Too right. Once a paedophile always a paedophile.

www.itv.com/news/2017-03-13/aprils-law-p...e-register-for-life/

She talks some sense. As to whether "once a paedo always a paedo" - I wouldn't know; I'm not an expert in such matters. Once a drunk, always a drunk; once a speeder, always a speeder; once a killer, always a killer. Makes sense to the simple minded.

I'm no expert either but from the studies I've read they all come to the same conclusion, paedophilia is an uncontrollable trait in a person that way inclined.

Speeding, murder, robbery are choices which a person has control over.

So no comparison to paedophiles really.
Not bad for a simple mind ay?

Well you obviously know what is and is not controllable Carl. Good luck to you.

Carl wrote:
I'm no expert either but from the studies I've read they all come to the same conclusion, paedophilia is an uncontrollable trait in a person that way inclined.

Speeding, murder, robbery are choices which a person has control over.

So no comparison to paedophiles really.
Not bad for a simple mind ay?

But Carl, how does being on the register actually prevent them from harming children?
Wouldn't it be better to actually lock up those considered dangerous?

Thank you and you're welcome.

Being on the SOR will not stop someone reoffending.
The SOR is a 6 inch brush that one size fits all and if you spoke to the PPU officers looking after those 80k in the register they would tell you that is only about 2% who really need to be kept a very close eye on and the test just suck up bauble resources . The reoffending rate of sexual offences is incredibly low and not because of the SOR.
I cannot begin to imagine how the parents of April get through each day but putting more on the SOR for life is not going to work as 98% of all sexual offences are committed by perpetrators that are not on it.
Carl their are some very dangerous people locked up and should never be let out I know I met a few of them while working in Wandsworth VPU but the next child that gets abducted raped murdered i doubt will not be on the SOR as they will not of been convicted of a sexual offence before.
Take Rolf Harris, he possibly will be released in June and he will have to sign the register by reporting to a police station then probation weekly the police ppu officers visiting him on at least once per month if not twice per month for the first year, what will that achieve? Nothing at all just ticking a box and watch vast amounts of valuable officers time. The mappa meeting monthly of 8 to ten people around a table discussing Harris and others on the SOR a waste of time as any concerns would need to be addressed now this minute not next week.
Sorry sorry sorry the Sex Offenders Register is not the answer.
I am sure JK can confirm that although it's not to much of an inconvenience to cost plod once a year and them to visit him what happens on the other 363 days and 46 hours of the year?

Carl wrote:
Too right. Once a paedophile always a paedophile.

www.itv.com/news/2017-03-13/aprils-law-p...e-register-for-life/

you may as well say once a bank robber / murderer etc .. is it for life.

There is no such crime as being a pedophile. Acting upon it is a crime.
Although some pedophiles can get a thrill looking a catalogues with child models.

The woman talks nonsense.

People convicted of sex crimes involving children can never work with children again. That's the law.

I sympathize with her loss but that does not make her an expert in anything but she is part of increasingly strident lobby (that includes the trash media) that the law should be emotionally driven and victims..even those related to victims which she is..should somehow have a say in how the law operates.

It goes against all concepts of good law but as we are heading over a precipice as a society...to be expected

I partly agree with Carl. Paedophilia or ephebophilia might well be a permanent part of someone's sexuality. If it is, and if he's right that it's uncontrollable, then it seems unjust to punish people because of something outside of their conscious responsibility, doesn't it?

I agree with some of the other comments. If a so-called sex offenders register is such a good idea, then why not have one for all categories of crime? So-called ​sex offenders have by far the lowest recidivism rate, but there's no register for burglars, who reoffend about 25 times more than the RSOs.

The register is most certainly NOT a simple and inconvenient matter. The rules are set out in two statutory instruments and s.83 (I think) onwards of the SOA2003. The rules are complicated. The police won't advise you what they are and often don't actually know the rules themselves. Just one example is that you must make a notification if your bank sends you a new card. But if you forget to notify Plod that you no longer have the old card, this is a CRIME with a maximum penalty of 5 years' imprisonment.To any sane individual, this is a smear of bullshit that should be overlooked, but instead, it grants the police the power to persecute targeted individuals using pettifogging and inconsequential infractions.

