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.
