(C-Fam, New York) Western countries want to remove the term “child pornography” from a UN Cybercrime Convention. They further want to eliminate some forms of engagement with child porn in a list of criminal acts.
Last month, UN member states began negotiating an international convention to combat cybercrime that is intended to increase collaboration among member states to go after cybercrime. However, some Western countries are promoting a new standard for child pornography that may leave children unprotected from sexual exploitation.
The U.S., UK, and EU want to remove the term “child pornography” from the convention and replace it with “online child sexual abuse” or “child sexual exploitation material.”
This new language is the result of a multi-year campaign by advocates and UN agencies to target sexual abuse in the making of pornographic material, and not just the possession and transmission of child pornography. The Friday Fax previously reported that some experts argue this change is problematic. Some UN agencies and Western governments are using this as an occasion to promote a broader agenda of sexual autonomy for adolescents.
By their own admission, UN agencies say the new terminology might exclude certain sexual materials involving children, such as consensual sexting between adolescents or other sexually suggestive content, in the process making it harder to prosecute some images that would otherwise be considered child pornography. Some UN agencies say this is desirable in order to “de-stigmatize” sexual behavior between adolescents and to distinguish between legal and illegal pornography.
In a statement to the Friday Fax, an EU representative said that producing such material would include both broadcasting and publishing.
Online access to pornography not only contributes to child abuse but also to sex trafficking…
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Editor’s Note: Iulia Cazan writes for C-Fam. This article first appeared in the Friday Fax, an internet report published weekly by C-Fam (Center for Family & Human Rights), a New York and Washington DC-based research institute (https://c-fam.org/). This article appears with permission.
