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Topic History of: April Jones parents campaign Max. showing the last 5 posts - (Last post first)
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tdf
Randall wrote:
By the way, like Pete I'm also bothered about the secrecy surrounding the material in these trials. We are all entitled to a public trial. I suspect that, like keeping the monster hidden off camera in a horror movie, it's a theatrical device so that "100 Vile Images â„¢" can be reported, instead of photos from Facebook of teenage girls at a slumber party.[/quote]
Just on this point, if the defendant is not named, I think it is because:
(a) defendant is not just on trial for internet CSA imagery but also for committing abuse.
(b) defendant is also on trial for abusing children known to him/her - who have the right to anonymity, and therefore the defendant also does, as to identify the children might identify the defendant
Also, as regards CSA images, there is a classification system (at least in the UK though it may vary from country to country) which rates the severity of possession on a scale from (IIRC) 1 to 4.
Granted, tabloid headlines usually go for the '100 Vile Images' approach.
pete
I realise I omitted to mention Randall's superbly well argued contribution, which in fact was one of the chief motives for my extended bray above. Well done, Randall!
Randall
honey!oh sugar sugar. wrote:
Viewing child pornography does cause children harm.
If nobody watched it,there would be no need to make it, would there?
Every time it is viewed, it abuses the child (who has not given consent) further.
I'm afraid you've fallen for some of the oft-spouted propaganda, Honey. Dr Goebbels would be so pleased. Pete gives a very good and thorough view of the misconceived approach, and the Barbara Hewson article is good also. However, I think my own contribution on the subject, from a different thread, is worth reproducing.
I believe - and the principles of a liberal society dictate - that a man should be able to do as he likes so long as it does no harm to others. This is especially true when he acts entirely within his private sphere, such as looking at his computer screen alone at home. Looking at illegal pornography (and there are kinds other than underage) does not cause harm to any other person. It's the old JFK argument. If we watch the Zapruder film, we don't timetravel and teleport to Dallas, 1963 and shoot the President.
I have heard it argued that the young people in the pictures are harmed by the knowledge that people could be looking at their images. There are three weaknesses in this argument. Firstly, being a bit upset about something does not equate to harm and is certainly an inadequate justification for imprisoning the upsetter. Secondly, the people in the pictures are not necessarily upset by their distribution, so justifying imprisonment because someone might be upset that you've seen them... oh dear. Thirdly, if the subjects of the images are upset about being seen by others, this anguish is present whether or not anyone actually does indeed see the pictures. So there is no causal link between viewing the images and causing harm to the person in them. I'd also add that, since the internet is a global resource, images might have been produced in a jurisdiction where, or at a time when, they were not legally characterised as abusive. So weakest case scenario would be to imprison an image viewer for upsetting someone who doesn't know the pictures have been viewed, wouldn't give a hoot if they did know and wasn't abused or crimed when and where the pictures were actually taken.
As with much we discuss here, the real purpose of laws and policy about child pornography isn't what people say it is: child protection. Pete and Hedda, above, explore how it's really another authoritarian effort to compel people (both subjects of photographs and viewers) to think, feel, live and be a certain way. It's a way that self-appointed moral gurus - whether they be fire-and-brimstone loony Christians or wimmin communists - who have decided that their views are better and should override everyone else's can override everyone else's.
By the way, like Pete I'm also bothered about the secrecy surrounding the material in these trials. We are all entitled to a public trial. I suspect that, like keeping the monster hidden off camera in a horror movie, it's a theatrical device so that "100 Vile Images ™" can be reported, instead of photos from Facebook of teenage girls at a slumber party.
pete
I apologise for the monster proportions of this post, but the issues raised in this thread kept prodding me to think more and more about them.
Honey took me to task over my comments about viewers of “indecent images” being “completely harmless.” I was perhaps being a tad pre-emptive and undiscriminating with that remark, as each individual really needs to be uniquely assessed as an individual if true justice is to be served, not as a 'type' of 'offender'.
That said, I have a quibble with Honey’s belief that viewing images harms the children depicted in them, although it is indeed the justification for increasingly vicious penalties.
No matter how repugnant the viewing habits of those who derive satisfaction from watching atrocities like jihadi beheadings or the 9/11 attacks may be to most of us, they’re actually watching coloured pixels on a screen arranged into animated shapes, not the actual crimes. Are they harming surviving relatives by their viewing activities? I remain to be convinced by voodoo science of this sort.
I’ll come back to this in a moment, because child pornography law refuses the distinction between digital representations and real events.
A recording of a real event is not the real event, it’s a recording of it, just as Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe is titled “This is Not a Pipe” because it’s a picture of a pipe, not a pipe.
To quibble also with tdf, I don’t believe that the law is more or less correct as it is, partly because it originated in the mid-1970s in a deliberately-fomented and groundless moral panic about a massive underground child porn industry involving the sexual slavery of 1.2 million ‘missing’ children.
As I hope to show in what follows, these laws have little to do with either justice or real child protection, and much to do with locking as many people up as easily and rapidly as possible.