No rational connection is apparent between the aim the rules seek to achieve and the effect they actually have. The register is simply not a genuine endeavour at all. Its real purpose is to outlaw and socio-economically disenfranchise the section of society at whom it is selectively targeted.

Randall wrote:
I partly agree with Carl. Paedophilia or ephebophilia might well be a permanent part of someone's sexuality. If it is, and if he's right that it's uncontrollable, then it seems unjust to punish people because of something outside of their conscious responsibility, doesn't it?

I agree with some of the other comments. If a so-called sex offenders register is such a good idea, then why not have one for all categories of crime? So-called ​sex offenders have by far the lowest recidivism rate, but there's no register for burglars, who reoffend about 25 times more than the RSOs.

The register is most certainly NOT a simple and inconvenient matter. The rules are set out in two statutory instruments and s.83 (I think) onwards of the SOA2003. The rules are complicated. The police won't advise you what they are and often don't actually know the rules themselves. Just one example is that you must make a notification if your bank sends you a new card. But if you forget to notify Plod that you no longer have the old card, this is a CRIME with a maximum penalty of 5 years' imprisonment.To any sane individual, this is a smear of bullshit that should be overlooked, but instead, it grants the police the power to persecute targeted individuals using pettifogging and inconsequential infractions.

No rational connection is apparent between the aim the rules seek to achieve and the effect they actually have. The register is simply not a genuine endeavour at all. Its real purpose is to outlaw and socio-economically disenfranchise the section of society at whom it is selectively targeted.

I thought the purpose was to save them the bother and expense of locking up dangerous people, and giving the police a head start when a child is raped and murdered?

I was going to pass over this tragic story in silence out of respect for a grieving mother, even though I know she’s spouting wholly erroneous myths and downright falsifications about our favourite bogeymen - sex offenders/paedophiles - and the 'register' so many of us misguidedly believe protects the public.

I would be deranged with implacable grief and unmollifiable horror if I were in her shoes. And to be fair to her, the myths and disinformation she espouses are not of her making but perennially favourite tropes of the mainstream media and the politicians who sycophantically suck up to them.

But since others have responded, and after having re-read the article, I found that I kept thinking about it, which is usually a prompt to start writing to find out what I really do think.

First, some data, rather than the “common sense” peddled by grandstanding politicians and media sensation-makers (Somerset Maugham once described common sense as “only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.”).

In the USA, where these dubious registers originated (they’ve been around since the 1930s), they began as ordinances arising in individual states or even local municipalities within states, typically after some heinous sex crime attracted mass publicity. There was no evidence in existence that they would be effective, but local and state legislators felt the need to be seen to be “doing something” to respond to public outrage, even though these crimes were and remain vanishingly rare (thank God).

Charles Patrick Ewing, an experienced forensic psychologist, Harvard law graduate and law professor, conducted one of the most comprehensive and in-depth studies into the efficacy of US sex offender registries for his book of 2011 Justice Perverted: Sex Offence Law, Psychology and Public Policy.

After decades of state registries and with the advent of the draconian Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act of 2006 (also known as 'SORNA 'or the Adam Walsh Act, named after a 6 year-old boy who was abducted and murdered in Florida), such a careful analysis of the data seems timely.

SORNA became the USA’s first national sex offender registry and requires all states to set up and maintain an online sex offenders’ registry, annually uploading the details of all offenders to a federal website accessible to the public. The cost of doing so currently runs into hundreds of millions, in fact now billions, of dollars every year.

So, has this been money well spent? Alas, the evidence is that these registries are obscenely costly white elephants that fail miserably to achieve their stated objectives (such as reducing the already exceptionally low recidivism rates of convicted sex offenders and reducing sexual offences).

A major systematic review of the published literature about the effects of registration of recidivism rates and preventing sex offending found:

“For this group of studies, we performed a meta-analysis and found no statistically significant difference in recidivism rates for either sex offences or total offences.”

