Commentary: Child Pornography in Anime
ANN reports of a man found guilty of downloading real-life child pornography as well as anime images portraying such acts. This has been the first time that someone has been convicted under the Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to End the Exploitation of Children Today (PROTECT) act of 2003. According to ANN, the act states “computer images that are indistinguishable from real children engaging in sexually explicit conduct as child pornography, while simple drawings which are easily distinguishable from real children are not considered child pornography.” Apparently the judge felt that anime children were no different then real live children.
This brings up a taboo among the anime community about portraying children in sexual situations in works of anime and manga. It is a debate over artistic freedoms and personal moralities. I, for one, don’t support such material at all. I’m into shows that focus on children in a non-sexual loving way. I become uneasy when these shows have these underage (17 and younger, by American standards) characters in adult situations. Such examples for the frequent nudity of Chika-chan, a girl from “Ai Yori Aoshi” in her mid-adolescence, or the very explicit sexual fantasies involving the high school protagonist of “My Wife is a High School Girl”. I love both of these series to death, and yet I personally can’t shake off the thought of that teenaged sex should not be watched. If it’s like this for mid to post-adolescence children, I can’t even imagine how pre-adolescence sex in anime would be tolerated.
Such fear is also evident in the US anime industry as well. With all the hentai that is imported to this country, very few, if any, feature underage characters having sex. Since PROTECT is still not completely clear at the moment as to what’s acceptable, companies don’t want to risk it. Such an example would be the US release of the anime OVA series, “Kite.” When this blood, gore, and sex fest was first released in the US, it came with everything but the sex. You see, in America, violence is tolerated much more easily then sex, and so the show was release with just a “mature” rating instead of the “adult” it would have received with the sex added. Upon the demands of the fans, a “Director’s Cut” version was later release that include the sex scenes. Well, that is, all the sex scenes besides one. That’s because they feared that since it was an explicit scene showing a mid-adolescent girl being raped, they would be selling child pornography. It wasn’t until very recently that they released the show with the controversial scene included.
And yet the most awkward example of this would be a warning label I once saw on the packaging of a hentai video. It read, “Though the characters in this video appear to be very young, they are in fact age 18 or over.” This stupid warming does bring up a point. You can say that one of your female characters is 10 but draw her with full breasts and hips. You can also, like this one show did, say that your female character is 18, but flat cheated and child-like. Either way, these characters are not real, and therefore have no real age!
So why then would such a thing be prosecuted for legal actions? After all, you can write a novel that talks about under-aged sex. It may receive a lot of negative feedback for it, but never any legal actions against it. No one is arrested for being a potential pedophile for writing or reading such things. So why should visual representation be any different? If you use the pen to write to words or to draw a picture, the fact is that the under-aged characters came from a pen and imagination, no matter how real the images look. Should you be arrested for something that you think about instead of actually doing?
You have to realize that every single law created has been broken in the fantasy world of visual entertainment. If you watch a movie about a serial killer plotting and then hacking his victims to death, does that make you an accomplice to the crime? After all, murder is illegal, right?
Of course not! You can’t be persecuted for fictional events. That’s what the whole “freedom of speech” thing is all about! The only reason why words and ideas should be tried in court is if it threatens or abuses another real-life victim. The reason why child porn is illegal is because in order to show it on a screen, you have to force real-live children to do such acts on camera. This is undoubtedly child abuse, and the law is absolute justified for its existence. But when it’s animated or drawn in a comic, there are no real victims. There is about as much real-life crime being committed from these works as there is in horror films. And yet the double standard of American society accepts the fictional acts of violence over sex any day.
This is an issue that we, the anime fans, must fight for. I don’t condone child pornography in anime or manga, but I’ll be damned if anyone should ban it or make it illegal. The whole reason why I love the medium is because it allows the viewer to escape into a world that is not restricted by the laws of State or science. If you ban the use of one thing in anime, what’s stopping them from banning other things? In this one situation, the guy deserved to be found guilty for supporting the abuse of real life children, but not the fictional ones. PROTECT needs to clarify the difference between reality and fantasy.
Not much of a comment but I totally agree with everything you have said in this post. This is one of those rare well thought out post about anime.
