My dissertation, not good academically, but gathered the information around what i knew on this subject which i tried to research within modules done at universities several times.
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1
An assessment of the failures at fighting
sexual abuses against children at the
local, national and international levels.
CONTENT
P. 1………. CONTENT
P. 2……….ABSTRACT
P. 4………. INTRODUCTION
P. 8……….I: VICTIMS AND FACTORS PUTTING THEM AT
RISK.
P. 8……….a) Definition
P. 9……….b) how many victims? - and the
statistics deficiency
P. 11…… c) Growing numbers
P. 12…… d) Victims’ profiles: Aggravating
factors
P. 13…… e) Consequences of abuses: traumas and
symptoms
P. 14…… II: THE MONETARISATION OF PEDOPHILIA
AND ITS DE FACTO OR DE
JURE LEGALISATION
P. 17…… a) ‘Commercialisation’
P. 18…… b) Monetarisation.
P. 19 … d) The problem could be the law
1) Leniency
2) Legality, illegality
P. 19…… e) Testimonies, disclosure and
judicial failures
P. 23…… III: THE PERPETRATORS WITHIN THE
SOCIETY: VISIBILITY, FACILITIES,
SECLUSION AND SILENCING
P. 23…… a) Where
P. 23…… b) Migrations
P. 25…… c) Employability
P. 26…… d) By who
P. 26…… e) surroundings
P. 27…… f) Family
P. 27…… g) social services/care
P. 28…… h) Schools
P. 29…… i) Gender
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P. 30…… j) Mediatisation
P. 33…… k) Socio-economic and socio-cultural
changes
P. 34…… l) Modernisation and the internet
P. 34…… IV: PROGRAMMES AND POLICIES
P. 33…… a) Convention
P. 34…… b) Dysfunctional: a system of
impediments
P. 36…… c) Human right, duty or responsibility
P. 37…… d) Aid and Program’s solutions-
holistic or specific
P. 38…… e) Raising awareness
P. 39…… f) Schools
P. 40…… g) Health reasons given as the
redundant reasons for countering paedophilia, not
the necessary attacks on predators
P. 42…… e) With what to help?
P. 43…… h) The danger of a so powerful tool
P. 43…… LITERATURE REVIEW
P. 45…… a) Are collections of data working at
all?
P. 46…… b) Data collection
P. 48…… c) Aggregation of data
P. 49…… d) Misappropriation of the language by
professionals
P. 50…… e) Rehabilitation, resocialization?
P. 52…… f) Too little is conscientiously done
P. 51…… CONCLUSION
P. 57…… BIBLIOGRAPHY
P. 61…… APPENDIX
ABSTRACT
The first section of this paper is about the
victims. Victims should be at the centre of the
greatest attention and emergency actions as
sexual crimes against children leave the most
3
profound social, mental, psychological, and
physical scars and symptoms. Increasing
concerns and data available are still standing
low compared to the scale of the abuses, and
even more when compared to ‘well-funded’
criminal networks and means of distribution
becoming more and more efficient and
recognised to be facing patently insufficient law
enforcement.
Trafficking involves ‘trading exchanges’, so
the financial dimension to it, the
‘commercialisation’ via ‘pornography’ and the
notoriously gigantesque money-making
industry that ‘so-called prostitutions’
represents will be discussed. Moreover, within an
exploitative context reinforced by gender,
social and work relations, one can also figure out
how atrocities might be linked with dire
exploitative methods- just because of the fear or of
the mimicking or the replication of systems
letting SAAC unaddressed. At the origin of this
fear or social reproduction; the whole
societal systemi may have been found in many cases to
be complacent or to have let down victims and
to have even led to their criminalisation,
impeaching in most cases disclosure and
prosecution.
After having analysed (or through) who and
what, the question of where will be under
scrutiny.
Places where sexual abuses against children
(SAAC) happen or start interpellate on the
access of the abusers to the abused while SAAC
are often perpetrated within the family, or
within the very surrounding of the child, in
places and discourses where children are and are
therefore threatened with the abusers’
attempts to be at proximity. The final point will be on
how the work put in place are in turn helping
curbing the progression of this scourge or how
they result in defeat.
