#csem discussion cw

[x-neurotoxin-x]

...what does Dabi mean by getting to be in movies? 👀 Was it his father, doctor, or someone else? If you don't want to spoil, then you don't have to answer, of course.

Under the cut, so I don't piss anybody off or spoil anybody if you don't want spoils for the fic

Tw/cw: discussion of sa, csa, and csem

His parents + HPSC doubling for a child trafficking ring. It's a hc i had for a while and sprinkle in this fic as well as a few fics planned for the paperbag series (one of them i oughta finish up soon.) Touya wasn't "useful" to Enji in the way of training to become a hero, but he and the commission didn't wanna let all the work go to waste so they trafficked him instead. That's partly the reason Dabi has conditioned responses to pain in the fic. Don't worry, Sako is gonna find out and be both devasted and pissed.

[marxistcomedy]

a couple questions here. cw for discussion of csa and csem

1. what is it about these words that make you think that it’s “purely for fun and pleasure”? have you spoken to every single author personally? how would you determine whether it’s for personal sexual gratification or something worthy of the pass given to works of ‘artistic merit’? why is it that only nabokov and other writers you deem ‘good’ are allowed to write these themes? how were you able to determine nabokov didn’t experience any kind of sexual thrill from writing lolita, and what methods made your conclusion different than the people who want to (and have successfully) banned lolita from schools and public libraries?

2. do you think csa is some kind of mind virus? do you think that abusers of children only enact abuse because they’ve been infected with pedophilia brain? if you do, you’re living in qanon world and not dealing with the realities of csa, in a way that harms victims and has particularly scapegoated lgbt+ people by a) treating abusers of children as intrinsically pedophilic and b) treating pedophilia as a sexual orientation rather than an act of violence against a child. given the demographics of ao3 users and studies estimating rates of csa within the imperial core as 1/5 or higher, it is far, far more likely that, yes, even the fetish content you’re encountering is a victim processing their trauma than it is abusers recounting or fantasizing about abuse they have or would like to inflict — if that’s your central concern here, which, again, is qanon world

3. if you’re willing to confront the reality of csa, you’ll realize that most abusers are not specifically pedophiles. they’re opportunistic offenders who understand that children in our society are extremely vulnerable targets, who are not given the tools or knowledge to protect their autonomy and are surrounded by adults who teach them to deny themselves the right to that autonomy in myriad ways, big and small, every other moment of their life. they know children are routinely made to do things that make them afraid or uncomfortable or emotionally and physically harm them, because that it what it means in our society (and many others) to be a child. they know, maybe because it happened to them, that they won’t get caught, that the child won’t tell — and more often than not, even if the child does tell, they won’t face any consequence. not only are priests and parents and sports coaches and family friends and doctors not reading ao3 fanfiction, much less writing it, you aren’t even describing a coherent category with which you could pin some blame on actual abuse that occurs in the world

4. when you talk about fictional kids experiencing abuse, are you talking about whump fics that graphically detail the cruelty of abuse and the suffering of the victim? are you talking about fix-it fics where a character experiences csa and is saved from it by someone willing to intervene? are you talking about fics that make explicit a dynamic in canon that implies or is metaphor for a relationship that would be child abuse? what do you think should be done with this content? who do you think should be made to deal with it? what do you think should be done about the people who write it? would you make exceptions for victims? how do you determine who’s a victim and therefore allowed to process in this way? is there content you believe categorically could not be written by a victim, and would you discount people from that category who self-identify as such? what kind of victim are you willing to shame and smear as a perpetrator of abuse for writing words?

5. following from that, is your discomfort in the thought that these works depicting child abuse is going to brainwash people who wouldn’t otherwise abuse a child into doing so? or will convince them to justify the abuse of others? or is your problem seeing and being confronted with fictional depictions of csa, ‘good’ or not, for whatever reason they exist, that are only a fraction of real abuse actually occurring all around you in the real world, in ways that cannot be stopped by doing tumblr moms for liberty handwringing? could you be reading about youth liberation and educating others instead? the reactionaries already organizing in your area against sex education in schools are a bigger danger to children than anyone in ao3. by prioritizing and focusing on their own adult discomfort, they mystify the social conditions that allow child abuse to flourish. are you enlisting in their cause by doing the same?

[pangurbanthewhite]

Ao3 is a great website with a great team of volunteers that absolutely needs to cut ties with its entire legal department and remove every member of the Board who enabled the legal team to turn Ao3 into its own personal playground.

CW for discussions of CSAM/CSEM and its handling in a legal framework.

This isn't the definitive thread on Ao3's organizational dysfunction and how it prevents them from protecting their volunteers, addressing issues of racist conduct, or KEEPING AO3 IN COMPLIANCE WITH CRIMINAL LAW but it touches on a lot of those points.

