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Issue No.12 Spring 2003
Exposing
the Scourge of Paedophilia
By Isabel Jenkins
Once again all major
newspapers splashed across their front pages yet another famous face in
connection with child pornography. How many more are going to be exposed
for downloading off the internet images of children being abused or tortured
just to satisfy their sick fantasies? It makes you wonder what sort of
society we live in, between unknown paedophiles and the string of famous
celebrities who were recently exposed in the media. Do they think because
they have money and power they're immune to the heavy jail sentence and
the humiliation that comes with it? But then again, some of them don’t
even care if they're prepared to look at these sick images and not feel
revolted. What if it were their own child on that screen - how would they
feel then?
The maximum gaol sentence for downloading an image of a naked child is
five years. In my opinion that's not long enough. There are those who
believe that looking leads to doing and that paying for images of children
being abused creates the urge to commit such crimes. If this is true,
there are thousands of child porn viewers out there taking that one step
closer to committing these crimes every day. The government should make
child abuse and child pornography a priority. It is getting out of control.
It takes months to examine a computer hard drive and maybe get a conviction,
although proving the offence is difficult. Operation Ore, the British
task force to combat child porn is very under funded and lacks necessary
resources.
In December 2002 the government announced an extra £500,000 but
the former head of the Metropolitan Police Obscene Publications branch,
Michael Hames stated “It would need millions more to make a difference”.
The backlog is so great that there is a six-month delay in examining suspects’
computers and at the present rate of exposure of more suspects every day
it could extend to 10 years. As well as finding evidence to prosecute,
the police have to identify the children and protect them from further
abuse. It must be a long and heartbreaking task to accomplish. Do these
officers go home and detach themselves from their work? I don’t think
so! It would be hard to forget those images, especially if they have kids
of their own.
In America another inquiry into child porn revealed the startling fact
that there are thousands of British subscribers to a website containing
children as young as four participating in acts of abuse. The law enforcement
agencies are working with credit card companies to shut down these websites
and put them out of business. Visa is already scanning thousands of websites
every day so that these child porn sites should find it more difficult
to operate openly.
I was glad to read in a local newspaper that leisure centres have taken
steps to ban the new photo phones from their changing rooms. Obviously
they also caught on that these phones would eventually be used to send
and receive images of children. It seems that as technology gets bigger
and better the easier it is for child porn users to gain access to all
sorts of horrible images that any normal person can't bear thinking about.
Child porn users come in all shapes and sizes - from barristers to pop
stars, politicians to clergy – in fact, from all walks of life. To
my surprise, one of my old school teachers was a child porn user. He lost
his home and his job, and now he's on the sex offenders’ register
for ten years. So no one knows how close these people really are to us
operating in our neighbourhoods... and possibly on our own doorsteps.
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