Reuters/Second Life » Virtual child porn may be a crime in Netherlands… and already is in Italy
February 21, 2007
Reuters reports thatReuters/Second Life » Virtual child porn may be a crime in Netherlands
Virtual enactments of child pornography in virtual worlds like Second Life may be a crime under Dutch law if it encourages child abuse, the public prosecutor said on Wednesday.
In Italy, virtual child porn and “age play” is already a crime. Our law against child porn (available here in Italian) covers also “realistic images of minors of 18 years, but the punishment is reduced by one third” (art. 600 quater 2).
I am not sure if there is any scientific backing that “age play” may promote pedophiles to act; however if there is a thin but scientifically provable correlation, I do support this kind of law.
In general, however, I don’t like the way child porn is used in Italy as a catch-all theme to legitimize all sort of freedom-limiting acts. For example, did you know that Italy has put in place nation-wide filters to block access to child porn sites… too bad that the law, as it’s currently conceived, is totally ineffective against real pedophilies (they would use VPNs and darknets… or just type the IP address and bypass these kind of DNS-based filters, yes the filters are that lame at the moment) but it potentially legitimizes Orwellian-style society control.
