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Even the name is horribly wrong

What we call child pornography is actually crime-scene images -- graphic evidence of the torture and mistreatment of society's most defenceless members

Julian Sher
Citizen Special
Monday, April 30, 2007

It is a crime of such unspeakable horror, we even get its name wrong.

"Child pornography" is the term the courts and the media use, but it is a dangerous misnomer that hides the seriousness and scope of the abuse and its toll on the victims.

The very term is a contradiction, since pornography is usually defined as sexually explicit material featuring consenting adults, but children are neither adults nor can they give legal consent.

Some believe that viewing child porn is a victimless crime, and acts as a safety valve to avoid committing the deeds. But the children involved are victims, and viewing porn may numb offenders into needing the real thing.View Larger Image View Larger Image
Some believe that viewing child porn is a victimless crime, and acts as a safety valve to avoid committing the deeds. But the children involved are victims, and viewing porn may numb offenders into needing the real thing.

To call the tens of thousands of child-abuse images that are flooding the Internet "pornography" is to suggest it is the same as adult porn but with an age difference.

Nonsense. Most participants in adult porn are paid professional actors, and consumers decide to buy or view the material based on their own moral or esthetic choices.

Child-abuse images, on the other hand, are crime-scene photos -- graphic evidence of the torture and mistreatment of society's most defenseless members. Such images cannot be justified by any claim to individual preference or morality.

Under Australian law, they call it what it is: "child exploitation material."

Even the word "child" in "child pornography" is problematic since it evokes in many people's minds semi-erotic pictures of Lolita-like teenagers who could be passed off as near-adults.

Here's a reality check: more than a third -- 39 per cent -- of the victims in these sex-abuse images identified by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the United States are under the age of five. Nineteen per cent of the children are under the age of three.

Bad labels are the least of our problems when it comes to Internet predators. Canada also has bad laws -- and even worse treatment opportunities for offenders.

When a Quebec Court judge sentenced a father to 10 years for raping his two-year-old daughter and five years for distributing images of the assault on the Internet, she called it "the worst crime in the worst circumstances." But in a stunning reversal last June, the appeal court reduced the man's maximum punishment because, as one judge put it, "there was no violence, such as gagging, threatening or hitting the child."

Pardon me? "No violence?" How else would you describe the rape of a two-year old?

It's even worse when men get arrested with "just" pictures. There is a myth that this is a victimless crime: What harm can come from someone just looking at pictures? Some apologists say it is even a safety valve -- better they look at pictures than go out on the street and grab your child.

But not only were real children tortured in the manufacture of these images, there is mounting evidenced that viewing these degrading images pushes offenders into what psychologists call a "spiral of abuse," helping them to overcome their guilt and fear to the point where pictures are no longer enough and they need the real thing.

Half of the offenders arrested for possession of child-abuse images in the United States were also found to be hands-on abusers.

A recent federal law in Canada finally imposed minimum mandatory sentences for this crime. Guess what you face for possession of these brutal images of torture? Fourteen to 45 days.
If you rob a bank you'll go away for a lot more time. Not to minimize the terror that bank employees must go through during a holdup, but let's face it: Banks are multi-million dollar corporations that are fully insured against theft. They get their money back, one way or the other.

A child never gets his or her innocence back.

Nor can a child ever get back the pictures of her abuse that become a permanent feature of the world's memory that the Internet has become. "I carry a great deal of pain for those pictures," one victim who is now an adult told me. "The memory chokes me, it destroys me."

A mother whose infant son was abused by a relative who posted the images online told an American court: "My son is too young to remember what happened to him, but I'm his mom. It will burn in my heart and soul until the day I die. I will never forget. Sadly, neither will the Internet."

And what about the offenders who want help, who want to stop? Dr. John Bradford works at the world-respected Sexual Behaviours Clinic at the Royal Ottawa Hospital, one of the few treatment centres for pedophiles in Canada. He estimates anywhere from two per cent to seven per cent of the population could have pedophilic tendencies. "Why are we not doing more about it?" he asks. "Because people don't want to face up to it as a public-health problem."

It's time we changed the name we give these abuse images. It's time we changed our laws. It's time we changed our attitudes.
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Julian Sher's most recent book is One Child at a Time: The Global Fight to Rescue Children from Online Predators, published by Random House. He can be reached through www.juliansher.com.