These hysterical claims all turned out to be pure, 22-carat bullshit after thorough police investigation in the land where it originated: the USA. There were never “1.2 million” missing children in the first place (less than a hundred per year across the entire USA, most of whom turned out to have been snatched by a jilted parent and most of the rest being throwaway kids, not runaways or abductees).
The “child porn industry” turned out to be a tiny cottage industry confined to a very small “niche” clientele in those pre-internet days. This is all ably demonstrated in Judith Levine’s rigorously researched book of 2002, Harmful to Children, and she gives a very clear account of the origins and ongoing irrationality and sheer dangerousness of these laws here, at a talk she gave in 2011 (her contribution begins at about 11.18):
The claims about the extent of child pornography were wholly made up by two unscrupulous, porn-hating (and therefore porn-obsessed) fanatics: child psychiatrist Judianne Densen Gerber and her Rottweiler campaign assistant, LAPD cop Sgt Lloyd Martin, a man who clearly had problems with truth-telling and anger management. Both were later convicted of corruption: Densen Gerber for using humiliating and degrading methods at her residential treatment centre for adolescent drug misusers and for embezzling her dubious institution’s funds, Martin for serial (and brutal) witness intimidation.
But not before their swivel-eyed panic-mongering had persuaded Congress to enact the first national anti-child porn law, the US Protection of Children Act. And the fact that it was all hysterical nonsense didn’t stop the panic they’d manufactured Stateside from crossing the Atlantic and being ferociously disseminated here by Mary Whitehouse and the MP Sir Cyril Townsend. The result was the Protection of Children Act 1978, the UK’s first national anti-child porn law.
Moral panic laws are rarely, if ever, good laws. I’d make a bonfire of them all if I could.
The child porn laws, which have become ever more draconian and ruinous, are, I believe, the primary tumour from which the legislative savagery that characterises our deeply questionable historic child abuse convictions in the UK have metastasised.
From Judith Levine’s talk:
c. 17.15:
“This is a law that strikes everybody. Anybody and everybody. You do not have to intend to download child pornographic images. We don’t know what child pornographic images are because … no one – no journalist, no social scientist, not even in some cases the attorneys for the people – can look at the images. Many of them, I believe, are probably pictures of teenagers.
And so every type of person, especially young kids, teenagers, who look at pictures get sent to prison for 10, 15 years and are sex offenders the rest of their lives.
… The net is so wide that it can take in anybody. Including you. If you download pornography, child pornography can be cached by your browser. There are some forensic experts who say that probably everyone who goes online … probably three quarters of the people in the world, probably has child pornography on their hard drive.
[Little wonder that UK police are arresting hundreds of people a month for this offence - pete]
And once you are accused, your life is over. I think this has to do with a kind of literalisation of fantasy, … a denial of the sexuality of children, a prohibition of any fantasy about children, and finally the Police State that has existed since 9/11.
It used to just be the Postal Inspector’s Office that would deal with this stuff. Now there’s Homeland Security, Department of Justice, ICE [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and all of the international law enforcement agencies as well. So there’s really kind of a worldwide surveillance of many, many millions, probably billions, of dollars.
…. All I would ask is that in supporting Lawrence [a US artist accused of downloading child pornography], if you do, and I hope you will, that you understand that he is part of a vast number of people who have been put in prison for doing pretty much nothing.
The laws are terrible. [My emphasis]
At 35.02 onwards:
How can they do a prosecution if no one can look at these (images)? The police can look at them (laughter in audience). And so now we’re all in a situation where … we are forced to somehow submit to the opinions of these dirty-minded little two-bit sheriffs* – that’s really who’s making decisions about people’s lives.
*In the UK, these would be Chief Constables.
At 37.29 onwards:
“Even guilty people deserve justice. The sex laws in this country amount to banishment. Even people who do the worst crimes get to pay their debt and go on with their lives - except for sex criminals.”
By sequestering and demonising a distinct, and I believe largely imaginary, group (“paedos”), these laws have laid the foundations for the False Allegations Industry and for perpetual sex panic, because not only does no one care about what happens to a human being once he (or she) has been dehumanised by toxic terms like “paedo” or “sex offender,” but many extract great delight from watching their downfall and symbolic execution.
It’s my contention that these laws have the perverse effect, in highly devious ways, of making paedophilia surreptiously attractive to the majority, but in such a fashion that they can deny any complicity with such desires and claim only disgust and outrage.
These top-down prohibitions borne of panic and blatant untruths do this not merely by inciting curiosity but by mobilising fantasies – fantasies that are typically quickly disavowed and projected, as the law actively encourages, onto a circumscribed ‘other’: the filthy paedo, the vile pervert. The war on child pornography is itself a form of child pornography, because it surreptiously invites everyone to make indecent images of children on their mental ‘hard drives.’
