According to academics Kath Albury, Catherine Lumby and Alan McKee, that’s the term preferred by police investigating the production and dissemination of images of children in sexual contexts online. In an article in New Matilda today they discuss the evidence related to this disturbing phenomenon – and the evidence runs counter to a lot of popular conceptions. Particularly in light of the spate of arrests announced this week – essential reading.
52 Responses to “Child abuse material”
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What disturbs me most in this witch-hunt is the number of lives/jobs/reputations being destroyed by what may begin as ‘internet curiosity’ which may itself begin by accident. While the act of down-loading child porn is reprehensible and not to be condoned, can it also be occasionally accidental?
This latest round will see some 70 – 80 – more if the Queensland police had stalled the Feds – individuals paraded through the courts. It is an enormous burden not only for the individuals but their families, work mates, friends and the wider community.
Pablo, if you read the New Matilda article, you’ll see that that people can’t download this material “accidentally”. It’s a highly techno-savvy crime, and not the sort of thing somebody just “stumbles over”.
Pablo,
As the article indicates, it’s very difficult to accidentally download such material.
I’m not sure why you refer to it as a witch hunt.
Crossed!
Come to think of it, can it be difficult to do something accidentally?
Anyway…
Ok my question is answered and as stated I could not condone downloading. As to whether it amounts to a witch-hunt well I would like to hear other views on the enormity of numbers getting caught up in this sordid business.
I’m not sure the numbers are enormous. See this para from the article:
I have problems with Catharine Lumby that probably interfere with my capacity to think clearly about her work, so I usually avoid commenting on it (and I don’t always find it unconvincing.) Similarly, I am not taken with Alan McKee’s unneccessarily belligerent attitude to the sort of scholarship I do, so I am inclined to be more critical of his work than usual.
That said: I think the central argument of that excerpt is very flimsy and somewhat self-serving, since it allows them to quarantine and condemn child pornography (bad, harmful) away from adult pornography (neutral, not harmful, maybe good) in their discussion of porn use and production in general. Whereas I remain unconvinced that a picture of a child being abused, if it is meant to stimulate sexual excitement, is not pornography.
They say that photos of children being assaulted should be called ‘child abuse material’, not pornography, because consuming it, and creating a demand for more, is just as culpable and damaging to the child as producing it. They argue this because the whole book is engaged in begging the question of the badness of pornography. They don’t believe porn is bad, ergo this material is not porn.
I agree that making and consuming child pornography are equally culpable and bad activities, and I think their reasoning about why is sound. But seeing production and consumption as morally equivalent does not collapse every other distinction between the two acts. Both acts are crimes but they are not the same crime. There are many reasons why it’s important to be very clear about this. Unfortunately Albury et al write about the subject in a way that obscures the difference between two crimes: basically they obscure it in a fog of sickeningness.
It would have been more honest and useful to write unflinchingly about the ways legitimate, mainstream pornography overlaps with child pornography, by implying the actors are underage, using young looking people etc.
IN my experience in counselling men, a good number of men have stuggled with (even momentary) attraction to children under the legal age of consent, for a myriad of situational and psychological reasons.
And you know what?
Part of the problem is that normal men don’t feel they have anywhere to take those confronting feelings and get some safe accountability. So they bury it, and inevitably in some cases it expresses itself in innappropriate and abusive ways.
Actually they report police as having said that, Laura.
But I agree with that. I think erecting artificial firewalls – defined by the legal age of consent – and saying “everything over 16 or 18″ or whatever is fine – is problematic if we’re going to consider dispassionately the issues porn raises generally.
However, I think what they report about police views and Jenkins’ research has validity regardless of their own views.
Govts run anti-domestic violence camapigns. Would there be any value in a campaign that encouraged people who felt attracted to child porn to seek help before they acted on their inclinations?
” They say that photos of children being assaulted should be called ‘child abuse material’
Actually they report police as having said that, Laura.”
Yes, you’re right, they don’;t actually come out and state this, – but having introduced the term as the one preferred by an expert in the topic, they then go on using the term as if it’s exactly equivalent to, and interchangeable with, ‘child pornography’. The rhetorics of the passage are being relied on to make the argument.
Laura – i’m absolutely with you on this one!
I’ll even go so far as to say as a society we are giving incredibly mixed messages about what is appropriate, vis the whole sexualisation of children debate, and many people walking around with confused boundaries, often compromised by their own experiences of abuse find it very hard to get safe avenues to express these issues and work through them in healthy ways.
Laura at 11, good point.
Geoff at 10.
Cautiously yes. Though it would be a very precarious area ethically and legally for govt to traverse.
