Legal and Practical Challenges in Combating Online Child Pornography
Introduction
The need to regulate and ban child pornography is obvious. Still, there is no clear global position on what constitutes child pornography. The attempts to ban this phenomenon face legal and practical barriers (Yar & Steinmetz, 2019). From the point of view of the legal system, child pornography is not clearly defined. The distribution of prohibited materials is difficult to trace from a practical approach.
Challenges of Combating Child Pornography
The issue of child pornography is a matter of debate as to which material should be considered in this category. This controversy extends to other controversial online content. It raises the question of how Internet censorship can coexist with freedom of expression (Yar & Steinmetz, 2019).
Currently, the definition of child pornography includes reproductions depicting a minor in an explicitly sexualized manner (Yar & Steinmetz, 2019). At the same time, the world’s countries define this concept differently, depending on puberty or legal age (Yar & Steinmetz, 2019). These difficulties with a legal definition provoke ambiguity and create loopholes for criminals to exploit for their material gain.
The problem of child pornography, while perceived as severe and destructive, faces the practical difficulty of tracking down the materials and catching the perpetrators. Children’s pictures of a sexualized nature are not distributed in the public domain (Yar & Steinmetz, 2019). Access to such material is organized mainly through a criminal network on the dark net, in which each participant remains anonymous.
People who are interested in such content will not want to contact law enforcement agencies to report a crime. In this state of affairs, the capture of criminals remains a matter for vigilant citizens. Law enforcement agencies do not control it. Everyone involved in this process knows the illegality of such activities, but anonymity allows this prohibited business to flourish.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the fight against the distribution of child pornography faces legal and practical difficulties. From a legal standpoint, child pornography has a blurred definition that encourages crime to flourish. On the practical side, crimes of this kind are almost impossible to trace because of the anonymity. Efforts to combat the spread of child pornography should be directed towards a clear legal definition of the phenomenon.
Reference
Yar, M., & Steinmetz, K. F. (2019). Cybercrime and society. SAGE Publications.