[sparkylurkdragon]

I’m fine with anti-antis having ways to express themselves, but you do have to realize that stuff rarely exists in a vacuum and that fiction does effect reality to a certain extent when conditions are similar. This has been studied and proven. This phenomenon of fiction impacting reality has been given a name. Normalizing certain csem has the potential to normalize those types of relations to a culture that is already fine with sexualizing minors. I know these types of things (and even things like age play) can be coping mechanisms, but survivors can definitely become perpetrators of the same evils they were plagued with. It is a common tactic amongst groomers to show examples of adults and minors being in a relationship to promote the idea that kind of ‘love’ can be healthy. Mine obsessively made me watch The Professional and used celebs with large age gaps as an excuse. Nowadays, loli porn is being used similarly. What do you think is a good middle ground stance? (Asking because I would love to know different opinions on this topic. I’m not trying to attack some random person on the internet who writers or reads fanfiction).

Mm. You seem to be coming into this in good faith, so I’ll bite.

Content warnings: Nongraphic mentions of CSEM, torture, violent intrusive thoughts, underage/loli smut, Abu Ghraib, rape, real life suicides, and school shootings. If I missed something, please take my apologies in advance and let me know.

1.) [Citation needed]

Which studies? Who did the research? Who funded them? Sorry, but after living through “videogames are murder simulators and your kid will definitely shoot up their school if they play Doom or Mortal Kombat or Night Trap,” I’m wary of taking that at face value. From my own wanderings and listening to experts in the mental health field, I don’t think fiction affects reality in the way you are suggesting it does. I see it as more of a funhouse mirror: it may reflect real-world biases, and it may distort the truth sometimes, but it’s really, really hard for it to create real-world problems wholesale.

Violent videogames are also a decent analogy here, because the solution the industry settled on was a rating system. Much like the solution fandom settled on with AO3 was a tagging system.

Also, this is one of my hard lines: do not call fictional art and writing CSEM. CSEM stands for “child sexual exploitation material”. It means that a child was exploited, someone real was abused, to make it. No living breathing person is exploited to write weird fanfiction. Conflating the two is incredibly fucking dangerous and leads to alarm fatigue, and has led to several incidents of purity types distributing abuse material because they thought it was anime characters. So. We will not be calling weird fanfiction or fanart CSEM. It’s about as insulting as calling a whump fic as bad as the Abu Ghraib prison.

2.) With great sincerity that is hard to convey in text: I’m truly sorry that happened to you. No one deserves to be groomed. I hope that you are now out of that situation and have been able to take steps towards healing.

But... do you want The Professional banned and erased from the collective human consciousness? I can understand why the knee-jerk reaction may be “yes”, because it was used to hurt you. But the thing is, your abuser would have used something else if The Professional didn’t exist. Your abuser would have used something else if all celebrities only had relationships with people born on their exact birthdays. That’s what abusers do. If there was nothing to groom people with but forks, then abusers would groom people with forks.

To pull it back some, do you want to ban candy? Someone might use it to lure a kid into the back of a van, after all. 

Like, I don’t like loli porn. It grosses me out viscerally, and I’m happy if it stays at least five miles away from me at all times. It makes my skin crawl to know some folks get off on it.

But, to be honest? If it prevents even one person from hurting a real person, or if it helps even one victim work out their trauma, then it has done too great a service in the world to destroy it, for no one was hurt in its creation, yet it has helped someone. And I don’t know any way to “objectively” see which pieces are irredeemable jack-off material and which are going to help someone. They might very well exist in the same piece.

To make another analogy... torture is one of the worst things a human being can do to another human being. (Indeed, one can argue convincingly that CSEM and all forms of rape are a form of torture.) I feel that very strongly. I have outright dropped stories where the “good guys” torture people before. It viscerally grosses me out, and I think it’s a harmful narrative to perpetuate. I really do think we’d be better off as a society without that trope.

And yet, I would never want those works banned. Rated and warned for, sure, given a forward explaining that torture doesn’t work, even better, but not banned. Because even the most vile “good guy saves the day by torturing information out of someone” piece may have helped somebody, in either its creation or its consumption, if only by showing how the mind of someone who thinks torture is a good thing works.

Also, I have a lot of violent intrusive thoughts. Having a safe outlet for them in the form of things like fiction where the good guys are tortured has in all likelihood saved my life, and possibly the lives of others. So perhaps, for me, there’s an element of feeling like I live in a glass house and can’t throw stones.

Frankly, I don’t think there is a middle ground stance at this point. Purity culture has never meant anything good for me and mine and I will never tolerate it. This latest wave in this latest subculture has, quite probably, killed people. Actual, real life people, who suffered and died.

Sorry. There’s no coming back from that.

[aestherians]

Brief discussion of child abuse in the post below. Please block the following tags if you do not wish to see it:

#child abuse cw

#cp mention

#csem mention