Collateral damage was a term coined in the 1960s which came into common usage in the Gulf War as a semi-acceptable euphemism for civilian casualties. American society recoiled, however, when Timothy McVeigh described the children he murdered during the Oklahoma bombing as collateral damage to the process of sending a message to the US government, writes Breda O'Brien.
In the Tim Allen case, we are painfully aware that child pornography is a crime with small, helpless victims. However, we also have to be aware that our anger can inflict collateral damage.
There is an ugly spirit of vengeance around, which has nothing to do with enhancing child protection, and everything to do with a desire to exact retribution. Expressing abhorrence for child abuse which results in pornography is vital. Lashing out at anyone connected to the guilty party is quite different.
Commentators have said that Ireland is now post-Christian. Sometimes I wonder are we pre-Christian, so shallow is our grasp of the concept of forgiveness.
We seem to think that there are only two alternatives. The first is absolute condemnation with no room for any level of compassion. The second is woolly-mindedness which absolves an individual of all responsibility, and dissolves the concept of moral accountability in a sea of psycho-babble. We seem to have forgotten another way, which is that people must accept responsibility and insofar as it is possible make recompense for their actions, but that it is not necessary to crush them utterly in order to achieve this, much less those around them. The now excoriated nuns did repeat a concept to us over and over, but it does not seem to have sunk in. "There but for the grace of God go I."
One of the reasons we find the Tim Allen case so hard to cope with is because it seems inexplicable that a wealthy man with a seemingly strong family life could succumb to this form of exploitation. It makes us uneasy to see how simple it is to become enmeshed in evil. We seek to distance ourselves by projecting the evil outwards, by shouting loudly, by demanding savage punishment. Yet who does not have some dirty, shameful little secret which it would be unbearable to have splashed on the front pages of newspapers?
The case also raised the connection between child pornography and top-shelf soft porn and there may well also be an intrinsic connection between the latter and the exploitation of children. Once the taboos surrounding the exploitation of the human body are breached, some people will seek further and further thrills which can only be found in more extreme images, perhaps depicting torture, or involving children.
Accessing pornography on the Internet supports an industry which will provide anything which the customer requires, including degrading images of children.
The most lucrative industry on the Internet is pornography, which means that many, many people are far from guiltless.
This is altogether aside from the fact that so-called ordinary pornography is often deeply exploitative of the individuals depicted, and destructive of relationships in the real world. There is well-proven continuum between various arms of the so-called sex industry, even those which we now consider it uncool to condemn.
Our reaction to the Allen case indicates that there is more a desire to inflict pain than to really protect children. If Tim Allen had been tried in a higher court and received a stiff custodial sentence, there would be no outcry. This is in spite of the fact that he would be imprisoned probably in Arbour Hill or the Curragh, with a slim chance of receiving group treatment for nine months, and no chance at all of individual treatment.
There would have been no public outcry about that, and no demand for action on the part of the Government to remedy the fact that there are group treatment places for some 15 people at a time, yet there are over 300 sex offenders in prison.
Let's not hide behind a claim that treatment does not work, because that claim does not stand up to scrutiny. There is a small number of child abuse offenders whose primary sexual orientation is towards children and who show no insight or remorse. These are difficult if not impossible to treat.
The vast majority of offenders do not fall into that category, and there has been pioneering work on treatment done in Ireland which deserves financial support and further research. It is based on bringing the offender to an awareness of the damage which he or she has caused, and using this as a spur to making choices which make re-offence a remote possibility. Building a network which will hold the person accountable, and act as a buffer against any drift towards rationalising the activity, is central to this process
The attack on the Allen family and the calls to boycott their business offends against this principle. Damaging marital and family relationships by subjecting them to scrutiny and criticism, when they are already seriously weakened by the nature of the crime, is no way to prevent re-offence. Cutting a person off from networks of support and meaningful work only increases the chances of falling back into dangerous and evil actions.
I have to admit that my first reaction was to feel that it would be difficult to be in Ballymaloe, with the awareness that this was a place where images of exploited children had been viewed for pleasure. I soon realised that, according to this logic, I should stop going to shopping centres, because on any busy Saturday, chances are that I would be in the presence of people who had not only accessed child porn, but who had actually abused children.
The Allen family are not the only innocent bystanders who have received the lash of the public's desire for revenge. Family members of offenders have been ostracised, including the elderly mother of a priest, already broken-hearted because of her son's actions, and now afraid to leave the house. Inflicting such pain gives the temporary satisfaction of confirming one's own moral superiority. It does nothing to protect children, no matter how loudly we protest that this is our aim.