Comment by scottfrye — December 4, 2005 @ 6:46 pm
This is off the topic. I’m thinking about moving my site from my current free service to another service. I was wonder how do you like blogsome.com and what can you do with the space blogsome.com gives you?
Comment by scottfrye — December 4, 2005 @ 7:05 pm
Off-topic, Wordpress.com if you want a free WP blog.
On-topic, the reason the man got in trouble is that he has a parole condition that disallows him from viewing online pornography of any kind, which he violated. The charges against him currently are for parole violtation, not child pornography. Of course, child porn sounds a lot better in the media, so they spin the story to that.
Comment by jason — December 4, 2005 @ 7:12 pm
Scott, Blogsome has been very good to me. They set up a whole blog for you using the WordPress system. You can change your page templete and manage your posts and comments. However, you don’t really have much control beyond that. I’d probably asking the guys over at animeblogger.com for some space. They seem to be the best.
Jason- There’s no doubt that the anime wasn’t the real reason why the guy went to jail. But this still brings up that subject that has been in debate now for some time.
Comment by Scott — December 4, 2005 @ 7:42 pm
Well for once I agree with you completely.
You nailed it when you point out that there are no victims in hentai anime, even if they appear to be children. While the given (and quite reasonable) justification for banning real child porn is to protect children from being molested there are far too many who’s real intent is to ban _all_ pornography or anything close to it because they dislike it themselves. Since trying to outright ban porn won’t work (I seriously doubt you could even get 20% of the country to really support that, especially most men view porn at least occasionally) they try to label it all as child porn instead which people will support banning. This is wrong for two reasons: 1. As you say, it violates our rights to freedom of speech and 2. Once people catch on it will make people suspicious of fighting child porn and lead to _more_children being harmed.
Off-topic on hosting: E-mail me if you want hosting on AnimeBlogger.net, you can find my E-mail on my blog, we’ll be happy to host you. We just don’t have a signup process done yet so right now it’s word of mouth and I have to set everything up by hand.
Comment by Maestro4k — December 5, 2005 @ 2:04 am
I agree, someone shouldn’t be arrested for whacking off to ANIMATION. That’s a load of bull. The authorities just targeted this guy because he was watching anime, which they are unfamiliar with and don’t like. I bet if he was watching Superman fuck Wonder Woman, they wouldn’t give a rat’s ass, because it’s American animation which is SOOOOO much better than Japanese animation. ~_~
That, or that parole thing he was on.
Comment by Alex — December 5, 2005 @ 5:41 pm
I’m not sure if I agree with you here. I think the real question is whether or not there was a link between the anime porn and the real porn. Did this guy use the anime porn as a gateway back to the real porn? Or did he try using the anime porn as a substitute?
It’s kind of like the whole debate on video game violence. If someone has violent tendencies, it’s probably better for them to vent with video games rather than people. Of course, using video games to train against real people later isn’t a solution.
Truth is, there’s sick people in the world. I think they’d exist whether or not anime kiddie porn existed. The question is whether or not the problem would be greater or worse when they don’t have a real world alternative. I don’t have the answers, but overall, I think your post is informative, and certainly provokes thought.
Comment by Hung — December 11, 2005 @ 2:24 pm
I find the notion of watching child pornography disturbing, even more so than brutal murder. Let’s reverse the matter a bit, say wouldn’t it be splendid to ban both showing of murder and underage pornography all together, there! The dilenma is gone, now potential pedophiles can’t raise objections using such excuse now.
Comment by Rainy — December 12, 2005 @ 9:27 pm
And everyone sings in the little happy world made of rainbows and lollipops and nobody ever does anything bad.
Comment by Scott — December 12, 2005 @ 9:31 pm
Pedophiles are gonna exist regardless of whether ‘lolicon’ hentai exists or not. I’d rather have the molestors watching lolicon than real abuse - at least then they aren’t supporting true abuse.
Comment by Emily B — December 13, 2005 @ 12:26 am
I found this to be a very good post about a touchy topic. Excellent point about Kite as well.
Comment by Ramsey — December 30, 2005 @ 4:47 am