There are few too few Wendall Rosevears
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2005/s1374708.htmin this world.“To give another example of the scale of the problem, in 2004 the biggest police operation ever mounted in Australia to target consumers of child pornography netted 194 men”
I wonder how many were actually charged then found guilty?
I seem to remember a similar situation (perhaps it was this one) where most of those interview/arrested were not subsequently charged and many of those who did get charged were not found guilty.
Perhaps those confused boundaries are caused by a lack of clarity in exactly what harm is caused by distribution of such material as opposed to what is simply considered distasteful? The Henson debacle shows that people unthinkingly denounce child sexualisation; and without the underlying reasoning behind the conclusions it’s not possible to utilize such experience/observations to assess alternative situations.
The police on the radio news yesterday were saying that they believed that not all those in Australia who accessed the material did so on purpose. Also news reports today were saying the person who owned the website had no idea the material had been stored on their machine – probably just a badly configured server that someone hacked.
With the number of viruses running around on PCs these days it wouldn’t be surprising to discover that there a few people out there accidentally hosting and redistributing porn and warez on their pcs. There’s a lot of zombie pc’s out there doing a lot of other illegal things (eg denial of service attacks) without their owners realising it. Others have their broadband connections used without them knowing because they haven’t configured their wireless setups properly.
It is good to read a discussion on this topic that takes a calm and rational approach. I was having a discussion this morning, that started about when do you let your children walk to school by themselves, with some (fellow) young mothers today and said that I didn’t think the extent of the problem of paedophilia is as big as the public perception of problem would have us believe. One said what about the 80 people arrested overnight. To which I replied that that number wasn’t a reflection of the number of people that would grab children off the street. As reflected in the report something like 90% of abuse is done by people known and trusted by the child. Which is really quite horrific in itself.
Is it too late to bring this hysteria to a halt and inject rationality and reason.
For example if I was to write of my own abuse as a child in an electronic form I would be in breach of many of the laws being talked about in reference to the Henson bruhaha.
I very much doubt that Anonymouse.
Chris at 17, I accept your point and hope those arrested are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
But you’re raising the one thing that didn’t work for me in the excerpt from The Porn Report.
Using bulletin boards/P2P software and password-locking ZIP files, doesn’t require ‘a very sophisticated grasp of the computer technology’.
It’s no more difficult than setting up your own blog for example.
Dodgy warez sites might have ‘downloadable’ porn on offer, but the porn is the teaser to get you to unintentionally download and install viruses, not the other way round.
The police refer to the private, difficult to access nature of child-porn distribution – delivering it through random virus-infected computers (that any virus program or firewall would pick up on immediately) would make it far easier for the authorities to be notified and successfully track down.
I might be proven wrong! But I think to put forward that child-porn distributers are competent computer hackers who can code sophisticated P2P software viruses, seems a bit like ‘video piracy funds terrorism’.
My argument was a bit silly.
One, they could simply pay a competent computer hacker.
Two, maybe that is how they were caught.
However I still think, with the prevalence of Russian free-hosting sites etc, it would be unnecessarily convoluted to get viruses and P2P involved.
The paedofinder general – Necessary viewing
Linked text
Carl what is the link about? I’m not clicking it if i dont know who you are.
I should dig up some of Smallbone’s work for demographic breakdowns.
(Check Google Scholar for those who can’t wait)
Good point SC, following links can get you in serious trouble these days
The link is a popular BBC cartoon, its says something about the quickness with which we like to prosecute suspected paedophiles.
On a more serious note, this is an issue that we all need to think about more seriously.
No one is going to argue that the rights of the victim are not first and foremost, but I fear that we are getting dangerously close to witch-hunt hysteria.
My late father, a primary school teacher, had an allegation made against him. They were proven to be without foundation, made by a vindictive and mentally unstable mother.
He was never the same again, he still loved teaching, he loved the kids, and the extraordinary number of former students at his funeral showed they loved him too, but the whole affair affected him very deeply.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I hate to think how many innocent men, who care deeply about children, have had their lives ruined because of the lynch mob mentality we so often see.
“No one is going to argue that the rights of the victim are not first and foremost, but I fear that we are getting dangerously close to witch-hunt hysteria.”
I agree Carl. This snippet from The Daily Telegraph reporting on Vaughan Johnsons’ comments, for instance, is most disturbing.
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23820681-5001021,00.html?id=
“I hope they bring these grubs to justice,” Mr Johnson said during a debate on the Budget.
“We find out how much guts they’ve got … as one of them committed suicide yesterday and another one had a big go, but he must not have had the courage to do it properly.
“If they all went and did it first up, we wouldn’t have this problem. They must be guilty if they commit suicide … maybe I am too harsh but I’ve got no time for that.”
Do you agree? Vote in the poll
The anecdote about the five year old was a bit much, wasn’t it?
Uurk.
Responding to points above I’d agree with the point that age alone is inadequate and arbitrary- the real line should be drawn with behaviours when they involve coercion ( including blatant trickery), pain and harm. Although god knows how you define or measure psychic pain.
Another issue seems to be the population of (destructive) paedophiles- does it increase decrease or remain the same over time relative to general population. Finally, whether the tabloid media sensitise people too much, with their endless irresponsible and self serving beatups.
Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty, and will all this to end up as the Henderson fiasco after the time to ask questions about the cover up of Milton Orkopoulos activities has past.
Milton Orkopoulos was a real pedophile, you know someone who abuses kids, not someone who looks at picture in an art gallery, or someone who downloads pictures from the net.
To say I was not impressed with this performance is an understatement, this is trial by the mob, trial by the media at it worst, and the political reasons for it a disgusting. .
I wonder how many of these people charged were actually victims of “Wardriving” where people with laptops go around trying to find unsecure wireless connections and and using their data, and hence their ip address being recorded on the offending websites ?
I found his comments totally disgusting.
Thats certainly a possibility. I imagine thats one reason why the police have been saying that some downloading may have been unintentional. They’d have to have a look at the suspects computers first. Its rather unfortunate (as I understand it) that if the police can prove that the download happened on your internet link that its up to you to prove that it wasn’t you. I know of a few people who leave their access points open (bandwidth limited) as a public service but those sorts of laws really discourage the practice.
“It would have been more honest and useful to write unflinchingly about the ways legitimate, mainstream pornography overlaps with child pornography, by implying the actors are underage, using young looking people etc.”
But their argument is that it doesn’t overlap at the level of the practices involved: the distribution networks aren’t the same, the users don’t see it in the same way, nor are they the same people, and it is not produced by the same people or in the same conditions. This implies that mainstream porn producers and consumers are very aware of the line and that while those consumers may consume content that does as you say – implying underage actors or using those who appear young – that is done within a context where the staging of these things is recognised in advance as staging, as a fiction. Knowing it’s not really a child is one of the elements of the consumption of such pornography: that’s how I see their argument extending to those aspects of mainstream pornography you’re referring to.
I’m not totally convinced by this, but I can see why they’re trying to make the distinction, and also to construct this position of the ‘ethical’ porn consumer – which for me at least is a major aspect of ‘The Porn Report’ project. I do believe ethical porn production and consumption are both possible, but I think there is a bit of a difference between identifying such an ideal in some producers and consumers, and generalising that across the spectrum of producers and consumers. There seems to be a bit of that kind of rhetorical slippage that Laura identifies in how the project is framed.
One potential problem I see with emphasising the distinction between child pornography and mainstream pornography relates to the way in which it parallels that deeply misogynist logic that says in effect that a girl must be protected, but a woman is on her own. I don’t think either side of that equation ultimately leads in the right direction.
Everyone:
The irony of it all.
Among the excuses once used to discriminate against ex-military personnel getting into teaching careers were: “They’re all racists”. “They’ll regiment the classroom and incite the students to militarism and violence”. Etc. etc., ad nauseum. Oh deary me, we couldn’t possibly let such awful murderers and monsters anywhere near our kiddies, could we?
And now, look at the “parade” of perverts caught in this operation – teachers, holders of child protection blue cards and others in positions of trust.
What irony!
Anonymous [19]:
I’ve seen some well-intentioned but idiotic laws and regulations in my time …. would you like to give us some specific details?
Who knows, a parliamentarian might be reading this topic on Larvatus Prodeo and be able to do something about changing the law so that victims are not punished as well.
Chris2
That quote from the Terror is absolutely awful.
Celebrating the suicide of another human being, even if they are paedophiles is something I find seriously disturbing.
Sorry, Joes2 I meant.
That said: I think the central argument of that excerpt is very flimsy and somewhat self-serving, since it allows them to quarantine and condemn child pornography (bad, harmful) away from adult pornography (neutral, not harmful, maybe good) in their discussion of porn use and production in general.
Which goes a way to explain why Hetty Johnson would accept funding from Club X, Adultshop and Gallery totalling about “$4,000 for her Senate campaign in the 2004 election”. (Crikey.com.au) When I first read that I went “Whaaaaaa…?”
It’s a ridiculous position to take IMHO.
Yes, Carl and Chris.
I trust that you both noticed that the terror is effectively running a pole as to whether it is OK to push someone to suicide in these circumstances. I did not have the stomach to read more.
From memory, the Classification Board refuses to classify films in which adult actors portray minors having sex, which means they can’t be distributed by any means. How that works out in reality, I have no idea.
“According to some of you there are no paedophiles anyway,..”
Are you capable of pointing to evidence of that?
