On Apr 7, 2006, at 2:54 PM, Sam Korn wrote:
Easily: child
pornography is visual material that depicts explicit
sexual activity involving children. My understanding (albeit unclear,
as I've never seen the image in question) is that the image did not
portray sexual activity.
It wasn't explicit, but it was very, very strongly implied.
Wikipedia's article on [[pornography]] says "Pornography ... is the
representation of the human body or human sexual behaviour with the
goal of sexual arousal". This image very clearly fits into this.
You asked for "a definition", not "Wikipedia's definition".
You could also
define child pornography as visual material that
documents actually-occurring explicit sexual activity involving
children. Since it's a fantasy sketch, not a photograph, there's no
clear evidence that the image documents any actually-occurring
activity either. Under US law, as well as the laws of several
nations, erotic materials depicting children are perfectly legal so
long as no children were harmed in their production--i.e., so long as
they do not depict any actually-occurring activity.
Child pornography isn't ipso facto illegal, nor was it deleted on
those grounds. It was deleted because child pornography is completely
inappropriate for a serious encyclopaedia.
The image in question was completely inappropriate for a serious
encyclopedia. Whether it was really child pornography or not is an
academic question of little interest to us now.
--
Philip L. Welch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch