GeekLawyer’s Blog

Having failed to cause offence to anyone other than Martin by suggesting the McCann’s were not holy Geeklawyer thought he’d have another go. This time about kiddy pr0n & the child protection industry.

Jim Gamble, of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) has caused outrage by suggesting that we should not skin alive anyone looking at, or suspected of looking at, children in a ‘dodgy‘ way. His thesis is that this is a vast social problem that would be better and more effectively dealt with by community control. And he suggested this because the numbers were so huge (tens of thousands of suspects were identified in Operation Ore) that jail was not practical and may cause more problems for child safety than it solves. He further contended that some offences were more serious than others and that the response should be a punishment matched to the seriousness of the offence: a principle not generally regarded as controversial elsewhere in the criminal law.

Critics say that he should “think of the children” and that jail is the only acceptable punishment for any offence involving children. Furthermore, they say, grading offences by severity is flawed because viewing kiddy porn is the same as making it and so should be treated in the same way.

Geeklawyer says that this is wrong on several grounds; and he also has a suspicion that the protection of children is one of those instinctive reactions that leads to irrational ill-considered responses and counter-productive solutions; 15 mph speed limits outside school being a minor example.

Firstly where people are committing lower level offences jail is often just not that a great solution. Sure, it makes us feel good but does it work? Some evidence suggests not and that it validates and legitimates the behaviour by those seeking to justify it to themselves: putting such people in the company of others who all say “it’s OK to do this, really.” doesn’t seem such a smart move. And jail is a far better networking tool for perverts than the Internet - indeed several cases have arisen where low level paedophiles have met in prison and gone on to commit acts on their release.

Second many of the people targeted are innocent. All those involved in Operation Ore were identified by their use of credit cards in paying for child porn. Unfortunately computer forensic experts given access to the prosecution material immediately identified the cards as those being used by online credit card fraudsters. There is a criminal subculture on the net called ‘Carding’ where items or services are purchased using credit card details obtained by hacking into shopping websites or from viruses on home computers. This was the source of the cards used in many of the kiddy porn purchases. Some of those interviewed by police accepted a caution rather than face the humiliation of a trial; this despite claiming that they were innocent. Suffering the risk of an unlucky conviction before a jury was considered too great a danger. But if one were innocent one would never accept a caution - surely? True, in the same way that one would never confess to terrorism if one was not a terrorist - though the victims in Guantanamo and the Guildford Four/Birmingham Six would probably beg to differ. Automatic and severe punishment of the innocent is equally repellent.

Finally, on a more philosophical point Geeklawyer says that viewing is not the same as acting. The child protection industry wants an absolutist fundamentalist position of total condemnation because it is an emotive topic: nothing about it should be qualified or mitigated; to mitigate is to excuse entirely. The theory is that child molesters molest to satisfy their needs and also to satisfy the needs of their voyeur customers. If the police are to be believed this is true but only for a very very tiny amount of purely commercial child porn videos made in Eastern Europe: small numbers of videos produced at a very high price by Russians to order for a few collectors. For virtually everyone else one suspects that these photographs are trophies prized by the paedophiles as a record of their conquests and shown to others not to satisfy their needs or ‘market requirements’ but for a grotesque form of peer status: “look what I did; don’t you wish you were me? Am I not the coolest?”

In many such situations the exhibitor must never get to hear from his audience: for example where the photos are packaged up and shipped from one person to another, or distributed from one website to another he would never get any feedback at all. True, if there is an interactive forum he might get such approval but even in the absence of such approval the molestation would occur and there is little or no evidence of incitement as a factor (though there was a very rare case in May 2007 of a British couple inciting an assault on a 9 year old by her grandfather).

Consider also that some of these photos are reported to date from the fifties and sixties. One has to ask how a modern Internet viewer contributed to that abuse under this theory.

Geeklawyer dislikes this ‘market theory’ argument because it is emotive, illogical and without evidence. He also points out that the ‘viewing is doing’ argument is not applied to other crimes. The audiences at burnouts are not charged with contributory traffic offences. Those watching videos of the beheadings of hostages in Iraq were not charged with murder or terrorism but on the same logic those acts were much more directly connected with the viewing audience; so why is kiddy porn different?

There is also the corruption argument that the viewing of such material leads to the need to abuse. Several academic studies are reported to suggest that anything from 70% to 98% of viewers never molest a child.

The voyeur almost invariably contributes little or nothing to the cause and while it should be a criminal offence to view such material and those who do so should be roundly condemned it should not be a beheading offence just yet.

Next time: why we should give Al Qaeda WMD and a slot on the BBC.