This seems to be a growing problem. Governments increasingly believe that they can vaguely gesture at imaginary children and expect people to overlook their human rights violations. Unfortunately, they’re not wrong
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I’d like it if, for once, the nation of Germany actually took it upon themselves to do proper fucking research into the matter, into how fiction affects its consumers, and whether or not they’re subconsciously looking for a scapegoat so they don’t have to confront their own problems, i.e., their lax and permissive attitudes towards adult-minor sexual relations, and how easy it is for perpetrators to get away with sexually exploiting minors, both via the Internet and hands-on.
It disgusts me how in other parts of the world, the law actually protects young teens from exploitation, yet these fictitious works, which do no harm, are somehow seen as problematic.
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It is indeed very ironic how it works over there. How can you have an AOC of 14 and be so paranoid about fiction and adult porn. It’s contradictory, but nobody in politics apparently even questions it.
When they updated the CSAM law they said that consuming abuse material depecting teens (14-17) does not warrant harder punishment as it’s much less likely for the offender to have pedophilic tendencies which is described as “higher recidivism” when diagnosed.
Germany went full “it’s ackchually ebephilia” mode.
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This! For once the hypocrisy has been exposed! It’s so odd how Germany allows abusers to screw kids, allows kids to get drunk (thus increasing risk for being abused), while they ban fiction because “muh youth pwotekchion”. They need to get their shit together and allow fiction and increase their age of consent to 18.
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What I want is to see them adopt a majority-minority consent rule, wherein anyone over the age of 21 is prohibited from engaging in such conduct with anyone below the age of 18, in addition to lifting these senseless bans on fictitious/harmless expression.
It makes no sense why men in their 30s and 40s can arrange a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old, putting the poor girl at risk, while the man importing a child sex doll from Japan can be seen as a deviant, and a possible threat to society.
I’ve been paying close attention to these fucking moralists screaming about how fiction “normalizes” these evil, deviant desires or disinhibits people from causing severe harm or trauma, meanwhile the legal systems in various countries are out there actually allowing these types of practices.
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For real. It’s very surreal to see how many governments see fiction consumption as a threat and thus criminalize it. It’s honestly made me wonder whether or not I jumped into an alternate universe where democracies and republics are doing autocratic nanny state shit.
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That’s the weird part. Consumption is not illegal and based on what I read and see it’s not uncommon in Germany.
The rules regarding media are one of the strictest there. Anything including is banned if low artistic quality or not educational: rape, sadistic violence, excessive violence without showing it as “bad” or satire, prohibited symbols of criminal organisations (e.g the number 88).
They also started investigating and banning a pornographic movie series that is part of german movie history as everyone knows it and even the youth protection agency admitted its artistic importance is thus very high, but still banned it because it is considered child / youth pornography since adult actors are playing school students and they deem it dangerous to the youth. Why not just release it for adults then? Wtf is the point of a rating system if you still think “of the children” when it comes to obvious adult content.
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I lived my whole life in Germany and I don’t see this happening for multiple reasons:
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Adult-Teen relationships are surprisingly not as frowned upon as outsiders might think. They are also not as uncommon since the current law makes it possible for people to be open about it, but also to abuse it.
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Germanys AOC comes from the medieval times and has not been changed ever since. Pornography featuring teens has been legal up until 2004 and every gov. prior to that striked down every attempt to criminalize it with the argument that AOC is 14 and it not making sense being able to have intercourse, but not watch.
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They outlawed youth pornography, because it was a mandatory guideline from the EU, not because they saw it as harmful themselves.
Every expert was against this ban including the federal ministry of justice, but a loud minority sent some politicians death threats and called them all pedophiles. Protecting democracy and minorities is not worth it when you risk your career and life for some. This made them look pathetic and weak - being able to be manipulated.
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well the problem is rather that, like I said earlier, You need to implement age verification in certain ways. The law isn´t new it´s been on the books since like the 50th (or maybe even earlier) and just isn´t adopted for the internet but just TV / radio and similar.
