Unworthy Victims

One of the problems with victimology and unwavering victim-worship is that it is unevenly distributed. In western culture we're almost lead to believe, whether by accident or not, that certain people are more deserving of our sympathies than others for matters having nothing to do with the circumstances of their victimization, all things being equal. The "usual suspects" are always our template for villainy, and the "typical victims" are always getting hammered into our sympathetic nerves, time after time. All else who don't fit the narrative need not apply, even if they have been objectively victimized too.

The image of a girl being raped by a shadowy man, even as tragic as it is, has been turned into little more than a thought-stopping cliche. It is indeed the prototypical image in our heads when we think of sexual exploitation, simply because of its incessant repetition in film, television, and the news media. Its depiction no longer makes us think, we merely become anesthetized to it, and we ignore and become incapable of seeing exploitation in other forms perpetrated on less-prototypical human beings. Not only does its repetition rob our emotional minds blind to the real tragedy of it (just because we've seen it a hundred times), but it holds that emotional mind hostage and blocks its rational ends from seeing the travesties committed on those our sympathetic acuity has been blinded to.

One wants to talk about how the predator manufactures the consent of his victim when he exploits her, but what about when culture has done the same to you, and has manufactured your consent to feel one way or another toward or against someone, at its discretion, by repetition? When the mere gender of a person, the age of a person, or social class of a person, has more to do with your outrage, your indignation, your sympathy for them, than the act that they have become victim to or perpetrated, you've already become a victim to the cliche of the media narrative yourself. That is how culture and the propaganda, the "thought-stopping cliches," have molested your will and alienated your compassion from you by their constant mercantile presence. Herman and Chomsky wrote on this phenomenon in like manner:

“Our hypothesis is that worthy victims will be featured prominently and dramatically, that they will be humanized, and that their victimization will receive the detail and context in story construction that will generate reader interest and sympathetic emotions. In contrast, unworthy victims will merit only slight detail, minimal humanization, and little context that will excite and enrage.”

—E. S. Herman and N. Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent

According to culture, men and boys are unworthy victims, so society does not care when they are victimized, abused, and maltreated en mass. Boys may only be sympathized with because they also fit the class of "child," but not because they are boy children. According to culture, teenagers are unworthy victims, so society does not care when they are victimized, abused, and maltreated en mass. So by these two observations alone, we should expect society to feel more sympathy for a six-year-old girl that has been mishandled, than a 15-year-old "young man" who has suffered the same--or even still, has been murdered, or sold into sexual slavery as a bacha bereesh in Afghanistan, even as much attention has been given to the treatment of girls in that country.

That which we assume "en mass" dictates how we respond to individuals within that mass. It would certainly lend an explanation as to why it does, and why male offenders are touted as "beasts" while female offenders of the same crimes are given the "mother of three" treatment. Where do you think your sympathy is "supposed" to go, given the choice between a beast and a mother of three? What if the "beast" had children too? Nobody is given the chance to care, and it is not important anyways.

So while we are all required to feel sympathy toward the typical cases, and hatred toward the "usual suspects," let's not forget those our culture has forgotten to take seriously. The moment you have an image in your mind about a typical case victim, fill her in with her exact opposite, and remember that it happens too, and how nobody cares about it when it does. Nobody's singing the lamentations of a teenage boy who has been violently raped by a woman, no matter how traumatic, just because it doesn't fit the typical schema of "offenders and victims." Nobody's asking for the head of the female rapist either. And when you realize this, you'll see real sexism, real ageism, real classism at work in ways the focus group didn't think would be commercially viable enough to wrest your "unquestionable" sympathy for.

All media is the same story being sold, over and over. Don't buy it.

Child Pornography

Let's not mince words or wax poetic on child pornography as it manifests itself in the public imagination and how it exploits children. It is a scourge on society and casts a specter of confusion on all those who hear the term, not to mention the harm it causes to children living under that spell of society's confusion.

Let's instead examine what really is the cause for concern--is it merely a child being pictured during a stimulating activity? Or is it when that activity is being forced on them? If it's the former, it would be just as wrong to picture a child playing baseball as it is to picture him playing doctor. But that rendition doesn't lend itself to intuition, and it doesn't seem to do justice to the children who are brutalized into performing sexual acts in other, more severe forms of child pornography. It merely trivializes abuse to the "greater sin" of a child simply seeking pleasure before the eyes of an adult. And yet, ironically, that's how most people would prefer we structure our rationales. Simply put, most people believe that a child pleasuring themselves is as bad as a child being brutalized and drugged into performing a heinous act, and don't see that the former trivializes the abuse of the later.

