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I’ve just read on the BBC website that ‘Nearly 70,000 pictures and videos showing child sex abuse have been removed from the Internet in the past year’ by a UK charity which is responsible for this thankless task.
As usual when I come across this kind of statistic my heart sinks. My feelings, as a man and as a dad, are a mixture of dismay, shame and anger, mixed with a sense of frustration because I don’t know what to ‘do’ about it.
In the U.K. media in the past couple of years, there have been a depressing number of reports of cases of child sexual abuse (women are sometimes involved but the statistics show that the perpetrators are predominantly male) especially by celebrities who had easy access to children and were aided by an apparent unwillingness by the police to either believe the stories of their victims, or to do anything about it for fear of falling foul of the ‘power’ and credibility that these individuals had in the eyes of the public.
While the men who carry out these atrociously selfish and damaging acts upon the most vulnerable members of our society are a tiny minority, the apparently growing quantity of material available on line to satisfy, and perhaps encourage, their particular kind of distorted desire shows that those who are caught up in it, and who indirectly contribute to the abuse of the children who are filmed and photographed, are possibly not as rare as we might like to think, or hope.
So called ‘child porn’ surely plays a part legitimising and stimulating the feelings of men who have an unhealthy sexual interest in children, whether or not they go on to act on their feelings. And the fact is that many convicted abusers are found with material in their possession showing the kinds of acts they then went on to commit, shows that it can have dangerous effects. So it’s understandable that debates about how to best protect children from abuse tend to be about regulation and control of the supply.
Prevention is always the most effective route to changing behaviour, and men and women urgently need to work together on bringing this hidden behaviour more into the open, and to devise ways to redirect the sexual needs that are being stimulated and fed by child abuse images.
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The problem is that, as history shows, prohibition of any kind has never been effective, and this is especially true when it comes to untraceable online material. A supply of anything is always created where there is a demand, because it seems there will always be people who are willing and able to put aside their integrity, and even their humanity, when there is money to be made.
To ensure the safety of our children we can no longer just look the other way from this problem, and wish it wasn’t there or will go away, or rely on ineffective actions like website filters and other easily bypassed technofixes.
Prevention is always the most effective route to changing behaviour, and men and women urgently need to work together on bringing this hidden behaviour more into the open, and to devise ways to redirect the sexual needs that are being stimulated and fed by child abuse images. We need to be thinking more as a society about understanding, and reducing, the demand for abusive images. More research urgently needs to be done into the distorted sexual needs of men who are drawn to images of abuse, and how they can he helped.
A good start to this process will be for health professionals and others who are interested in the treatment of these individuals and removing the risk of them doing harm, to talk more openly about effective interventions. Putting more resources into trying to understand the men who create the demand for this material, and using that knowledge to devise effective ways of reducing that demand. Meanwhile, men with these particular psychological and emotional problems need to be able to get help at an early stage before they are expressed in harmful actions. Demonising them risks driving them, and the material catering to them, underground where it will fester and continue to cause harm.
I’d like to see some kind of campaign to educate and inform all men about the extreme harm to children caused by the creation of material showing any kind of abuse, at the same time asking ourselves the difficult questions of whether there is something about our cultural attitudes to sexuality, or the way our society is currently structured, that contributes to the forming of men who like or ‘need’ to be turned on by the pain of the most vulnerable, so that we can all contribute to changing their thinking, and their actions in whatever ways we can.
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Photo credit: Getty Images