(LifeSiteNews) — According to a report by Stefano Gennarini of the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam), a new United Nations treaty allegedly designed to fight cybercrimes “would allow predators and tech giants to profit from the sexual exploitation of children, including through images created using AI.”
Artificial intelligence, which is revolutionizing the digital world at warp speed, can already produce imagery and video almost indistinguishable from the genuine article.
The U.N. treaty mandates the criminalization of non-consensually sharing intimate photos as well as “child sexual abuse material” – images of real children – but “still allows for a broad swath of sexualized content involving children.” Such imagery is still illegal in the United States, with 38 states having enacted laws specifically targeting AI child exploitation material, and the Justice Department has been “aggressively” going after creators of AI-generated child abuse images.
This year alone, AI child abuse images have been spreading like wildfire, with law enforcement struggling to catch up.
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Nonetheless, the U.N. treaty fails to address this growing threat. Instead, Gennarini notes, “the new U.N. treaty allows countries to de-criminalize virtual child pornography in all circumstances as well as private sexting by minors, even to adults.” The treaty was adopted on December 24, 2024, and now must be signed by individual countries for it to take effect, with a signing ceremony scheduled for July in Hanoi, Vietnam. Forty countries must ratify the treaty before it “enters into force”; supporters have been arguing that, for example, “legalizing sexting is compassionate because adolescents have the right to sexual expression.”
Gennarini notes that defenders of the treaty have been making the case that “letting pedophiles satisfy their sexual preferences with virtual material would make it less likely that they would prey on real children.” This argument, incidentally, predates AI. For years, some people – including some libertarians – have claimed that giving pedophiles an “outlet” in the form of a child sex doll or non-photographic child pornography (sketches, paintings, other imagery not of real children) might prevent real abuse from taking place and spare real children pain.
This argument – which was even made by Barbara Kay in the National Post in 2017, where she argued that such sex dolls could constitute “harm reduction” – fails not merely the test of morality but fundamentally misunderstands how pornography actually functions. Pornography does not merely feed demand, it fuels demand. Those who begin with AI images will inevitably escalate usage, and this pornography will entrench and encourage pedophilic desires. In fact, the Guardian published a reportlast month detailing how algorithms on porn sites and escalating porn addiction are leading a growing number of men and minors into child porn usage.
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A technocratic “harm reduction” approach to this problem is utterly ill-suited to the scale and severity of this problem, both in moral and practical terms. Despite that, the UN appears to be heading in this direction. As Gennarini notes: “[T]hey say that dropping the term ‘child pornography’ is necessary to avoid re-victimizing those who have been exploited. They call all this part of a ‘trauma-informed’ and ‘harm-reduction’ approach, based on new theories in behavioral therapy.” Bluntly put, these theories are garbage.
Over the past decade, Western countries have finally been grappling with the reality that the ubiquitous consumption and availability of pornography has triggered a full-scale crisis that has transformed the way human beings relate to one another and mainstreamed violence in the intimate context. Violent pornography is not just consumed, it is acted upon, which is why practices like “choking” have become normalized over the past decade.
That is no exaggeration – according to the Atlantic, 24 percent of American women reported feeling fear during intimacy due to porn-inspired strangulation, a practice The Insider noted is now “so normal Gen Z-ers don’t even discuss it.”
Pornography is poison, and any imagery of children – AI or otherwise – mines the pits of hell. It must be banned in every form and punished to the full extent of the law.