Have you guys heard about the latest going on with Amazon? Apparently people are in uproar about "pro-pedophilia" items including videos and books listed for sale on their site. These are guide books about "how to" be a pedophile. And then videos that are considered obscene. This video ( http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2010/11/13/ac.amazon.problem.cnn?iref=allsearch ) on the CNN website discusses the issue about whether or not this is illegal based on its content. And is it right to have a book advising people how to be a pedophile? One woman interviewed said that this is basically teaching people how to molest children.
I was really interested in this because currently in my abnormal psychology class we are studying sexual disorders and pedophilia is one we are studying.
Also- the "child advocate" that was interviewed discussed how "the law and culture need to catch up with technology." We need to keep up with the times of the Internet... she commented that it used to be hard to get child pornography but now it is being made and available on the Internet to those that are looking for it...
So what do you guys think about this? It is kind of different that what we have been talking about in class but interesting to me that it was related to my abnormal psych. class and that once again people may not realize the consequences of putting these things on the Internet. It is a false belief that what you do on your computer is private. Once the Internet is involved, it becomes public. Should Amazon remove these things on their site?
I totally agree with the woman you quoted saying that this was basically teaching pedophiles how to be pedophiles. It's disgusting. Pedophilia is a serious psychological disorder and one that can harm other innocent people (mainly children, obviously)and it is ILLEGAL! A book telling pedophiles how to act in order to essentially not get caught is ridiculous. It's like writing a book on the best way to sell drugs or kidnap someone!
ReplyDeleteI really do feel like website managers need to be cognizant of the fact that they need to make sure the products they are selling are in alignment with law. Perhaps they just didn't have an eye out for it because they thought it was so absurd that anyone would write something like that on an illegal matter but obviously people will and have!
I think this is a complicated issue...on the one hand, it is not illegal to publish or sell books depicting how to do illegal things. (If it were, many crime novels would be banned, as well as lots of chemistry books which can be used for making bombs, illegal drugs, etc. Heck - in many states, certain sexual acts between consenting adults are technically illegal so a novel in which these behaviors happened would have to be banned.) So, depending on what is actually in the book, amazon may be within its rights to sell the book. However, they are a business, and they can refuse to sell anything they don't want to sell, for whatever reason. And I bet, given the public outcry, they are now wishing they had caught this earlier and taken it down. Clearly someone who works at amazon dropped the ball on this one.
ReplyDeleteDepending on the content of the book, it may or may not be child pornography (there were no pictures in the book apparently), which would be illegal to sell. The lawyer in the CNN clip seems to think it clearly is child pornography but I don't know the legal definition and it might be more fuzzy than she is saying here.
The child advocate who is interviewed makes a similar point to what we've been talking about in class all semester - the internet makes lots of things easier to get. It makes it easier for me to check my bank account balance...and easier for people to get access to illegal materials (like child pornography) or materials that aren't illegal but certainly dangerous in the wrong hands.