Real concern over virtual under-age sex
von Aline van Duyn (New York) -German Financial Times
Online fantasy worlds are giving child protection agencies cause for concern.
Every day, people spend more than $2m on goods and services in the three-dimensional online fantasy world called Second Life. Land, houses, tables and chairs, clothes, entertainment – pretty much anything that people can buy in real life is for sale in Second Life. It is one of the most popular of the growing number of “virtual worlds” inhabited by avatars, electronic characters that can resemble human beings or anything else, from weird aliens to animals.
It is not just individuals that inhabit these worlds: companies from IBM to Reuters have set up offices, hold meetings or advertise on Second Life. People do things in these virtual worlds that, in real life, could result in imprisonment. Paying a child for sex, for example.
“Virtual worlds are raising some new areas of concern,” says Special Agent Flint Waters, leading officer for the Wyoming Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforce. “There are a growing number of virtual brothels, for example, where it is possible to pay to have sex with an avatar that appears to be a child. This raises difficult questions for us as a society,” he says.
The internet already presents huge obstacles for law enforcement agencies. Sexual predators are known to use the internet to contact and befriend children. Electronic communication also allows for the easy and widespread sharing of photos and videos of sexual abuse of children. Photographic images of such abuse are already a legal minefield, with child pornography laws varying widely among countries.
The International Center for Missing and Exploited Children last year found that of the 186 countries that belong to Interpol, the international law enforcement organisation, 95 did not have laws addressing child-pornography.
The legal picture is even more complex when it comes to virtual depictions of sex with children, or child pornography in cartoons or computer generated images: these are rarely illegal.
And, so far, there is no record of such activities conducted in Second Life, for example, involving actual children; they are done by adults pretending to be children, in what is often called “age play”.
Second Life, which is run by a company called Linden Labs, says: “Residents of Second Life are morally, socially and legally responsible for their opinions and their behaviour in-world. Linden Lab prohibits illegal activity within Second Life, and categorically has zero tolerance for the exploitation of children.”
However, the growing virtual depictions of such activities and images, and the ability to make the scenes very lifelike, raises concerns about whether such fantasy enactments of child abuse make a person more likely to abuse in real life.
Such concerns are leading for calls for non-photographic visual depictions of child sexual abuse to be made illegal. The British government is considering making it an offence to possess non-photographic images of child abuse. Under current laws, any such images which are not photos or pseudo-photos are legal.
“We have stringent laws to cover the making, distribution and possession of indecent photographs or pseudo-photographs of children under 18 but, as technology develops, a gap is emerging in respect of realistic fantasy images of child sexual abuse,” a British government report said.
Experts in child protection do not believe that all the answers or solutions will necessarily come from changes in the law alone.
Social networking sites, such as MySpace, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, have reduced concerns about the ease with which children can be targeted by making information about “safe practices” available to children and by making it easy to report suspicioius or unacceptable behaviour.
For companies appealing to advertisers, there is an incentive to take steps in order to ensure they do not become tainted with a bad reputation, which is possible even if they are not engaging in illegal behaviour.
“Companies have different responses, but many do eventually recognise that they can be a piece in the puzzle to tackle crimes,” said Michelle Collins, director at the US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
This is obviously a complex issue, most certainly because of the matter of “age play”.<br/><br/>While one would be remiss to dismiss any situation wherein a real child was being exploited, is the situation greatly different when 2 thirtysomethings roleplay out an experience.<br/><br/>Are possibly legislators in danger of crossing that invisible line in social justice whereby we accept that two law abiding consenting adults, in their private residences or homes, have a great deal of flexibility in expressing their sexuality. A situation which most free and democratic countries hold to (barring exceptional BDSM practices).<br/><br/>In the same token, by being concerned about “age play” in Second Life, are we equally concerned about a 40-something married couple who for pleasure occasionally dress up and act out a “cheerleader fantasy”?<br/><br/>Where do we stop? If we are going to examine virtual worlds with the ethical rigour that that article espouses, that same ethical microscope we need to equally apply this microscope to a whole host of other real-life activities as well to ensure fairness.<br/><br/>Thus, while we all obviously agree that children should be protected, their are a number of issues regarding freedom & rights that we also need to be concerned about.<br/><br/>The government, legislators or indeed the enforcers of these laws are seldom welcomed with open arms by the populace when they are interfereing with the rights of law abiding consenting adults within their own private home.<br/><br/><br/>David Grundy
That middle paragraph should read<br/><br/><i> Where do we stop? If we are going to examine virtual worlds with the ethical rigour that that article espouses, that same ethical microscope needs to be equally applied to a whole host of other real-life activities as well to ensure fairness. </i><br/><br/>David<br/><br/>(who just hates not being able to edit his posts!
)