(Washington State Institute for Public Policy (WSIPP) (June 2009) “Does Sex Offender Registration and Notification Reduce Crime? A Systematic Review of the Research Literature” available at www.wsipp.wa.gov/ReportFile/1043)

A study into the effects of New York’s own state register in 2008 concluded that:

“[These] results provide no support for the effectiveness of registration and community notification laws in reducing sexual offending by (a) rapists, (b) child molesters, (c) sexual recidivists, or (d) first-time sex offenders. Analyses also showed that over 95% of all sexual offence arrests were committed by first-time sex offenders, casting doubt on the ability of our laws that target repeat offenders to meaningfully reduce sexual offending.”[My emphasis]

(Jeffrey C. Sandler, Naomi J. Freeman and Kelly A. Socia, 2008, “Does a Watched Pot Boil. A Time-Series Analysis of New York State’s Sex Offender Registration and Notification Law,” Psychology, Public Policy and Law, pp. 284-302)

Available here:

s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/...A_time-series_an.pdf

I have no particular problem with the life sentence passed on Mark Bridger; he seems to be an exceedingly dangerous individual who needs to be removed from society. But as I also believe that the essence of both reason and justice resides in the ability to differentiate and discriminate, I am deeply opposed to measures that make little distinction between him and some hapless twerp who has downloaded illegal images.

Our most precious achievements as human beings, it seems to me, are our capacities for reason and reasoned kindness. But our rational aptitudes are fragile; they can be submerged or even destroyed by our inclinations for revulsion and outrage.

Contrary to the folklore, there is little relation between hands-on child abuse and viewing prohibited images of minors. Barring blatantly biased and methodologically flawed studies such as the Butner prison study, and despite decades of trying to prove a connection, there remains zero credible evidence in the literature that ‘viewing’ leads to ‘doing’, and much to suggest that the exact opposite may be the case.

A study by the biologist Milton Diamond in 2011 found that societies in which ‘child porn’ was at one time legal had substantially lower reported rates of ‘hands on’ child sex abuse during those periods.

During the Communist era of the Czech Republic (1948-1989), the Communists imposed the strictest prohibitions on any form of pornography. When that worm-eaten monstrosity finally collapsed in 1989, the Czechs went from absolutist laws barring any sexually explicit material to a completely unregulated marketplace where any kind of porn, including child porn, was easily and legally obtainable. In comparing the seventeen years before the Communist downfall with the eighteen years after it (1989-2007), Diamond found a precipitous decline in reported child sex abuse cases as well as crimes against women:

Milton Diamond, Eva Jozifkova, and Petr Weiss, “Pornography and Sex Crimes in the Czech Republic,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 40, no. 5 (2011): 1037– 43.
(Readable here: hawaii.edu/PCSS/biblio/articles/2010to20...-czech-republic.html)

Similar findings were obtained in studies in other countries where child porn was legally obtainable:

Milton Diamond and A. Uchiyama, “Pornography, Rape, and Sex Crimes in Japan,” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 22, no. 1 (1999): 1– 22. 176
(psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1999-10442-001)

Berl Kutchinsky, “The Effect of Easy Availability of Pornography on the Incidence of Sex Crimes: The Danish Experience,” Journal of Social Issues 29, no. 3 (1973): 163– 81.
(onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.15....1973.tb00094.x/full)

The academic Thomas Hubbard sums matters up accurately and succinctly:

A homicidal rapist and someone who clicks on a link that says "Watch 16-year-olds do everything" do not constitute a single natural kind; it is their being in the same data pool that amalgamates them and binds their fates.

“… sex offenders are lumped together without reason and may share little in common. So their group identity ends up being imparted by those committing the most notorious crimes. When a registered sex offender acts egregiously, it is the entire group that politicians and the media hold accountable, leading to collective punishment.

Censoring Sex Research (2016) (Kindle Locations 7297-7311). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

I find that agree with the points raised by MWTW, hedda and Randall. I would simply add that, all too often, whatever people disavow in their own erotic lives becomes susceptible to projection: all the filth and perversity I feel enraged by isn’t in me, you understand, it’s in them, the vile perverts. Over there. Right over there.

