Alaskan Prosecutors Push Against Anime Via Virtual Child Porn Ban

Prosecutors Aaron Sperbeck and Audrey Renschen from Alaska are pushing for a ban on sexually explicit drawings of children, specifically citing anime and related imagery.

In the United States, the First Amendment protections on free speech allow sexually explicit depictions of fictional children, which are also known as virtual child pornography, as the result of a landmark 2002 Supreme Court case which held that child porn produced without involvement of a real child including cartoons and anime images is in fact legal.

Federal law defines obscenity very loosely and subjectively, leaving major decisions on obscenity largely to the states. Generally, the federal obscenity bar is set very high and must be obviously offensive to a majority in order to be declared as such.

Sperbeck, the crimes-against-children prosecutor in the Anchorage District Attorney’s Office, is pushing for the ban and has the support of the chair of the House Judiciary Committee in representative Jay Ramras (R-Fairbanks) and others in the State Legislature, stating “I’m awestruck that it even exists,”. He stated the prosecutor “has got a good idea and I’m going to support him”.

According to Renschen, the proposal is not intended for “children in bathtubs or Lolitas with their shirts off.” For her part, Alaska Assistant U.S. Attorney Renschen, demonstrating specious reasoning has stated

“When you talk about anime, even though a real child wasn’t used, it still sexualizes the child and cartoons are naturally conducive to attracting a child.”

She added that she has not charged anyone with possessing anime images in her five years of prosecuting child pornography cases.

Joan Bertin, executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship in New York for her part stated

“That represents someone’s fantasy life. When you start regulating that kind of matter, you are getting into [the realm of] thought control and that is very dangerous. Even if fantasies are obscene to others, a person should have the right to possess them.”

Circuit Judge Roger Gregory in a legal writ this past June agrees with Bertin.

“I am hard-pressed to think of a better modern day example of government regulation of private thoughts than what we have before us in this case: convicting a man for the victimless ‘crime’ of privately communicating his personal fantasies to other consenting adults.”

Gregory wrote the above in the lone dissenting statement (PDF) regarding the Whorley virtual child pornography case, confirming that cartoons depicting minors in sexually explicit conduct are not illegal unless they depict real life minors.