We heard good news today: dozens of people involved in child pornography were arrested, with more arrests to come.But child pornography itself is ever-unfolding bad news, there seems no end of it; no end to pedophiles. It’s baffling, the taste for child pornography. But it’s one of the most common internet crimes.
There’s astonishingly little data on what happened to the children in those photos. Are they being abused somewhere still? It seems likely. If some were rescued, will they recover? Who’s responsible for their having fallen into the hands of rapists and pornographers?
One particularly unsettling statement in the latest article is that the incidence of brutality recorded in child porn–brutal, sadistic rapes and beatings of tiny children–is on the increase.
It increases in a way that might be parallel with the increase in other kinds of vicious crime. Murder on the whole is not increasing–but the murder or brutalization of young people by young people is.
Early teen kids beating another kid to death over a minor dispute; youngsters setting other youngsters afire in a disagreement over an X Box…
And there’s the increase of mass murders generally…the strange pattern of the murders of small children, killed en mass, in China…the recent slaughter of teens by a Norwegian right wing militia fanatic…
One desperately turns to medical explanations; we might blame genetic patterns in an overpopulated world, or neurotoxins (which are indeed widespread in the environment). Or we turn to behaviorism and blame violent videogames and movies.
But it all seems more mysterious than that. It’s enough to make a man almost believe in the devil.
And going back a few years, there was this article–on child porn found at the Pentagon and the lack of prosecution for most of the perpetrators.
Tags: child pornography, pedophiles
Coincidentally, I just translated the passage in The Other End about the abused child. If anyone reads this, please read that novel, it’s full of wrath and beauty.
Coincidentally, I just translated the passage in The Other End about the abducted child. If anyone is reading this, please read that novel, it’s full of wrath and beauty.
Interestingly enough, on Usenet, a lot of spam has titles that would lead you to believe that avi’s of abused children would be an incentive to download a virus. Example: “Eve, 13, crying, raped” or similar. There are enough of those posted to make you wonder if there are that many child porn fanciers on Usenet, or if it’s like the Viagra and Cialis ads on TV that would have us believe that most males in the US have some kind of ED problem.
I think a lot of what we’re seeing as an increase in percentages is merely an increase in population numbers as a whole. Or rather, I hope it is. My mother noticed the increase in violence and brutality in society as a whole some 50 years ago; she commented then that, “If you cram too many rats into a small cage, they begin to prey on each other.”
Or, if you’re into insects, this could be likened to locust pre-swarm behaviour. We’re reaching critical mass, folks.
BTW, I have never, nor would I ever, download any of those spam messages; I just noticed the titles of the messages. In case you wondered.