthday and her 18th birthday to charge the boyfriend with statutory rape.

And on the other hand, I have an aunt who has down syndrome. Mentally, she's stuck at about 7 or 8. She was in some kind of half way house when she was sexually taken advantage of by one of the staff there. They were able to get the guy on rape, but it was only because this was a mental health environment and they were able to use the law to have it interpreted as being similar to a guy raping a coma patient. It struck me that, if he were just some guy out in the rest of the world and he took advantage of her in exactly the same way, it would be fair game. He could have claimed consent, at best it would have gone to court but he probably would have won. It made me think, there's something fucked up with the sometimes arbitrary nature of sex laws in general and age of consent laws specifically.