However bad our day
Janice Turner on why men who like to look at child abuse don’t go to prison:
Anyone shocked that Huw Edwards didn’t go to prison hasn’t been paying attention. The sentencing magistrate wasn’t dazzled by his BBC stardom or cutting him slack because of his liberal politics or long-repressed homosexuality. To put it bluntly, the newsreader’s offences were at the very bottom of the paedophile league table.
Edwards had 41 child abuse images on his phone, seven of which were category A, the very worst kind. Compare him with other recent cases: a TV comedian found with 35,000 images on multiple devices, a rabbi from Pinner with 1,694 (189 category A), or the Chesterfield scout leader with 6,440 images (756 As). They all, like Edwards, received suspended sentences.
In fact eight out of ten stay out of prison. That’s because there aren’t enough prisons.
There are 850 arrests a month for child abuse image offences and, according to the child safety institute Childlight, 1.8 million British men have admitted to viewing such material online.
It is almost entirely a guy thing, Turner says.
The problem is not just too big for the criminal justice system to absorb but too endemic for most of us to comprehend: your old boss, your friend’s husband (who seemed such a great guy), the man who announced the Queen’s death are secretly aroused by grotesque crimes.
Their excuses are legion. Edwards cited variously an overbearing father, attending Cardiff University not Oxbridge, a health condition that narrows his arteries and — since a woman must be culpable somehow — emotional estrangement from his wife.
So random. He might as well have said octopus, Plato, spinach, North Dakota. What in literal hell is the connection? You’re unhappy or stressed or overworked so the solution is…to look at images of children being tortured? Not drink or coconut cream pie or drugs or long walks in beautiful scenery but…staring at tortured children? HOW DOES THAT HELP?
How is that consoling or pleasurable or compensating or cheerfully distracting or a happy reward? How is it in any way a consolation for misery or exhaustion? I do not get it.
But read court reports and several excuses recur: mental health, depression, overuse of prescription meds, alcohol and, above all, “stress”. At which women shake our heads, since however bad our day, we don’t think it would be improved by watching naked, terrified little girls.
Or naked terrified little anythings. If these incomprehensible men are comforted by pictures of boys being tortured they probably also like seeing animals tortured. The rest of us, meanwhile, literally cannot bear such pictures, of boys or girls or animals or anyone sentient.
The reason men who’d claim to be loving fathers can pore over images of abused children is because they delude themselves they’re not “real”. Professor Fry says they commonly say “but I didn’t hurt the child myself” as if it is a victimless crime. “But many survivors say that knowing their images are being traded millions of times is as traumatic as the abuse itself.” Sometimes, a clip becomes such a dark-web viral hit that grateful paedophiles send money to its creators in jail or try to track down the children who appeared in it. (If they haven’t “disappeared”, as many do.)
Surely Huw Edwards, a man who appeared on primetime TV in millions of homes, must know better than anyone that a person on screen is human too — that they suffer, because they are as real as you.
Screen goes dark.
Depression, anxiety, stress. A litany of ‘excuses’ many of us share. There are so many ways to deal with it – you mentioned a few – that it becomes incomprehensible that people…make that men…find release in such a horrific way.
Guys. Go on Ophelia’s walk in the park with beautiful scenery. Come home and take a nice hot bubble bath. Then do like I do – clip recipes out of magazines until you obsessively have such a big recipe collection you couldn’t possibly cook them all if you live to be a hundred, but your stress feels some relief. If none of that works, GET THERAPY.
On that not enough prisons note: according to Rory Stewart when he was prisons minister and his team were trying to get the numbers for prison violence down one of the suggestions was releasing violent offenders and getting more sex offenders (of this type) inside. Apparently nonviolent sex offenders make pretty compliant prisoners, and the prison system had done it before to get their numbers down.
At various times in my life I have suffered depression, stress, alcohol abuse, marital breakdown, estrangement from children, business failure, near bankruptcy and homelessness. And yet I have never sexually abused anyone, let alone a child.
In the early days of the interwebs, for those of us who can recall Bulletin Boards and Usenet, I came across several images of child sex abuse, and I could not turn away fast enough. Yes, even then, some people would post porn on a thread when they had lost the debate. The only arousal from those images was of disgust and hate for whoever created and posted them. And this was when the web was too slow for video, 480p images was about the most it could handle.
