Alex: ... but isn't this really more about protecting children and their innocence rather than protecting adults' rights to view porn?
Yes. It is about protecting children's innocence. But it isn't about imagining threats to their innocence that don't exist. Or, rather, it isn't about talking up remote threats to their innocence so that the parents, society, and the poor children themselves, imagine there's a man out to get them, and he's probably one of those men walking downt he street right now.

Protecting their innocence means keeping them unaware of the nasty side of life for as long as possible. Why, I've just been reading a book set in the late 1800's where it was considered indelicate for a doctor to mention syphilis within the hearing of a 17 year old.

icey:- ... but when said paedophile gets aroused viewing such 'art' (as Alex said earlier,when we look at something that turns us on we want to and often do act on it) and if there's some child 'handy' at the time...what then?
He's much more likely - much more likely to gratify himself using the pictures. Much easier and more immediate than finding a "handy" child, supposing there is one, gaining its trust, persuading it or forcing it to submit, and then taking steps to ensure he is not discovered ... whatever those might be.

I'm not saying bad things never happen, I'm saying they only rarely happen, and when they do, the paedophiles have usually planned their assaults carefully and meticulously over time.

I don't think pictures of naked children are any more likely to cause attacks on children than cars on the road are likely to kill them. I think it is far less likely.


I cannot accept that it is right for many people (hundreds, thousands or millions, dependng on the exposure) to be denied the pleasure of what might be a sublimely beautiful study of an innocent child because it is possible - remotely possible, but that possibility is real - that someone somewhere in the world might get aroused by that picture and at the same moment find a child he can impose himself upon ... AND BECAUSE OF THAT POSSIBILITY, ALL pictures of naked children are to be prohibited.