Oh, and threatening the “execution” of anyone, over the internet, is not advisable Geoff. The police have ways of catching up with people who use it for illegal purposes.
I too found the tone and the quote in the linked newspaper article very disturbing. I can’t help feeling immensely sorry for the teacher/s (and their families) who attempted suicide. I don’t take that action as an indication of a guilt that goes beyond the material found on their computers. I can’t wondering whether public knowledge of their arrests coupled with their professions means that they felt that their lives were ruined one way or the other. I don’t excuse kiddie p*rn on their computers, (I find it abbhorent) but that doesn’t automatically mean that these men have done anything worse than view/collect this stuff. If that is the case it’s not worth taking their lives over. Even if they are guilty of more, I still find the gloating over their suicide/attempt really saddening and disheartening.
Well said, Raydish.
Agreed with the sentiment, with the caveat that its not a victimless crime.
(If there was not audience etc etc…)
I’ll link again to Wendall Rosevear’s interview on Four Corners.
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2005/s1374708.htmand Hetty Johnson on the same show
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2005/s1375143.htmMight i just say, that my comments@39, relate to the views of someone named “Geoff”
that seem to have been pulled from the thread.
Rayedish echoes my own feelings expressed @1 and I think LP has been an island of sanity in a debate that, compared with the Hansen farce, has not drawn any response from a national figure that I am aware of. Maybe that’s understandable but my prediction is that in a few years a lot of this debate will be seen as a bit of relic of the IT age. The pity of it is that there have been casualties along the way.
Pablo and Rayedish:
Witch-hunts and mob-rule are not the only reasons for some people cheering on suicides or offering rope, poison and the like to assist suicide. Not doubt there are some sick people who get their jollies out of attacking anyone designated as the Evil Other …. but I think much of the current anger goes much deeper than that.
There is also sheer frustration and simmering disgust – at so much publicity being given to the abuse of children and yet so seemingly little effective preventative action being taken …. there is concern that there are organizations and occupations where tampering with kiddies was – and possibly still is – considered a perk of the job.
There is a feeling that a few token perverts are exposed to the glare of publicity and are punished – great for selling advertising space or for winning votes – but that the systemic problems remain untouched.
I read that Wendall Rosevears transcript posterd by sublimecowgirl at 14.
Rosewears states that:
“The general statistics are that people who’ve been in gaol, about 15 per cent of those will reoffend generally and so that’s an average reoffending rate within a five year follow up period”
According to ABS Prisoners in Australia, about 60 per cent of prisoners have been there before. Talk about “denial”!
Nanu,
You need to work on your logic:
According to ABS Prisoners in Australia, about 60 per cent of prisoners have been there before.
Rosevears says that the general re-offending rate is only 15 per cent.
Ergo
Rosevears is in denial.
Um no. The stats refer to two different (but not distinct) groups:
(1) The general population of offenders
(2) Prisoners
Those 60 per cent of prisoners who are doing time for re-offending after a previous period of imprisonment represent at most 9 per cent of all offenders.
Gummo, however minor the percentage might look on paper, it still represents a group of extremely and predictably dangerous people who will damage 100% of those they victimise in future.
Gummo
On the difference between prisoners and offenders and recidivism:
From ‘Recidivism in Australia: findings and future research’, number 80, in the AIC’s Research and public policy series.
Recidivism of adult prisoners:
about two out of three prisoners will have been previously imprisoned
about one in four prisoners will be reconvicted within three months of being released from prison
over a third of prisoners will be reimprisoned within two years of being released
Recidivism of adult offenders based on self-report and administrative methodologies (excluding prisoners)
between 50-60 percent of adult police arrestees will be rearrested within 10 years
about two-thirds of adult offenders appearing before the lower courts will have been previously convicted.
So Gummo while the quote I posted form Rosevears was clearly talking about prisoners not just offenders in general, AIC research shows that recidivism among offenders in general is higher than among prisoners.
Recidivsm rates among pedophiles seems to differ according to who is doing the counting. Treating psychologists, who want to keep their rich pay cheques for counselling, seem to quote about 12 to 13 per cent. Corrections researchers, with access to court and prisoner data, seem to count 60 to 80 per cent.
A useful bibliography for those interested in real data in this area.
http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:1ZgXVFGmHzEJ:www.griffith.edu.au/arts-languages-criminology/key-centre-ethics-law-justice-governance/publications/preventing-sexual-violence-abuse+smallbone+criminology&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=au&client=firefox-aMy mistake – I misread that Rosevear’s quote.
Joe2 @27, I voted no and was horrified to note that the “yes” vote was 80%. The press and others like Vaughan Johnson have got the burning torches, the rope and are whipping up the lynch mob. It all has the Haneef odour to me.