Spare the children from photoshopped creep shots for their own good
PROTECTING children from abuse online is a big deal.
Barnardo’s is running a campaign. It features this image:
Bit off, no, to choose a picture of an attractive young woman / girl in make-up. If you find her attractive are you a pervert? It turns out that the woman /girl in the picture is not a sex abuse victim. It’s a picture of young woman whose age is not given. We then get this:
“My name is Lucy. I’m a character that has been created to protect the identity of the real children’s stories I’m going to represent. I’m 13, but my story has happened to children younger and older than me. I went to court because I had a chance to see the man who sexually exploited me punished for what he’d done. But in the courtroom I was made to feel like the abuse I experienced was my fault. They said that because I look mature for my age, men could easily think I was old enough to have sex. They also said that I seduced him! That I agreed to it all. But I only had sex because he tricked me into it, promising to care for me. I trusted him because he was older but he abused my trust and hurt me. Why couldn’t the court remember that I’m a child and I can never truly agree to being sexually exploited?”
The courts are full of real-life stories. Why invent a victim, and then present her case without all the facts? Her case went to court. Isn’t it a good thing that the justice industry took her seriously. They don’t always.
You are then invited to sign a petition:
Dear Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales,
I want to make sure that sexually exploited children, whatever their age are never treated as if the abuse is their fault. To achieve this, I want our legal system to remember that in child sexual exploitation cases the victim is still a child.
Never? Should we always mistrust and suspect the adult, the accused, then? The child is held as sacred. We’re constantly invited to see the child as a barometer of our morals. End global warming to save the children. Bring water to Africa to save the children. Introduce ID cards to save children. Jut add children and your cause is morally correct. Justice and the process of law and fair trials take a back seat when the children are mentioned. No-one objects to the view that children mut be protected, even if discredits institutions, like the criminal courts. Children are abused. Adult in positions of power do abuse it. They should be condemned. But what about intention? What about free will? Uncertainty should not be abolished.
Over in Brazil, online service provider Universo Online is plugging its parental control service. It warns:
“Don’t let your child lose his childhood on the internet.”
A campaign for SaferNet, warns:
”Some People See Children As Grown-ups.”
They are really creepy. But do they do any good? Other than to scare, what’s their purpose?
Posted: 6th, March 2013 | In: Key Posts, News Comment (1) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
March 7th, 2013 at 10:47 pm
There’s easy cases, and then there’s hard cases.
I remember very clearly a case I read about a couple of years ago, in the UK.
A young woman. She drank, smoked, took drugs at times, was sexually active and promiscuous. One night she proposed sex to a man (20-something) she met on her estate. He agreed, and they did the deed.
It came to the attention of the police. The man was arrested, charged, and tried.
She was 12 – just a few days short of 13.
She had told him she was 16 and he believed her. She had been medically examined, and the doctor testified that, if he had been told she was 16, he would have had no reason to doubt that statement.
The judge said it was the hardest case he had ever had to try. The accused had no choice but to plead guilty; since she was under 13 the defence that he honestly believed she was 16 was not available; it was a strict liability child rape offence. The judge was wise and compassionate and gave him a token punishment – a fine or community service I think – and, quite exceptionally, decided he did NOT have to register as a sex offender.
Sometimes children need protecting from themselves – but punishing those who take advantage of them isn’t *always* the right way to do it. It usually is, of course, but not always; otherwise it’s very easy to end up with injustice.