The only upside was there were far fewer people on the interweb making it easier to report, have taken down, and get the posters banned from a group.
I will never cease to be amazed at the number of people in society who have no signs of mental illness in their life, until they are charged with a heinous crime. Those of us with genuine mental illness are being treated, not inflicting our illness on innocents.
Daaaamn. I’m sorry to hear you went through all that.
Is ennui a mental illness? Because that’s probably mostly what it is (though obviously paedophilia is a thing; just not necessarily the same thing).
Ray Blanchard did a lot of research on criminal sex offenders. (In fact, that was his main area of study for most of his career, although it was his foray into the topic of transsexualism in the ’80s that he’s more famous for.)
Sexual attraction to minors appears to be something that’s baked into a certain percentage of men. I was in Blanchard’s office at his house last year, when we were discussing autogynephilia and other sexual paraphilias, and he pulled up some stats that included pedophilic attraction among men, which he’d gathered from his studies. The number was frightening. Something like 10% of men experience some degree of arousal towards young teens, children, or infants.
I think that some men with such attractions convince themselves that they’re not at fault for their actions, because they’re in service of an instinct that they didn’t ask for and don’t want. They even valorize themselves a bit, like they’re martyrs or something because they “only” consumed pornography to feed their “beast”, rather than committing the rapes themselves. I have no sympathy for men who act on harmful sexual desires in any way at all — and that absolutely includes the consumption of pornographic images of sexual abuse. But the fact that so many men in power give so much leeway to other men when it comes to sex crimes is evidence that there are far more beasts lurking in men’s minds than there appear to be on the surface of society. There’s a silent bro code going around.
One of the major problems with our species — which starts to look like it might be our species’ biggest problem, the more you think about it — is that human male sexuality is glitchy as fuck. The sex instinct’s one job is to make men desire sex with women to keep the species going, and it is failing badly at it. By the time men reach adulthood, many of them end up with sex drives aimed at inanimate objects (fetishism, in the clinical sense, refers to this), at strange body parts (Quentin Tarantino’s notorious foot obsession for example), at themselves (transvestites/transsexuals), at animals, at family members, at children, at dead bodies, or at circumstances like pain or humiliation or domination or submission. Basically anything men are supposed to be hard-wired to be sexually averse to, the opposite happens in a sizeable minority of men. (Such paraphilias are vanishingly rare in women.)
This creates something of a quandary with respect to the topic of conversion therapy. We desperately need to find a way to modify men’s sexual instincts when those instincts could pose a danger to others. So far, researchers haven’t found a way to modify the sex instinct’s wiring in the brain, through pyschiatric therapy, drugs, electric stimulus, or neurosurgery. The fear is that if we do find a solution — a “cure” for sexual paraphilias — that it might be used to “cure” homosexuality, too.
That opens up a can of ethical questions about forced conversion therapy for gays, versus voluntary conversion therapy for gays. Very few people in our present culture believe that forced conversion therapy for gays would be acceptable if it were possible. But quite a few more would be fine with “voluntary” conversion from gay to straight if such a procedure were scientificially feasible. But how “voluntary” would it be for a patient to submit to a procedure to modify his sexual instinct when it isn’t causing any harm but society is shaming him for it nevertheless? I ran into a number of people who held some dark attitudes about homosexuality when I was fighting against the inclusion of “gender identity” in Canada’s conversion therapy ban.
One interesting factor is that homosexuality doesn’t appear to be the same “kind of thing” as those other paraphilias. Superficially it does resemble them — members of the same sex are “supposed to” incite sexual aversion, not attraction — but it appears the mechanism that underlies same-sex attraction is different from someone’s brain swapping aversion for attraction in other categories such as age. So we might yet find a way to rewire the part of the brain that causes pedophilic attraction, without going near the brain bits that make gay people gay.
That would go some way towards ending the sexual abuse of children.
“a can of ethical questions” god I’m so bad at words sometimes! I mix and fumble my metaphors like a bat out of a circus cannon. I’m working on it. I try!