UNITED STATES
The Worthy Adversary
Posted by Joelle Casteix on October 16, 2014
UPDATE: Grisham apologized. Looks like he finally read the memo. And he got people talking …. –
Child pornography is criminal for a reason: It’s gross, vile, and extremely damaging to the children who were exploited.
But someone didn’t get the memo.
John Grisham (yes, THAT John Grisham) said recently in an interview that men who look at 16-year-old girls in sex acts are not pedophiles and should not be punished.
If you are sexually aroused by watching minors being sexually abused and/or forced into sex acts, you have real issues.
But I am not going to get into that in this post. What I AM going to talk about is why these photos are illegal and why people who create, sell, and/or look at them should be punished.
Here are reasons why John Grisham is horribly mistaken:
1) The actions involved in the photos are criminal.
Child pornography is not “art.” It includes photos of children (boys, girls, toddlers, and teens) being tied up, raped, drugged, sodomized, and violated. It’s disgusting stuff. Talk to prosecutors—they will tell you.
2) All of the children in these photos are victims of sex trafficking. Sex trafficking is when a child is sold for sex—including prostitution and child pornography. The children in the photos—whether they be 10-year-old boys or 16-year-old girls—are being sold for sex. Period. Bad people are making money off of this. Yes: They are making money off of pictures of children being raped.
3) Let’s talk about the kids in the photos. How do you think that pornographers get the kids? They don’t do a casting call and abide by union rules. Instead, they exploit and imprison runaways, force kids into drug addiction, or take pictures of children they are already sexually abusing. Other children are isolated from friends and family, marked with tattoos to show that their pimp “owns” them, and then are forced to comply if they want to eat, sleep, or get a hit of drugs to keep them from going into painful withdrawal symptoms.
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