Monday, September 03, 2012 12:21 a.m. EDT
Child porn evidence unreliable: study of Playboy
"A commonly used method of judging a woman's sexual maturation may not be good enough in child pornography prosecutions.
That, at least, is what a group of pediatric endocrinologists concluded from a study of more than 500 Playboy centerfolds.
"So often these people get convicted on what I refer to as felonious bad taste," said Dr. Arlan Rosenbloom, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville. "They're downloading stuff that isn't very nice, but isn't illegal."
In many cases, prosecutors are basing their cases against people who have downloaded images, and don't have a way to confirm the subjects' ages.
In a study published online today in the journal Pediatrics, Rosenbloom and his colleagues write that they were prompted to examine "547 images with breast exposure from an anthology of the monthly centerfold illustrations in Playboy magazine from December 1953 to December 2007" because Rosenbloom had seen the so-called Tanner scale misused in trials."
"Physical definitions of ‘child' are inherently problematic," Richard Wortley, a professor at University College London and co-author of "Internet child pornography: Causes, investigation and prevention," told Reuters Health by email. A recent court case, for example, "ruled that pictures that 'appear to be' of a minor was too imprecise, and that chronological age should be the criterion. Internationally most legislation is based on chronological age."
Yaman Akdeniz, a law professor at Istanbul Bilgi University and the author of "Internet Child Pornography and the Law," said most child pornography cases involve images of "younger children under the age of 12 rather than older teenagers." In such cases, distinguishing between Tanner stages 4 and 5 would be irrelevant."
http://whtc.com/news/articles/2012/sep/03/child-porn-evidence-unreliable-study-of-playboy/
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