Vincent Browne: On Saturday morning last, I received the following e-mail: "Our site is back online! We waiting for you! Hi! You received this e-mail because you sent your address to our maillist or you are/was our member. We created the (name of site) and (another site). In our memberzone we have 1000 exclusive hardcore photos with little, tasty children and over 300 Megabytes of high quality hardcore CP videos. By joining our site, you'll no longer have to search for other cp sites on the net. You will find MORE ABSOLUTELY FRESH content If you was our member. We care about our members. Often updates. Friendly support. All in ONE site! You will be totally fulfilled at our site! We have a lot of extra services inside our memberzone!!!"
I have never accessed a child pornographic website, not even by mistake.
I have never accessed any pornographic website and, as far as I recall, I have not done so even by mistake. This is not because of any moral qualms about pornography; I just have never looked at or sought access to a pornographic web site.
I received an even more explicit child pornography e-mail a year ago and contacted the Garda about it. I retained the e-mail on my computer until they came to inspect it because I thought there might be a way of tracing its origins. The gardaí simply advised me not to respond to such e-mails, for thereby I would be signalling I had received it.
So how did I come to receive such e-mails, unless such e-mails are dispatched indiscriminately, perhaps to millions of people around the world in the certain expectation that a few thousand will respond? If the websites one is encouraged to access by these e-mails involve a payment for entry, then, clearly, these are criminal enterprises, involving the exploitation of children.
So why are service providers not required by law to exclude such e-mails from circulation through their services?
Remember all the hullabaloo about Judge Brian Curtin (whatever happened to that case?) a few months ago and the outrage about the exploitation of children? Why no real action on that front?
The Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland (SAVI) report of a few years ago revealed a shocking incidence of child abuse:
One in five women (20.4 per cent) reported experiencing contact sexual abuse in childhood and one in 10 reported non-contact sexual abuse.
More than one in 20 women (5.6 per cent), over 110,000 in all, were raped as children.
One in six men (16.2 per cent) reported experiencing sexual abuse in childhood, with one in 14 reporting non-contact abuse.
2.7 per cent of all men were subjected to penetrative sex (anal or oral sex) in childhood. That is around 12,000 men raped as children.
We have a mega problem with child abuse but no strategy for dealing with it or any sense of urgency about it. Just occasional manifestations of outrage when a high profile case comes along, a bit of scapegoating and then nothing.
For a start, why not a requirement under our criminal law for Internet service providers to filter out commercial child pornography sites? Sure, there would initially be a scatter-gun effect - more sites would get filtered out than commercial child pornography sites - but that would sort itself out in time, especially if other countries could be induced to do the same.
I have confined this proposal to "commercial" child pornography sites because of a sense of unease about censoring pornography (or any other material) that causes no direct harm. I cannot see the legitimacy of criminalising simply the viewing of child pornography, when no payment is made for the material. Acquiring (without payment) such material causes no harm.
I personally think it sick that people would find this interesting (except in an academic sense) or erotic but, where no harm is caused, why should my views be forced on others?
One further point about this. I think the demonising of people who pay for child pornography or even who directly abuse children themselves is unjust and for two reasons.
The first is that it seems to me that such people suffer from an extreme dysfunctionality, bordering on illness. Many of us "normal" people are capable of evil but, I suspect, most of us are not capable of sexually abusing children, simply because we would find that abhorrent. Those who find such abuse erotic, in my view, are ill.
And my second point is that the characterisation of such people simply as paedophiles, as though that is all they are, is unfair.
One of the heroes of the early 20th century was probably a paedophile. His courageous reporting of cruelty and exploitation in Africa caused a change of regime in one of the largest states of that continent. Later he exposed other cruelty and abuse of the native population of the Amazon. He was Roger Casement.