Laws which support mass projection of this kind will inevitably become ever more draconian. The only way to solve the problems associated with mass projection, like the manufacture of social bogeymen and what Carl Schmitt might call ‘enemies’, is to stop projecting. And to accept that none of us free from sexual eccentricity.

This might make us kinder, saner and more nuanced in our approaches to crime in general and sexual crime in particular. And, from a psychoanalytic point of view, we are ethically obliged to begin our assessments and deliberations from specific individuals, not from some imaginary block called “sex offenders” or “paedophiles.”

The latter approach inevitably results in diverting finite police resources away from managing seriously dangerous individuals who require intensive supervision and into monitoring completely harmless people. As I mentioned earlier, reason and justice depend fundamentally on discrimination and differentiation.

pete wrote:
I was going to pass over this tragic story in silence out of respect for a grieving mother, even though I know she’s spouting wholly erroneous myths and downright falsifications about our favourite bogeymen - sex offenders/paedophiles - and the 'register' so many of us misguidedly believe protects the public.

I would be deranged with implacable grief and unmollifiable horror if I were in her shoes. And to be fair to her, the myths and disinformation she espouses are not of her making but perennially favourite tropes of the mainstream media and the politicians who sycophantically suck up to them.

But since others have responded, and after having re-read the article, I found that I kept thinking about it, which is usually a prompt to start writing to find out what I really do think.

First, some data, rather than the “common sense” peddled by grandstanding politicians and media sensation-makers (Somerset Maugham once described common sense as “only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.”).

In the USA, where these dubious registers originated (they’ve been around since the 1930s), they began as ordinances arising in individual states or even local municipalities within states, typically after some heinous sex crime attracted mass publicity. There was no evidence in existence that they would be effective, but local and state legislators felt the need to be seen to be “doing something” to respond to public outrage, even though these crimes were and remain vanishingly rare (thank God).

Charles Patrick Ewing, an experienced forensic psychologist, Harvard law graduate and law professor, conducted one of the most comprehensive and in-depth studies into the efficacy of US sex offender registries for his book of 2011 Justice Perverted: Sex Offence Law, Psychology and Public Policy.

After decades of state registries and with the advent of the draconian Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act of 2006 (also known as 'SORNA 'or the Adam Walsh Act, named after a 6 year-old boy who was abducted and murdered in Florida), such a careful analysis of the data seems timely.

SORNA became the USA’s first national sex offender registry and requires all states to set up and maintain an online sex offenders’ registry, annually uploading the details of all offenders to a federal website accessible to the public. The cost of doing so currently runs into hundreds of millions, in fact now billions, of dollars every year.

So, has this been money well spent? Alas, the evidence is that these registries are obscenely costly white elephants that fail miserably to achieve their stated objectives (such as reducing the already exceptionally low recidivism rates of convicted sex offenders and reducing sexual offences).

A major systematic review of the published literature about the effects of registration of recidivism rates and preventing sex offending found:

“For this group of studies, we performed a meta-analysis and found no statistically significant difference in recidivism rates for either sex offences or total offences.”

(Washington State Institute for Public Policy (WSIPP) (June 2009) “Does Sex Offender Registration and Notification Reduce Crime? A Systematic Review of the Research Literature” available at www.wsipp.wa.gov/ReportFile/1043)

A study into the effects of New York’s own state register in 2008 concluded that:

“[These] results provide no support for the effectiveness of registration and community notification laws in reducing sexual offending by (a) rapists, (b) child molesters, (c) sexual recidivists, or (d) first-time sex offenders. Analyses also showed that over 95% of all sexual offence arrests were committed by first-time sex offenders, casting doubt on the ability of our laws that target repeat offenders to meaningfully reduce sexual offending.”[My emphasis]

(Jeffrey C. Sandler, Naomi J. Freeman and Kelly A. Socia, 2008, “Does a Watched Pot Boil. A Time-Series Analysis of New York State’s Sex Offender Registration and Notification Law,” Psychology, Public Policy and Law, pp. 284-302)

Available here:

s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/...A_time-series_an.pdf

I have no particular problem with the life sentence passed on Mark Bridger; he seems to be an exceedingly dangerous individual who needs to be removed from society. But as I also believe that the essence of both reason and justice resides in the ability to differentiate and discriminate, I am deeply opposed to measures that make little distinction between him and some hapless twerp who has downloaded illegal images.

