Yeah, so this is going to be a tad controversial of a post. If you’re like me, just hearing the term “kiddie porn†fills you with squeamish and uncomfortable feelings, but two things got me thinking/talking about this topic lately.
Hit Me Baby One More Time
Sadly, I know from a conversation I had last night with a new friend of mine, Tom, that just having this topic on my site is going to land me a lot of unfounded hits. I got chatting with Tom, a bit of a guru in Internet marketing and an advocate for NGOs, about this topic last night and how rampant it is in S.E. Asia (that’s Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar and Malaysia for those that don’t know).
The area is often portrayed in Western media as a major gathering point for all the perverts of Western nations, but what Tom enlightened me about was that something like 90%+ of the business comes from Asian men. That means for every 10 little boys or girls that are horribly abused in this way, only one is by a white guy (not to be gender or multi-ethnically biased here, but I think we can agree that if we’re talking percentages, white males are going to dominate the ‘Western’ category).
He brought this to my attention because we were talking about an amazing group he’s the project leader of (www.nomadicmarketing.com) that provides marketing services to Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that otherwise couldn’t afford good marketing. He was talking about a few of the groups they help, and how they’re fighting this sex trade.
More to the point, he told me because they mention this topic on their site, they get a lot more hits. I immediately replied that this can’t be good as it’s the wrong sort of visitor – but he corrected me that if the hits are high, the search rankings are high, and site statistics are high, it doesn’t matter who the visitors are – computers can’t really discern. And yeah, I’m still getting hits for “Shanghai KTV Girls“.
Anyway, check out the site and donate in some way if you can.
The second bit…
Shamed To Suicide
As horrible as sexual child abuse is, there is a side to it that we often forget about – the victims who get no sympathy from us – those accused. Notice, I didn’t say tried, and convicted. Just being accused of purchasing, watching, creating or supporting kiddie porn in anyway is enough to completely ruin your life.
I watched “Goodnight, And Good Luck†a few weeks back, and though the content is about McCarthy-era Communist witch hunts, the same ‘witch hunt’ term can easily be applied to child pornography today. We hear about someone accused of having a den full of kiddie porno and we want to sauté his balls and feed them to him. We lose all sense of rationale and justice.
I just read a fantastic article on CBC.ca, ‘Global child porn probe led to false accusations’ as well as The Landslide Case from The Fifth Estate. If there’s one thing that is consistent in this world it’s the short-comings of our justice systems – which is why we have “presumed innocent until proven guilty†built into it. However, with child porn cases, the opposite is true. Just being associated or investigated in a case will generally cost you your job, your friends, your relationship and you’ll be forced to live in a anonymous state of exile or, as is quite often the case, kill yourself. And you’re completely innocent.
The article illustrated the gross mistakes that can be made in child porn cases, not at risk of hurting the obvious victims (the children), but hurting the unseen, and often uncared for victims – the accused.
Why is it someone can be accused of killing people and we don’t mind rallying behind him as being innocent, but if someone is accused of being affiliated with kiddie porn they are immediately shunned – whether they have a good chance of being innocent or not.
In my opinion it’s for the simple reason I began this all with. Kiddie porn and sexual child abuse gives us a queasy feeling in our stomachs. It doesn’t jive right with our souls. We can sit at home and find in our hearts a bit of sympathy for someone who has killed someone, especially in rage, as we’ve all been very, very pissed off before. But add sex, and then children to the mix (even minus the murder), and it becomes a huge taboo. These people our freaks, they have no place in our society and if they’ve been accused there MUST be some sort of evidence there. Police don’t just accuse innocent people. Maybe they aren’t guilty of exactly what the police are looking for, but hell, they MUST be guilty of something. Burn them. BURN THEM!
Herein lies the problem. I really don’t think A) those that are innocent should be treated this way, and neither do I think that B) the guilty should be either. These people have a sexual deviance and it’s a problem, but treating them like social outcasts is what leads to child murderers. And I don’t care how you stack it in this post-90s, soft-spoken, ‘I-have-issues’ world we live in – but being abused and being alive is better than being abused and being dead.
We should be creating programs for pedophilia and finding solutions to – by better examining the causes of – this problem.
And that’s my two bits on that. Oh, and if you’re looking for pictures of naked kids, I can only hope that you read this and now seriously examine your choices. The world doesn’t have much sympathy for pedophiles, and there is no “level†of guilt when it comes to this.
NOTE: Please, please, PLEASE don’t bombard me with a bunch of “pedophilia sympathizer” hate-mail. Honestly, I don’t support pedophilia at all. I think it’s horrible. I am only trying to make a point that the way we’re tackling this issue isn’t working. We have to recognize that a) innocent people are having their lives ruined in our quest for “justice” and b) guilty people are being treated like they are monsters for a sickness they need help with.