And the point of that committee is just to ensure these youth protection laws are followed. But yeah it´s likely the site as it is now would run afoul of the child abuse material paragraph too …
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It was not banned in 2004, but in 2008/9 and even then they only banned distribution at first with the reasoning being something like:
Criminalizing possession would lead to an increase in crimes without the existence of a prior actionable crime. CSAM on the other hand is always a product of abuse.
I honestly do not understand this. That is why you make laws to prohibit, or close loopholes lmao. Sounds like they did not want to burn their collection.
You still see this type of “mentality” in new laws. There are separate laws for the abuse of 14-17 year olds and the recent law banning abuse manuals only refers to those that deal with the abuse of people below 14. Where is the logic.
Now with the current EU chat control thing going on Germany has asked to use their own definition of “Child” since it would not fit into their current legal system.
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The federal minister of justice at the time was only initially against the new law and then made a surprising 180 within barely 24h. In fact, she was the one who proposed the doll ban following popular demand. The initial draft of the law only had higher sentences in it, the doll ban was added in later.
Now her sudden change of heart may have been due to those threats that were made against her and her family. She mentioned this a couple of times, yet weirdly no media outlet investigated this despite the scandalous and far-reaching implications. If ministers can be threatened without recourse to force changes of federal law, then this undermines the very fundamental fabric of our democracy. Yet all media pieces who reported about this acted like the threats were a normal and appropriate reaction to her initial refusal to change the law (which, as we know now and she probably did back then as well, actually does more harm than good).
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My “favorite” example of this is a draft from 2020 that passed the Bundesrat, which proposed a life-long ban preventing people convicted of sexual crimes against children from ever working with minors again.
This included any kind of sexual crime against children, including child pornography, including fictional material. It notably did not include any kind of crimes against teenagers.
That would have created a situation where you could be permanently banned from working with teenagers if you had been convicted for fictional child pornography, but if you had violently raped teenagers on several occasions you would eventually have been allowed to work with them again.
This was not an accident or an oversight, but explicitly desired this way. The reason was that crimes against teenagers are “not a sufficient indicator for pedophilia”, therefore they are excluded to not be unnecessarily harsh against people who don’t deserve it. I’m not making this up, this is more or less verbatim what was written in the agreed upon draft of the law.
Luckily the draft never got further and was forgotten due to other legislation that was about to get passed, but there are still powerful activist groups regularly demanding that it be revived again.
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Judging people based on labels, rather than the deeds of the individual… Does this remind you of anything?
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I recently read that after World War II the German police is not allowed to use ethnicity as a data point to identify potential criminals anymore. So instead, today they are using their family names. The police is actually maintaining a list of certain “arabic” family names and use it label anyone being born with one of those names as a potential member of huge and foreign criminal organizations, while there is no real evidence that these organizations even exist. A study recently showed that the media is playing along with this and are happily publishing racist narratives of “the heroic German policeman” vs “the criminal Arabic clan member” for years, while completely ignoring the stories of law-abiding members of these families, who are heavily stigmatized and discriminated because of this.
Bit off-topic, but it goes to show that fascist thinking has successfully reentered the heart of German society, and not just when pedophilia is concerned. Today there are neo-nazis in the army, the police and even the heart of German democracy, the Bundestag. I would advise anyone thinking of migrating here to stay the hell away.
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Unfortunately, events like this:
Ruin the reputation of immigrants to Germany. It’s like those statistics regarding foreigners in Japan and CSA that @Chie brought up. People look at stuff like this and use it as an excuse to be shitty to the entire group. An uncomfortable number of nations have been fluctuating and flirting with authoritarianism (if not outright being authoritarian themselves) the past decade or two or more. America, Brazil, China, Russia, Germany, Italy, Hungary, India, Philippines, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iran, Myanmar, Brunei, Korea, Japan, Kazakhstan, Türkiye, the Taliban, etc. Too many crazies who want to bring back the “good old days” of fascism, Nazism, Sovietism, and imperialism/colonialism/racism…
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fun fact the most cases in Berlin where in the District that included the berlin gate… Also the majority of those that actually got convicted where german … Media just did not care because by the time that got published the New Years Eve was about a year ago…
Again a case of racist narratives being pushed against factual data …
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