Those are emotional words to be sure, but I don't know that the line is necessarily clear. How does one define exploitation? What is a child? How do we know if sexual gratification of the audience is the goal? Making child pornography should be illegal, assuming that making it requires the molestation of a child, which is obvious. Should distribution of child pornography be illegal? The knee jerk reaction is to say yes, but keep in mind how bad the government can be in so many ways, and to allow merely sharing or possessing some kind of information to be illegal gives them a giant hammer that they might decide to hammer us with.
Should the people involved in making, or in fact making available to the public, Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet be charged with distribution of child pornography? Olivia Hussey was 15 when she played Juliet. She had a sex scene which most people would agree was erotic and her nude body was shown. Even under stricter definitions of child pornography than are being applied to Cuties, we might be able to say that Romeo and Juliet is child pornography. The main advantages for R&J being that it's much classier than Cuties and the girl is 15 rather than 11-12. These are questions we need to think about before we permit people to be put into jail. These are questions we need to think about before we allow a movie to be banned.
Also, this is a globally distributed movie and a local jurisdiction is going to prosecute. Considering the questionable nature of child pornography and the question of whether distribution should even be illegal, do we want one region of a nation or of the world to decide what can and can't be seen everywhere else? In this age of mass media, any kind of movie, show, song, book, entertainment, or story can go anywhere in the world. Do we want people charged based on the strictest local laws?
Believe me, I am against child molestation and child pornography. I'm probably in the minority of people on this site in that I actually have kids, little girls even. But child pornography and child molestation are ideas that cause people to throw logic right out the window and form a witch hunt without even thinking about the reality of a particular case or the precedent that can be set with such a prosecution. Were the actresses in Cuties molested in the making of the movie? By strict legal definition, almost certainly not. Were the actresses exploited? "Exploitation" is a weasel word if ever there was one, and people use it all the time to justify banning things that they don't like. If we are going to ban movies and jail people, we need a very legally strict definition of what misdeed was allegedly done to those actresses. If we have those things, then a good argument might be made that some of the movie's creators should be prosecuted. Is letting or having kids do lude dances to be illegal? It's certainly objectionable but if its to be illegal then that opens up another Pandora's box of government interference in our lives. Then we must address the issue if distribution of something should even be illegal, because if so than almost anybody could become a criminal by sharing footage of illegal material. Maybe if could be proven that distributors participated in the production of the movie, thereby being complicit in what ever illegal act that was committed against the movie's actresses.
There are so many complex legal and societal issues at play when it comes to banning a movie like this and for the justifications that are being used. We can't just say "OMG the childrens!!" and then prosecute unthinkingly.
