INDEPTH: CHILD PORN
Child porn FAQ
CBC News Online | June 22, 2004
If I e-mail photos of my own children taking a bath to family members, am I breaking the law?
No. The Criminal Code's definition of child pornography stresses that even if children appear nude in a photo, the focus has to be on sexual organs and the picture must be distributed for an explicitly sexual purpose.
Sometimes I get spammed e-mail with links to child pornography sites. If I click on one by accident, have I broken the law?
Not if there's no intent. Senior Counsel Carole Morency, a legislator working on the new proposed changes to Canada's child pornography laws, says the law targets those who actively seek out child porn. Still, technically speaking, any picture you view on the web is downloaded and saved on your computer's hard drive. Even if you regularly empty your Recycle Box and clear out your caches, experts can still usually find it later. Morency says it's an understandable concern that some may fear an accidental download will come back to haunt them, but points out any sort of investigation would eventually prove their innocence.
Can a 17-year-old girl legally send nude photos of herself electronically to her 19-year-old boyfriend?
Yes – if it remains private correspondence between the two of them, it's a completely consensual action, and there's no exploitation taking place.
The Criminal Code says any picture or video featuring adults who are "depicted" as being younger than 18 is to be considered child porn. How am I supposed to know how old people are being depicted as?
The issue of "intent" comes into play. Morency explains child pornographers are typically more interested in material featuring pre-pubescent boys and girls than youth a few weeks shy of their 18th birthday. To put it bluntly, there's a difference between people who are actively searching for sexual material featuring children and those viewing photos of adults wearing schoolgirl uniforms.
Can all "digitally created" examples of child pornography be defended as having artistic merit?
Not necessarily. Morency says if something meets the definition of child pornography, then it meets it even if it was made using photo-manipulation software or the creator's imagination. If digitally created photos or fictional text stories are used as evidence in a courtroom, then experts must assess if they possess artistic value. That may change, though, if lawmakers remove the "artistic merit" defence and replace it with a test of the material's contribution to the "public good."
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