Apparently Italy’s New Child Pornography Law Includes Anime and Manga
Apparently I put it in the title because I’m not the biggest connoisseur of laws and new rules but I’m going to pass on what happened in Italy now in 2022 and that also applies to Germany.
What happened is that these two countries updated their laws on child protection and s*xuality, but Italy has a difference in relation to Germany. For example, check out a change in the law related to child pornography in Italy in 2022:
“In 2022, the Italian legislator introduced a new crime under Article 600-quater paragraph 3 of the Criminal Code, which punishes the mere (intentional) “access to online child-pornographic material”. Before, accessing child pornography had remained unpunished, since the crime of possession (detenzione) of child pornography implied at least the download from the web from a file sharing program or from a messaging app – even if the file is then deleted and even if there is no evidence that the file has been opened. The new legislative intervention intends to fill a gap that results from those who access websites containing child pornography without downloading any of the content.”
So, to clarify, before it was only punished for those caught with child pornography. But now people can be punished according to the law if caught ACCESSING this content, regardless of what happens after the fact.
Apparently Italy’s New Child Pornography Law Includes Anime and Manga
Okay, but how do manga and anime end up fitting into this new law? According to Paolo Caroli: “The legal definition of pornography does not even require that the content was created for the purpose of inducing s*xual arousal, since it is sufficient that it has this function “in the eye of the beholder” (e.g. pictures of naked minors playing normally on the beach).”
We proceed with the following:“With a decision heavily criticized by the scholarship, the Italian Court of Cassation extended the concept of child pornography even to comics and hentai anime, the so-called “totally virtual pornography”. According to the Court, the possession of child pornography is a crime of concrete danger (reato di pericolo concreto or konkretes Gefährdungsdelikt) and in the case of comics, the danger is represented by the evocation of real situations in which “children are reduced to mere objects, toys with which and on which to perform acts of s*xual nature” (Cass. Pen., Section III, 13 January 2017, n. 222659).”
According to what was reported, this was a highly criticized decision as it includes anime, comics, hentai and any fictional content in this crime.
We know this kind of thing is meant to include lolis content, social networks like Facebook, Pinterest and even Google put up warnings when you try to search for Lolis indicating that this would be child pornography.