4
INTRODUCTION:
This paper will be looking at reasons for the
failures to protect children from sexual crimes
against children (SAAC) in a comprehensive and
successful manner. It will investigate the
detrimental roles of states’ institutions,
businesses, and private individuals allowing SAAC to
perdure. The dramatic amount and pervasiveness
of SAAC in society become even more hard
to believe when compared with the quasi total
secrecy around it, they are left unreported and
unprosecuted. The very few scandals of SAAC
mediatised represent only a little proportion
of the extent of those crimes, while no
comprehensive measures seem to be taken to fight
actively against them. That taboo infiltrates
all institutions, and the same applies to the way
politicians and policy makers react to them:,
in letting them unaddressed, in silencing them
publically.
‘Growing number of victims’. This phrase is
certainly the most shocking and widespread in
the literature on present sexual abuses on
children (Fong and Berger, 2010) (UNICEF Pacific,
2006) (Broughton, 2009) (Lalor, 2004). In this
dissertation the literature review has been
placed at the end in the attempt to prioritize
information and start with the first chapter that
provide information about the victims.
Pedophilia, through incest, is known as being present
and ‘evenly distributed’ regardless of the
class, wealth, origins, social milieu or status
(Galiana, 2012). However, traffickers and
other abusers will predominantly target children of
very marginalised communities (Dottridge,
2008) (O Briain, 2006). The chapter thus goes on
to enumerate what might count as aggravating
factors other than poverty and the gender
factor both explored in chapter III within
their social or cultural contexts. Being without
one’s parents or experiencing parental neglect
or abuse, lack of financial means and lack of
education, all highly contribute to augmenting
the risks for children to be sexually abused
5
(Fong and Berger, 2010) (O Briain, 2006)
(Dottridge, 2008) (Lalor, 2004). It is to be noted
that the focus is made on the legal,
political, societal and pragmatic (preventive, retributive,
or reparative) measures- rather than
psychological or medical perspectives. However, a
summary of the traumas and tortures sustained
by the victims is necessary to understand
better the quasi inevitability of lasting
exploitation without outside real help. This rather
descriptive part is fundamental to the
understanding on how perpetrators use their ‘power’ to
further harm (Fong and Berger, 2010) and
occasion dependency or helplessness, and
sometimes with the support, knowing, willing,
condoning, tolerating, unaware, ineffectively
defendant or passive attitude of the system.
The second part connects sexual abuses to
money, the law and the power relations that results
from it. The heavily economic vocabulary used,
and debates around that highly profitable
trade (O Briain, 2006) (Schell et al., 2006)
(Esposito, 1998) (Lalor, 2004) exposes clearly the
many pressures and obstacles at all levels
encountered even when it comes to paedophiliac
abuses. Of course this monetarisation,
commoditisation pervasively present are reminiscent
of how prostitution backed by many as work
could lead to more and more sexual crimes
against children (SAAC) and fewer actions and
fewer possibilities for valid, substantial
oppositions. Legislatively, the lack of
appropriate punishment (UNICEF Pacific, 2006)
(Dottridge, 2008) (Galiana, 2012) gives an
additional view on how prostitution and
pornography are treated as a billion-dollar
industry, i.e. as an industry first and foremost,
supported by rulings agreeing with
paedophiliac representations, and paedophile activism
(Schlebaum, 1992) (Mirkin, 2009) (Taylor,
2013). The plights of the victims will be back at
the centre of the discussion. It is there
explained how children are the victims of their direct
abusers and, of the whole society irresponsive
to the horrors children are let in, of
stigmatisation and denial translated into more
than judicial defeat but judicial torments in this
case leading to lasting torture. Examples will
be exposed, such as the routinized doubts on the
6
credibility granted to children testimonies
undermining prevention and police protection
(Fong and Berger, 2010) (O Briain, 2006)
(Jensen et al., 2005) (Orchard, 2007) (Schlebaum,
1992) (UNICEF Pacific, 2006), like the UK have
been reminded with the 2013 and 2015
grooming scandals of more than 400 girls (The
guardian, 2013) (The guardian, 2015) (BBC,
2015). Details on children remaining
unaccounted for, ignored, or not believed, and put
further into danger of reprisals by the same
agencies supposed to be the rescuers and carers of
children and of people attest of the great
impediments contravening disclosure and testimony
within official organisations themselves.
