If you know me well, you'll know that I can't leave something well enough alone.
When people came forward and said that they'd been groomed into molestation as children using Cub Porn, it was a serious moment recalibration for me. The idea that what I'm doing is harmless seemed to no longer be true. So I did what I felt I needed to: I asked for more information. Surprisingly, quite a number of people were willing to talk to me about their experiences, and I've learned a lot from these accounts. One thing in particular, in fact, surprised me a lot. But here's the spread.
The accounts pretty much split down two types:
1) People trying to use the furry fandom as a way to lure in vulnerable teens/tweens to create RL child porn.
2) Internet relationships between a tween/teen and an adult
The first account is pretty familiar to us- stranger tries to endear themselves to a child, meets up, they end up in a bad situation they can't escape, they use the CP they make to bring in another, the cycle continues. Strangers in the dark.
The second one, however, is much more common by any metric I can measure, and it's surprising how public it is. A young person enters a relationship with someone much too old for them, the older one draws, commissions or asks the younger one to draw them both consummating their relationship (because pictures are the roses of furry relationships; we're weird that way), and the relationship continues until they meet. The grooming aspect of the art is specific to depicting both of them, together, in some way, shape or form.
Now this is where it gets interesting.
If someone raises an objection, or a question, about the ages involved? The younger person just... ages their character up, and pretends to be older.
At this point, the abuse is invisible to us. Nobody who doesn't know the younger person personally has any way of knowing what's going on. In fact, in plenty of cases, the younger person was never not portrayed as an adult in art. We have no way of knowing how many couples out there feature people of drastically different ages, both posing as adults.
So let's do a thought experiment.
Let's say we nuked all cub art. Clean, porn, everything, gone tomorrow. What happens to these two cases?
In the first case, well. Nothing. Cub art was never a necessary component, it was just a secondary vector for abusers to find and trade with other abusers, and they'll never not have that. They'll create their own hidden network and hang out there and finding them will be even harder.
In the second case, everyone knows you can't draw cubs and it's strictly enforced, so... everyone has an adult character. Every furry tween and teen on the internet draws themselves as an adult, making it absolutely impossible for anyone to know they aren't one. They get thrust into the miasma of general furry art, which has a ton of porn. They get approached by people as if they're an adult, unless their manner of communication gives it away to someone looking for it. In any case, this relationship is impossible to detect, and therefore the abuse is even harder to find.
In conclusion: Taking steps to castigate non-offending pedophiles and remove art networks related to it pushes them into the dark, makes them less likely to get help if they need it, and actively trains them to be more secretive- which is how you get away with molesting children.
Having a cub art community makes finding abusers easier. If you want to help vulnerable young people, stop raging and start engaging.
TL;DR: I am not morally conflicted about doing what I do anymore; I am now doubly sure this is the right direction.
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5 years, 8 months ago
17 Aug 2018 23:47 CEST
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