Our most precious achievements as human beings, it seems to me, are our capacities for reason and reasoned kindness. But our rational aptitudes are fragile; they can be submerged or even destroyed by our inclinations for revulsion and outrage.

Contrary to the folklore, there is little relation between hands-on child abuse and viewing prohibited images of minors. Barring blatantly biased and methodologically flawed studies such as the Butner prison study, and despite decades of trying to prove a connection, there remains zero credible evidence in the literature that ‘viewing’ leads to ‘doing’, and much to suggest that the exact opposite may be the case.

A study by the biologist Milton Diamond in 2011 found that societies in which ‘child porn’ was at one time legal had substantially lower reported rates of ‘hands on’ child sex abuse during those periods.

During the Communist era of the Czech Republic (1948-1989), the Communists imposed the strictest prohibitions on any form of pornography. When that worm-eaten monstrosity finally collapsed in 1989, the Czechs went from absolutist laws barring any sexually explicit material to a completely unregulated marketplace where any kind of porn, including child porn, was easily and legally obtainable. In comparing the seventeen years before the Communist downfall with the eighteen years after it (1989-2007), Diamond found a precipitous decline in reported child sex abuse cases as well as crimes against women:

Milton Diamond, Eva Jozifkova, and Petr Weiss, “Pornography and Sex Crimes in the Czech Republic,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 40, no. 5 (2011): 1037– 43.
(Readable here: hawaii.edu/PCSS/biblio/articles/2010to20...-czech-republic.html)

Similar findings were obtained in studies in other countries where child porn was legally obtainable:

Milton Diamond and A. Uchiyama, “Pornography, Rape, and Sex Crimes in Japan,” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 22, no. 1 (1999): 1– 22. 176
(psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1999-10442-001)

Berl Kutchinsky, “The Effect of Easy Availability of Pornography on the Incidence of Sex Crimes: The Danish Experience,” Journal of Social Issues 29, no. 3 (1973): 163– 81.
(onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.15....1973.tb00094.x/full)

The academic Thomas Hubbard sums matters up accurately and succinctly:

A homicidal rapist and someone who clicks on a link that says "Watch 16-year-olds do everything" do not constitute a single natural kind; it is their being in the same data pool that amalgamates them and binds their fates.

“… sex offenders are lumped together without reason and may share little in common. So their group identity ends up being imparted by those committing the most notorious crimes. When a registered sex offender acts egregiously, it is the entire group that politicians and the media hold accountable, leading to collective punishment.

Censoring Sex Research (2016) (Kindle Locations 7297-7311). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

I find that agree with the points raised by MWTW, hedda and Randall. I would simply add that, all too often, whatever people disavow in their own erotic lives becomes susceptible to projection: all the filth and perversity I feel enraged by isn’t in me, you understand, it’s in them, the vile perverts. Over there. Right over there.

Laws which support mass projection of this kind will inevitably become ever more draconian. The only way to solve the problems associated with mass projection, like the manufacture of social bogeymen and what Carl Schmitt might call ‘enemies’, is to stop projecting. And to accept that none of us free from sexual eccentricity.

This might make us kinder, saner and more nuanced in our approaches to crime in general and sexual crime in particular. And, from a psychoanalytic point of view, we are ethically obliged to begin our assessments and deliberations from specific individuals, not from some imaginary block called “sex offenders” or “paedophiles.”

The latter approach inevitably results in diverting finite police resources away from managing seriously dangerous individuals who require intensive supervision and into monitoring completely harmless people. As I mentioned earlier, reason and justice depend fundamentally on discrimination and differentiation.

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.

(unless it is a cartoon or something,obviously)

I see that my typing finger was yet again hijacked by my unconscious, this time referring to "Randall" in italics rather than in bold, as convention requires. Please take it as a compliment, Randall.