This is, in fact, exactly what the legal scholar Amy Adler argued in an important essay of 2001 entitled The Perverse Law of Child Pornography. When we read or see news bulletins replete with references to “sick/vile/depraved images”, our minds are inclined to manufacture our own versions of what these images might look like. If you wanted to stop people thinking about pink elephants, you wouldn’t say “Don’t think of a pink elephant.”
By insisting that indecent images are not digital representations but solely and only real, documentary records of crimes that MUST be banned, and that they re-victimise every time they are privately viewed (insanely, even if they’re computer-generated and involve no real children at all), child porn laws elicit our imagining the very “filth” they ostensibly censor. And we often do this circuitously: what kind of vile pervert extracts pathological sexual pleasure from viewing indecent images? Now, let me imagine what dirty pleasures such vile perverts are obtaining ….
In a superb essay of 2014, the psychoanalytically-oriented literary analyst Steven Ruszczycky elaborates on Adler’s account. In a seismic observation, he writes:
The implication seems to be that the pedophilic gaze thus requires that we have either some familiarity with or some capacity for recognizing what is sexually exciting about children. … we know what it is when we see it; but we only know it because we already have some capacity to experience pedophilic desire. In other words, child pornography law can only function if we find the potential pedophile within ourselves.”
I personally believe that this is one reason why misery porn, whether in the form of commercial movies, autobiographies, novels or news media reports, are so immensely popular. It’s easy to veil obscene enjoyment beneath a veneer of disgust.
Misery porn novels featuring VIP paedos and abused children are bestsellers in the Anglosphere, as authors like Jonathan Kellerman, Andrew Vachss, Ron Handberg, Robert Campbell and James N. Frey know from the size of their bank accounts whenever they’ve turned their literary abilities to concocting stories of child sexual exploitation.
The British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips puts succinctly it in his 2015 essay Laying Down the Law:
… to forbid something is to make it desirable. The forbidden coerces desire. It makes something strangely alluring. It may make us obedient, but it also makes us dream (often at the same time). To abide by a rule you have to have in mind what it would be to break it.
Taken from Unforbidden Pleasures (2015) (p. 24). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
The academic Richard Mohr has coined the phrase “the paedophilia of everyday life.” His work cogently shows that the series of moves by which adults participate in and then disavow an erotic desire for a child structures both the law and the wider social sphere.
In an argument similar to Phillips’, Mohr ably demonstrates that, despite the legal prohibition of child pornography, huge numbers of adults are prompted by this very prohibition to surreptiously imagine and enjoy the sexiness of the young, a sexiness which the prohibition itself works to elicit in those mental hard drives I mentioned.
And they do this through texts and images that constitute everyday human experience: the catalogue of mundane 'paedophilic delights' furnish just enough exposure to the erotic appeal of the young while simultaneously effacing any conscious knowledge one might have of what makes these images so enticing in the first place.
Ruszczycky again:
What prevents one from becoming fully conscious of one’s attraction to these images is the creation of a pathological subjectivity [the paedo] that can carry the burden of one’s disavowed desires as well as become the object of one’s condemnation.
And Mohr:
Society needs the pedophile: his existence allows everyone else to view sexy children innocently.
Parents are not owners of children, but loving stewards. Our aim is help them grow up and leave us as well rounded human beings, after all.
It’s possible that violent and sadistic child rapists often have child porn stashes. But it doesn’t follow that everyone with stashes of this sort is a violent and sadistic child rapist.
The latter, we know for a fact, are vanishingly rare; sad, misguided individuals who click on the wrong kind of links are vastly more numerous.
I may have been glib to refer to them all indiscriminately as “completely harmless,” because no human being is. I think, for example, that the morally upright individual who projects his paedophilic desire onto another and accuses him or her of child sexual abuse is an exceptionally dangerous and harmful person, because he or she will destroy a fellow human being’s life for attention or personal gain.
The word “child” conceals more than it reveals. It conceals the fact that, as Levine points out, many of these images are of sexually mature adolescents. It conceals the fact that, as is well documented, many more males than females are inclined to describe their juvenile sexual experiences in positive terms. It conceals the fact, again well-documented, that many gay men recount age-divergent relationships experienced as minors that they continue to value as formative experiences of an especially positive kind. And, today, it ignores the fact that a huge and rising number of “indecent images” appearing on the Net are in fact spontaneously and willingly self-produced camcorder or smartphone recordings made and posted by juveniles themselves.
This article by barrister Barbara Hewson, written in 2003 after the first twenty-first century paedo-panic, Operation Ore, remains essential reading:
My personal view is that I do not favour legalising child abuse imagery, I think the law is more or less correct as it is, though there may have been police over-reach in certain specific cases.
However, in a free society we are entitled to debate these issues - otherwise, our much vaunted 'Western freedoms' simply don't exist any more. Similarly, we should be free to state that we are sceptical about certain allegations around 'VIP abuse networks' without being threatened, harrassed and bullied by the pitch-forking wielding mob.
The idea that paedos are all morally on the same plane as child murderers, is of course, erroneous. Fortunately, only a very small % of peadophiles are child murderers.
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