Excerpted in part from Kids Online: Protecting Your Children
In Cyberspace
by Donna Rice Hughes (Revell, September 1998)
Pornography can be thought of as all sexually explicit material
intended primarily to arouse the reader, viewer, or listener. Each
category of illegal pornography has a specific legal definition
established by the courts. The Supreme Court has said that there
are four categories of pornography that can be determined illegal.
Illegal pornography includes indecency, material harmful to minors,
obscenity, and child pornography. Click
here for the legal definitions of types of pornography.
Lay Person Definitions
Legal for consenting adults, Illegal for
minor children
- Harmful to Minors Material
- Material harmful to minors represents nudity or sex
that has prurient appeal for minors, is offensive and unsuitable
for minors, and lacks serious value for minors. This material
is often referred to as soft-core pornography. There are "harmful
to minors" laws in every state. Note: Indecent and harmful to
minors material is legal for adults but illegal when knowingly
sold or exhibited to minor children (legal
definition).
- Indecency-Indecent material
includes messages or pictures on telephone, radio, or broadcast
TV that are patently offensive descriptions or depictions of sexual
or excretory organs or activities. This is often referred to as
"sexual nudity" and "dirty words" (legal
definition).
Illegal for Adults
- Obscenity- Obscenity is graphic material that
is obsessed with sex and/or sexual violence and is, therefore,
prurient, patently offensive, and lacking in serious value. It
is often referred to as hard-core pornography and includes close-ups
of graphic sex acts and deviant activities, such as penetration,
group sex, bestiality, torture, incest, and excretory functions.
There are federal obscenity laws that criminalize distribution
of obscenity on the Internet, but they have not been vigorously
enforced as of November 2001 (legal
definition).
Note: (Production, transmission, and distribution of obscenity
are felonies, yet possession of obscenity in one's home is not
a crime. However, use of a phone line or online service to transmit
obscenity is a federal crime under current law. Therefore, it
is a felony to either upload (transmit from your personal
computer to the Internet) or download (copy from the
Internet onto your personal computer) Internet obscenity.
Because of the subjective nature of current obscenity law,
content prosecutable as obscenity is widely available on the
Internet, not because it is legal, but because it must be treated
as "constitutionally protected" until it has received due process
and has been proven illegal in a court of law. Consequently,
children have access to content that could be prosecuted as
obscenity, such as pictures of women engaged in sexual acts
with animals (bestiality).
- Child Pornography
Child pornography is material that visually depicts children (real
children as well as computer-generated depictions of children)
under the age of eighteen engaged in actual or simulated sexual
activity, including lewd exhibition of the genitals. Child pornography
laws were recently amended to include computerized images or altered
(morphed) pictures of children, and counterfeit or synthetic images
generated by computer that appear to be of real minors or that
were marketed or represented to be real child pornography (legal
definition).
|