But if sensible people can be in agreement that when force is involved (when children are brutalized, drugged, and manipulated to engage in a sexual activity to produce an image) that an unspeakable evil has occurred, our shock and judgment really only ought to apply to cases where the child is actually being forced, drugged, and brutalized into it, whether sexual or not, and not simply for any child who may accidentally have an erection in a candid photograph outside the photographer's control. If that isn't the case, then we can conclude that society is more afraid of a child's exhibition of natural sexual exploratory behaviors than it is of them being at risk of exploitation. The distortion on this topic is so high that it becomes difficult to know what side of that pendulum our society is on as we create justifications for the exploitation of children in the service of ridding the same.

We have to agree that there are levels of child pornography, and that the real thrust of our attention ought to be on killing the evil perpetuated where children are being forced, drugged, and brutalized, or in some way manipulated into a situation they most likely wouldn't willingly get themselves into had they known all the parameters. Those images and their producers ought to be where we exercise our main law enforcement thrust--where we ought to be going in with the hammer and taking no names. Consequently then, one would think we ought to be placing less emphasis lower "levels," like teens who consensually exchange nude pictures of themselves over their cellphones, or parents with nude pictures of their children in their possession (the horror!). But then it seems almost contradictory when one sees that so few child porn cartels are brought to justice, compared to how many teens are implicated in illegal behavior for possessing nude images of themselves and others, if not arrested and charged and stuck on sex offender registries. Studies have even found that more than third of all "sex crimes against children" are committed by juveniles themselves. How are these "children" being protected by the laws put there to protect them?

Nobody advocates for the rape of children in pictures, least of which those like me who merely criticize the efficacy of our child pornography legislation at reducing child rape, but that is often what critics are accused of doing. Questioning efficacy is like siding with the child molesters to some people, so it becomes better not to question it. And while that silence has been an effective "thought-stopping cliche" waged against those who value efficacy over political expediency by those who value the opposite, it has produced little else but the opposite. The prevailing silence on this issue--the "political expediency"--has turned our teenagers into child pornographers and our sexually active youths into "child rapists," not technology, not culture, and not anything else our adult population likes to blame the trend on. It was the broad brush strokes of the law--the politician running for office on simple-minded sentimental sloganeering, the sensationalist tabloid and drama television special--that caused us to pit children against their own nature and then criminalize or at least pathologize them for it.

The real issue of child pornography is not a dichotomy between siding with rapists or with the justice system, as it has often been made the case. It has to do with whether we treat parents who take a picture of their kids in the bath any different than the perverts who keep runaway children in a cage. It has to do with whether we ought to treat people who are visibly brutalizing children on film the same as those who may draw two crude stick figures of different sizes "doing it."  In one instance, physical children are being exploited, and in another, a perceived audience for exploitation is being physically apprehended. In one instance, our focus is on stopping the show, in another, it's on apprehending the audience while the show goes on. The questions of strategy get ignored for the purposes of political expediency--so long as it looks like people are being busted, it makes no difference who gets selected for justice and what they have done to deserve it.

All images featuring children "could be" child pornography. That is how we've let them define it for us. "We know it when we see it," the US Supreme Court has declared. So if you have a picture of a child, it can be pornography in the right context. If you have a drawing of a fictional child, it can also be pornography. And until all those who create any images of children have been painted over with the broad brush strokes of "justice," it seems, our reservations will not rest. The definition of child porn has been de-specified so much that the "swift hammer of justice" is being brought down more against simulated CP possession cases, not because they establish some kind of audience for child porn, but because they are the most cost-effective for law enforcement to bring to justice and give the public what they want, which is "more busts."

Agencies involved in busting possessors are automatically granted the title "saviors of children," and yet they don't even have to do the real "dirty work" of breaking up an actual prostitution ring to receive such a distinction, much less rescue the traumatized kids (who can be such a drag on the psyche). Due to this diversion, law enforcement inevitably invests their interests into busting dad for picturing his child in the bath and then tries to sweep the child porn cartels under the rug as "too difficult" to assess or capture--although there are always "small strides" being made. The public is happy with this narrative, and we move right along to the next bust.

So we fret about at best and arrest at worst those who may carry Caravaggio's "Amor Vincit Omnia" on their computer--a painting of a naked boy of antiquity (Cupid), and on the other hand, for the photographer who intentionally caused actual children to cry in an series of shots for an exhibition, leave without a second look. Apparently, seeing the naked Cupid's genitals could be considered a crime where the infliction of emotional distress onto actual children (by giving them favored toys and forcefully taking them away before the camera), is perfectly acceptable. One has to wonder between these two events where the harm was done, and why it is so disproportional as to where where the justice fell. Have we truly become a society where it is acceptable to cause a child emotional distress on film (so long as it is not sexual), but reprehensible to possess a picture of a happy child, as in the case of Carravaggio's Cupid, simply nude?

