what do you think when you hear the word “kiddie porn”?
you’re probably disgusted. however, you also hear the words “kiddie” (sounds a bit like “kitten”, doesn’t it?) and “porn”, which is an abbreviation of “pornography”, an abbreviation that does not only make the word sound shorter but also somehow abbreviates the whole idea. the little word “porn” has a bit of a recreational connotation. golf, tennis, porn. so somewhere lurking in the term “kiddie porn”, on a subconscious level, is a little fun recreation with something cute like a kitten. the term “kiddie porn” masks what’s really going on.
let’s try another term, then. how about: “brutal, ongoing sexual exploitation of children”?
30% of them under the age of 5.
20% under the age of 3.
20% of “kiddie porn” involves the brutal, ongoing sexual exploitation of children younger than 3 years old.
let’s just let that sink in for a moment.
why “ongoing”? because this brutal exploitation often goes on for years and years. those who investigate these crimes, trying to find out where the children live whose sad pictures are freely passed around on the internet, say that they can see these children grow up, to 5, to 7, to 9 years old. the reason for that is, as in many other forms of violence, that 70-80% of perpetrators are well known to the children; half of them are family.
these aren’t missing children per se. they are children who live a “normal” life, with “normal” families. the kid goes to school or daycare, the family goes to church, the parents are often professionals. what the child misses is not family life but childhood.
“the predators are us, they are among us, they are not monsters – they are comprehensible,” stated julian sher, who was interviewed on CBC radio one yesterday and wrote one child at a time: the global fight to rescue children from online predators.
i don’t flinch easily when it comes to tales of human suffering and acknowledging that, sadly, we are much more capable of evil than we’d like to admit. but even i want to avert my eyes and ears when i hear this: “the predators are us.”
yet, as long as we see these predators as “them,” seemed to be the argument, we can’t do much about the problem. we have a lower chance of catching them because we’ll tend to exclude as possible perpetrators all those who are “like us” – for example, concretely, we keep on telling our children to be wary of strangers but still encourage them to blindly trust everyone they know. the best way to curb this horrible crime is to empower our children, was another message. to inculcate a deeply-felt sense in them that their body and mind are theirs.
another problem, says ottawa psychiatrist dr. john bradford, who advocates a public health model to deal with this issue, is that the perpetrators-as-monsters model leads to a tendency of low-grade to no treatment once perpetrators are in prison. he claims that child porn producers and purveyors, if properly treated, have a very low recidivism rate.
since most convicted perpetrators do not stay in prison indefinitely, this is a big concern. do we want to punish the monsters and then release them to start all over again, or do we want to successfully treat mentally and emotionally sick people whose threat to children is then dramatically reduced?
isabella mori
moritherapy
counselling in vancouver