On Aug. 21, 2014, the Huffington Post ran an article defending an artist who published pornographic pictures of his two-year-old daughter and called it art. And, in order to generate page clicks, they included some of the pornographic pictures so you could see for yourself that they are pornographic. In my world, any public picture of a boy's or girl's genitals for a child under the age of 18 is child pornography.
Showing child pornography is a new low, even for HuffPo. Of course, they won't be prosecuted and the father probably won't either. He's an artist victimized his own daughter for his personal gain, you see, not some dirty old man passively downloading pictures from the Internet.
Once the pictures are on the Internet and downloaded to myriad child porn collections, they can't be deleted. Imagine 20 years for now and the daughter is in college and some guy comes up to her and says, "I've seen nude pictures of you!" She will be scarred for life. The justifications that the father gives for doing this are the same justifications that pedophiles use. Either the father is incredibly naïve or enjoys exploiting his daughter but, either way, she should be put into a home where she will be treated properly.
I'm all for the innocence of children. But when you photograph children in this way, you have perverted this innocence into something so much worse. Considering how much sexual abuse of children exists these days, we have to draw the line to avoid even the appearance of exploitation.
No, I'm not going to include a link to the story. If you're into child porn, go find it yourself.
Updated Aug. 27: Revised wording and added a paragraph.
Updated Oct. 4: Changed "image" to "imagine" and changed "naive".
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