Mining the data on child sex abuse
Is Tony Abbott trying to use an
ill-informed myth about the link between metadata and child sex abuse in
the hope that the Opposition, the Senate, and the electorate will allow
him to do what he wants? Dean Laplonge reports.
Tony Abbott has stated there is a link
between metadata storage and protecting children. In an attempt to
secure support for legislation that will require companies to store
metadata for two years, he has claimed the new law will assist with
investigations into child pornography and child sexual abuse. “We know
that access to metadata has played a role in preventing and
investigating terrorism offences. But it’s also vital to investigating
major crimes that destroy lives in this country – and no crime is more
abhorrent than crimes against children.”
The connection he makes between crimes against children and terrorism
is intentional. Both topics generate intense emotions of fear and
anger. The mere thought of either occurring can lead people to insist
that anything and everything must be done to prevent and stop them
irrespective of whether the actions taken are illegal or curtail
individual freedoms. The threat of terrorism has been used to justify
wars. The fear of child sexual abuse has been used to gain cross-party
support for the introduction of cyber predator laws in several Australia
states – laws which allow police officers to masquerade as children
online in an attempt to entrap potential paedophiles.
Abbott’s sudden concern for the well-being of children is at odds
with his recent response to the Forgotten Children report issued by the
Australian Human Rights Commission. This report concluded that the
detainment of children in immigration detention camps breaches
Australia’s international obligations. It recommends that all children
in immigration detention be released and calls for a royal commission
into the issue. Abbott labelled this report a “transparent stitch-up”.
On the one hand he views the fact that children in detention are
suffering as less important than his and his government’s reputation,
but now he claims to be working to protect children.
The children mentioned in the Commission’s report are real. This
report does not talk about potential harm to children who might be
placed in detention in the future. It cites examples of doctor’s reports
on how actual children are suffering because of their detention now.
The children to which Abbott refers in his latest comment are imaginary.
His concern in this case is about the potential and possible sexual
abuse of unknown and, as yet, invisible children.
This is not to say that children are not victims of sexual abuse. To
help Tony Abbott better understand this issue too, however, we should
consider what experts in this field have to say on the matter.
In her ground-breaking and challenging book, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, Judith Levine argued that
“Projecting sexual menace onto a cardboard monster and pouring money
and energy into vanquishing him” renders children “more vulnerable both
at home and in the world”. This is because the vast majority of child
sexual abuse is perpetrated by somebody already known to the child, and
often from within the child’s own family circle.
In their 2012 article
“Reconstructing the sexual abuse of children: ‘Cyber-paeds’, panic and
power”, UK academics Yvonne Jewkes and Maggie Wykes argue that the
relocation of child sexual abuse to the virtual space has effectively
silenced reporting on sexual abuse in the domestic space. “Anxiety
around ‘cyber-paeds’ has become a smokescreen diverting attention from
the real sites of sexual harm to children: men in paternal/familial
settings and a socio-economic context that constructs children as
sexually desirable,” they write.
Another UK academic, Mark O’Brien, has argued that the response to
internet child pornography and child abuse constitutes a moral panic. He
quotes
from professor Stanly Cohen’s work on moral panics about youth cultures
in which a moral panic is defined as something that is “presented in a
stylised and stereotypical fashion by the mass media” and when the
“moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other
right thinking people”. The outcomes of the current moral panic about
online child sexual abuse are, according to O’Brien, an absence of
balanced scrutiny of the issue, a reluctance to debate the difference
between voyeurism and practice, and opinions presented as fact.
Katherine Williams wrote in the Journal of Social Welfare and Family
Law that laws which are introduced to respond to online child
pornography seek to preserve a specific ideal of sexual morality. She
notes that such laws are often introduced without evidence to support
claims about what they will achieve. Instead, assumptions are made about
who is viewing the images, what these images are being used for, and
how they relate to the actual sexual abuse of children.
Professor Carissa Byrne Hessick from the College of Law at the
University of Utah argues for disentangling child pornography from child
sex abuse. She suggests that while “child sex abuse is often a messy
intrafamilial problem,” we just don’t want to think about or deal with
that. The idea of a stranger posing a threat to “our” children is oddly
more appealing.
Looking at child pornography laws in Canada and the USA, Robert Danay
has addressed the claim that any resistance to government intervention
to restrict usage of the internet is simply a ploy on the part of
paedophiles to organise and elevate their status. He writes that
such a suggestion is based on “hysterical misinformation and has masked
some of the real harms that stem from our current child pornography
prohibitions”.
Finally, Ludwig Lowenstein’s review of
“Recent research into the downloading of child pornographic materials
from the internet” discovered that “Research concerning the use of child
pornography by paedophiles had been mostly anecdotal, and the few
empirical studies on the topic had been plagued by inconsistencies in
definitions and problems involved in sampling methods and procedures”.
The ideas I have summarised here are not exhaustive or by any means
extensive. There is a lot of work being done to investigate a range of
related issues, including the effectiveness of online tools to monitor
the circulation of child pornography, the use of sexting and
pornographic selfies as methods of communication between young people,
the impacts of the construction of child pornography on children, and
the construction of the paedophilic gaze through laws that nevertheless
claim to be seeking to put an end to viewing children as sexual objects.
The point I seek to emphasise is that the research does not state
conclusively or even strongly that internet child sexual abuse is the
biggest threat to children or that metadata laws solve this particular
cultural problem. Child sexual abuse occurs; of that there is no doubt.
How, where, and by whom are, however, matters of interest and debate, at
least among those who seek to investigate this issue seriously.
Tony Abbott is no expert on this subject. It’s doubtful he has
considered the issues of internet child pornography and child sexual
abuse in as much detail as these researchers and writers have. Despite
extensive search through journal databases, I was unable to find any
peer reviewed article or even newspaper article written by him on this
particular subject. He nevertheless deems it appropriate to speak about
it in a way which puts forward his views and opinions as if they were
unchallenged facts, and as if he does know what he is talking about.
Granted, the topic of child sexual abuse is highly charged. Even the
presentation of other people’s ideas here is likely to result in
personal abuse against me. I believe it important, however, that a
serious and considered debate about this issue take place before we rush
into accepting any new law which will allow greater government
monitoring of our private communications but which has not been shown to
be able to solve a problem to which it has now been linked.
Abbott has claimed that a report detailing the suffering of children
in detention camps is politically motivated. I wonder if he will now
dare to make the same claim about the facts concerning internet child
pornography and child sexual abuse that I have outlined above. Are these
people who read, investigate, gather and analyse data, and then write
up their findings telling tales to get at him and his government? Or is
he seeking to use yet another ill-informed myth in the hope that the
Opposition, the Senate, and the electorate will allow him to do what he
wants?
Author’s biography
Dean Laplonge is a cultural theorist whose research and consulting
work explores the relationship between culture and everyday practices.
He is the author of GenderImpacts (https://genderimpacts.wordpress.com),
a blog which explores the impacts of gender on the way we think and
behave. He is also the Director of the cultural research company Factive
(www.factive.com.au) and an Adjunct senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales.
Publication rights
Copyright of this article remains with the author
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