Caravaggio, by the standards of his time was no child pornographer, but those who would argue it perhaps have missed the intention behind such a striking image and the eternal message that it teaches: "Amor Vincit Omnia," or "Love Conquers All." Those who attempt to clothe Cupid are themselves the ones possessed by his nudity. They make it the primary detail. They are as the Biblical Adam and Eve who have discovered they are naked--whose sin is in simply acknowledging the guilt of their nakedness. It actually takes a less depraved mind to see Amor Vincit Omnia for what it is: "Love Triumphant." Children are beautiful. Child porn is destructive. Children are naturally sexual. Child porn is exploitation. Beware of those who would disguise evil as good, but just as well beware those who look upon what is good and only see evil.

Causing emotional distress, drugging, brutalizing, and otherwise manipulating children to do things on camera against their will should always be the focus of our attention when prosecuting for the crime of child pornography. However, we are unable to do just that, and effectively rescue actual children from exploitation, if we continue our misguided quest to be the most politically expedient by simply apprehending the audience instead.

Adult Sitcom Tropes

Adults use children in drama as props, sensitive props upon which to pair off the so-called complexities of adult affairs. How many tender scenes depicting two adults engaged in so-called painful dialogue are intercepted by some child of theirs, seemingly catapulted out of nowhere and who's arrival signals the complete closure of the "dirty" "dark" "depressing" adult-talk? Suddenly the adults in these fictionalized portrayals decide to go all-smiles at the sight of the child with the subtlety of a painted clown face. What's worse is how the child is to remain oblivious to the crying clowns--which is what these adults are--and skip along merrily as if to fulfill every wish an adult could have about a child.

Children are perceptive. They are not as perceptive as they are often made out to be when adults wish to showcase their perceptiveness, but they are not the "runaround dunces" they are commonly depicted as in the sitcom world of adult wish fulfillment. As perceptive as they are capable of being, even adults eventually have to concede that as they grow, children do develop more direct ways to express their ability to decode the so-called "sophistication" of adult affairs. These are called "teenagers" in this same sitcom universe, and because adults have to accept that teenagers are no longer runaround dunces and have powers of perception, they choose to recast them as the enemy.

Runaround dunces are no threat to the adult's self-inflated perception of their importance, so they are more or less depicted as inconvenient playthings. However, teenagers, being also under the adults' power but capable of usurping them, are rendered as the enemy. The teenager has to be shown as an impetuous brat willing to call insurrection without warning if the adults so much as suggest anything to them. They must put themselves in jeopardy (they can never be depicted as right), and the adults must swoop on in and heroically rescue them from their own undoing. They usually finish out with a talk as if the teen has learned some valuable lesson in self-reliance. Such a thing is there to please the adult's conscience--it's really just a cover for the fact that the teen has come full circle and is now in complete deference to the adult's authority. The curtain closes. This is the only way these events can unfold on television, never in reverse.

Watching adult-centered fictional television is literally like watching one age group's self-serving skewed view of reality. All the other perspectives--the perspective of the runaround dunces and the perspective of the impetuous no-nothing brats are not considered. At the end of the day, only the adults must be satisfied, and the children, just satisfied that the adults are satisfied.

It is similar to the old television trope where each character is called upon to give an account of something, and we get to see each character's skewed recollection of events that cast them as the heroes and everyone else as the villains. In this case, adults love to cast themselves as the heroes, even as misunderstood heroes, and everyone younger than them (or older as the case may be) as the "enemy." Adult television, and all of it's assorted tropes, are propaganda for the 25 to 50-year-old demographic, and more importantly, their inflated opinion of themselves. To be egotistical is to be human. Adults just have the means to televise theirs non-stop, 24/7.

Thought-Stopping Cliches

Our typical human overhears the cultural media pulpit repetitively spouting thought-stopping cliches about predators day in and out, takes them at face value and then perhaps turns around and criticizes those who practice religion. There is no difference. If religion is said to become anxious at the idea of critical analysis and receives criticism for it, then our media pulpit should be spared no less the same. The only thing that is necessary to say to render null all arguments for justifying our opinions based on reason alone is wrapped up in the confused media-fed jargon of the expression, "predators targeting innocent children." No one can contest paranoia like this without looking like they support the "predators," so it becomes truth regardless of its truth.

"The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis."
(Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism 429)

Childhood innocence is a cultural designation for which there is no evidence--sure children exist inside a different developmental stage from adults, but there is no reason to believe they are any more "innocent," "pure," or "angelic" as a result than your average adult given their own developmental state. Another is the purely cultural detestation for "pedophilia," where ignorance has produced in the mainstream its 1 to 1 correlation with "child molestation." Such a 1 to 1 correlation has no evidence, and even runs counter to evidence suggesting that not all pedophiles necessarily commit the crimes of child molestation and possession of child porn. But put these two words together in the same sentence, "innocent child" and "pedophile," and all analysis stops. If you contest the jargon, you're in support of the perpetrator. In the past, such an ability to think beyond the words would doom your soul to hellfire, these days, it dooms our society to ignorance and illusion servitude.