Age play

Until recently, it seemed that Second Life society was much freer than real-life society. Whatever lifestyle you might choose to pursue in the real world, in Second Life you could experiment with BDSM, age play, bestiality or furriness, life as a vampyre or alien or jumped-up police officer. Generally, as long as legal and not offending others, you could indulge your avatar in free exploration, and maybe learn things about yourself at the same time. Some activities have always been controversial, and have become more so with changes in laws in a number of areas. The issues with age play have been a hot topic of conversation for a long time. A couple of years ago, I ran Slave City, a place which was designed to allow people to explore experiences of being slave or master, in a rather less conventional environment. There were lots of people interested to explore what being a slave or master/mistress meant in terms of a virtual world, who had no experience of this in RL. They found that established BDSM or Gor communities tended to look down on them as ignorant of the conventions of dominance/submission, or Gorean lifestyle, and it was hard to find out whether it had any appeal for them without devoting a lot of time and effort to it.

My moral dilemma began when a child avatar washed up at Slave City, claiming to be 800+ years old, and a character from Japanese anime or hentai. she wanted to be a slave, and promptly plastered her room with cartoon pictures of her character being abused by men with large *ahem* attachments. At that time Linden Lab had no stated policy of being against adults role playing age play, and I tried my damndest to be open to the idea that other people’s idea of fun is not mine and I should not be judgemental. I convinced myself that I needed to defend other people’s freedom to be whoever they wanted to be, although I found the child avatar thing rather disturbing. In fairly short order, someone reported the images as being generally offensive, and they were removed.

The world has moved on. The laws relating to images of children have become so draconian, that in the UK although a pair of 16 year olds having sex are not breaking the law, if one takes pictures of the other unclothed, they may well be. Images morphed from pictures of adult women to look like children have earned their creator time in jail. It has become unsafe to assume that cartoony SL images will not count as child pornography.

The German incident outlined in the blog seemed to involved two adults engaged in age play, and no child being harmed in the process, although there does seem to be an implication that there was also child pornography involved. I see the two things as being entirely different, because child pornography, unless electronically created, will involve real harm to a child, while two adults engaged in role playing, while offensive to many people, are not actually harming any children. It is impossible for us to know whether the ability to role play in a virtual world might save real children from harm, by providing an outlet to the person concerned, or might lead to abuse in RL when someone discovers that they like it. I think that you have to set that to one side, because it is uncertain, and see that there has to be a separation between what someone does in a virtual world, and what they may or may not do in RL. Many of us have killed, fired guns, engaged in sexual play in virtual worlds, in a way which we wouldn’t dream of doing in RL.

To judge whether or not people will be likely to offend in real life is the stuff of Minority Report and 1984 thought crime. If our criminal justice system begins to try to arrest people for considering crime of any type there will soon be more people behind bars than free.

There is another and much more serious aspect to this too: if people collating images of children and adults electronically are punished as severely as those who actually take abusive photographs of children, then there is little additional risk in using real children. That seems totally wrong to me, and dangerous as a policy to my children and all children.