I don't agree Honey. Like (I hope) everyone here, I cannot understand why anybody would want to watch child pornography; but then animals have never turned me on either. My love for dogs is entirely non sexual. But as the world changes, different types emerge, And many times (as you say cartoons; graphics; actors and actresses; numerous non real activities) are not proof of crime. Or criminal intent.

Various lines have been blurred or even crossed. The time has come to revert - and to cope with the new world and the new technology.

JK2006 wrote:
I don't agree Honey. Like (I hope) everyone here, I cannot understand why anybody would want to watch child pornography; but then animals have never turned me on either. My love for dogs is entirely non sexual. But as the world changes, different types emerge, And many times (as you say cartoons; graphics; actors and actresses; numerous non real activities) are not proof of crime. Or criminal intent.

Various lines have been blurred or even crossed. The time has come to revert - and to cope with the new world and the new technology.

What exactly are you disagreeing with, Mr King? I am a bit confused.

I was not suggesting that looking at child abuse is the same as acting upon it. I think the urge to harm people is probably independent of sexual orientation.

My point was that it simply isn't true that those who watch actual abuse are "completely harmless people" as Pete appears to suggest, because they have already caused harm to the child by looking at him or her being molested.

(again, this is not about old Sam Fox photos and suchlike, which I understand is more than enough for a prosecution)

honey!oh sugar sugar. wrote:
[quote]pete 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.

(unless it is a cartoon or something,obviously)

An illogical claim made on zilch proof and a favourite of entities like police, NSPCC etc and is a really awful thing to tell victims of child offence material.

Apart from the fact it may depend upon what the material is..was it professionally produced or is material from 40 /50 years ago when such stuff was legally produced in Denmark etc (where the participants may be long dead) or is the alarming matter of 1000s of teens today producing 'selfie' type stuff and distributing it between themselves.

This claim also does not take into account the fact virtually anything that appears on the net is basically out there forever.

So you are telling genuine victims that they are being repeatedly abused possibly every day by dozens of perps and will be for the rest of their life.

People should think before they make such wide sweeping claims when they cannot possibly back it up with evidence & that does not take into account the feelings of genuine victims but is based upon their own notion which is usually influenced by repeated unproven claims of those with vested interests.

Quite apart from every victim may have an entirely different outlook and reaction to abuse than another- this is tantamount to telling rape victims, child abuse victims that "their life is ruined" (with no hope of recovery)- another much repeated dangerous & exceptionally cruel idea.

Not only that- it is a message to future victims of a sex-related crime (and there will be many more 1000s)...that immediately you are abused or raped..that's it..life destroyed.

I'm with Germaine Greer on this one who says anonymity for rape victims is a terrible thing to keep repeating like a mantra as it is basically telling victims that indeed, something so terrible has happened and it is so shameful they must hide it from the world...rather than encouraging victims to shout it from the rooftops.." I was a victim of a terrible crime but I will not let it destroy my life and allow society to enforce it's many methods of shame upon me because of what happened"

If people want anonymity then let them have it..let all victims of crime have it for that matter if they wish.

By all means..enforce the law but there are very practical things that happen in life especially with children.

Their appearance dramatically changes as they approach adulthood and it's almost impossible to look at a picture of a child and compare it with that child as an adult and say they are the same person.

In a unlikely situation but then everything is possible...perhaps a 40 year old man or woman could be shown a photograph or film of their abuse and you can tell them.."these days because of the internet..you are probably being re-abused every day of your life". Nice.

# I speak as a rape victim and victim of attempted murder (perps never caught) & I refused to allow it to destroy my life but I have met many rape victims..from friends to "comfort women" from WW2 who think likewise. I suspect people are far more resilient than the public thinks.

As for cartoons...it's such ridiculous thoughtless claims that saw a man convicted a few years ago of having dodged up photos of the Homer Simpson children having sex.
Even more illogical is the fact I went to the original launch of the Simpson family cartoons decades ago so Bart & Lisa must have been in their 40s at the time the man made his cartoons.

Incest maybe but child abuse?

Madness. No wonder we are careering towards the cliff edge.

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.

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:

www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/6800#.WM2Z7YXXLDd

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.

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!