Petition/Interest Check to Purge Underage RPF on AO3
Apologies if there are typoes on this post. if you would like me to clarify anything via DM, ask, or reply I am more than happy to. This topic is very important to me. I will publish all asks.
Claim
When people claim the Archive of our Own (AO3) hosts CSE/AM (Child Exploitative/Abusive Material) they typically are, or people assume they are, talking about underage fics of fictional characters. Whether or not you believe these fics are immoral is irrelevant to the topic that the Archive of our Own hosts thousands of works of real life (RPF) children under the tag Underage Sex.
At best, these are publicized pedophilic fantasies of real children. At worst, it is CSAM.
Classifying CSAM
When most people think of CSAM, the most obvious examples are photographs and videos of child sexual abuse. And yes, this is the most glaring and important to tackle part of CSAM. However, photorealistic images meant to resemble children, at least in the United States, are classified as CSEM.
CSEM is bad because a child is, in a word, being sexually exploited. Child celebrities are frequently exploited by their employers, parents, and yes, fans. (John Hickley Jr. was inspired to assassinate Reagan due to his pedophilic obsession with Jodie Foster, he is not a man to be praised)
When you are famous, it is impossible to avoid what people are saying about you. To say that child actors should just "look away" from the people who publicly post rape fantasies about them is victim blaming, plain and simple.
Consent and RPF
Even with adults, RPF is a highly contested topic, with some celebrities giving explicit consent and others expressing explicit discomfort. This is irrelevant to this topic. As I hope everyone reading this can agree, children cannot consent. A very, very common argument I hear in response to defending Underage RPF is that the authors could possibly be minors themselves. This is ignoring the fact that,
It is very unlikely that those writing RPF tagged "Extreme Underage" (Read: Toddlers and Elementary schoolers) are that age
Though, yes, many people just lie, AO3 asks to confirm you're an adult before opening any explicit work. One would expect the same rules to apply to authors.
Writing private fantasies is different than sharing them to a public platform where anyone, including adults, can read them.
Children-on-children sexual abuse has its own term, COCSA. Being a minor does not mean you are incapable of committing CSA. It is no more justifiable, and a child is still harmed.
AO3's complicity
On November 25, 2023, X (Formerly Twitter) user bearsys_ published a tweet saying that they were let go as a volunteer for AO3 due to having "From the river to the sea" as their status.
This was considered a violation, and not the fact that bearsys_'s AO3 account, bryophyte, had earlier published RPF of an at the time 17 year old (de-aged to be a toddler) being raped by his deceased best friend.
This should speak louder than anything.
The simple fact that the Archive of Our Own allows fics to be tagged as both RPF and Underage is incredibly telling. If you are writing erotica about real, breathing children, you are a pedophile, or catering to pedophiles on the site. There is no excuse. And to pro-paras who defend this: you are not "anti-contact" if you are lusting after children on a platform they can access.
I would really appreciate more people talking about this. This is not a shipping debate. This is not a fandom debate. This is the largest fanfiction platform defending written CSAM because they know if they ban it, they will lose support.
I want people to be outspoken about this. So many times I see people claim to "not care about AO3 drama", because they care about real children and not fictional ones. So speak up about this. Because these are real children.