Thirdly, the questions of where and who come
into play. This will not be about traffickers
themselves, as they should be the objects of a
specific piece and are the objects of quite
abundant interests, but about the processes of
such commercial or non-commercial traffics or
isolate abuses. The paragraphs are divided
into places and locations, geographical but also in
places of decision-making such as social
services, schools, and families. It also hints at the
need to debunk people linking it conceptually
or ideologically to a specific time in history, as
it supposed absence in general comes with
worse and ‘legitimised’ ways of sexually abusing
children, unchallenged child marriage (Lalor,
2003) being only one example. Along these
themes, recurring patterns of abuses are found
whenever perpetrators can profit from the
defect of societies (Lalor, 2003) (Whitaker et
al., 2008) (UNICEF Pacific, 2006) (Dottridge,
2008) (O Briain, 2006). Changes in cultures
(Lalor, 2003) have been used as a cover and
inculpated for the occurrences of paedophilia.
Are changes truly guilty of regression? - or
protecting undefined cultures located in the
past instead of tackling the present forms of
society’s biggest failures, if not only
retrograde, could sometimes unsurprisingly be a further
note to a sterile stance. Nostalgia tones will
be romanticising families, or deprive individuals
of their personal choices and autonomies, and
disavow the presence of egregious crimes
hidden or justified by ‘stabilised’ or rigid,
arbitrary society where seclusion and secrecy are
7
part of an active societal construction or
destruction. In response to this, we will see how
sexual crimes against children (SAAC)
supporting stances has been confined and by the
larger notions of ‘religion’, traditions,
gender relations, and poverty (Orchard, 2007) (Hornby,
2012). (Lalor, 2003). The reality of
performant technologies multiplying opportunities and
information facilitating offenses through the
internet will be presented (Schell et al., 2006)
(Esposito, 1998) (Beech, et al., 2008)
(Schlebaum, 1992).
Chapter four will give examples of the
conventions pertaining to SAAC. It will hint at the
premises, perspectives, solutions and
alternatives commonly found in governmental and
NGO’s programs (Saxby, 2008) (Fong and Berger,
2010) (Dottridge, 2008) and suggest some
of the common features that have done so much
to curb SAAC but that could bear limitations
in their redundancy or because they become the
only and reduced way to proceed (Willis,
2002) (Kelly et al, 1995) (Jensen et al.,
2005) (Siverts, 2003) (Brabant, 2011) (Whitaker et
al., 2008). We will act as a reminder on how
SAAC are of an extremely grave nature, and
could participate in causing irreparable
injustice through false accusations (Astapenia, 2013)
(Daily Caller, 2014) (Huffington Post, 2016)
(Daily Dot, 2015).
Hindrances to data collection and the quality
of data, as well as data aggregation (Lalor,
2003) (Whitaker et al., 2008) (Willis, 2002)
(Fong and Berger, 2010) (Broughton, 2009)
constitute the first part of the literature
review. Then questioning arises on the way
professionals themselves use terms chronically
misused, fuelling misunderstanding and
amalgams or helping the hiding of crimes by
defining them via wordings such as ‘sex
industry’, ‘prostitution’ or the
‘commercialisation’ of sexual abuses on children.
The dissertation puts forward the way
paedophilia, one cannot do more taboos and ‘naturally’
‘at home matters’, are maintained in the realm
of the untold, of the unnoticed, of the
unreported, or un-investigated even though
when known of everyone. Could statistic results
be part of the explanations for such unwilling
or absence altogether of serious steps against
8
it? Would it be because of its pervasiveness
(UNICEF Pacific, 2006) (Lalor, 2003) that
paedophilia is in fact ‘under protection’ or
at least protected by people’ passiveness not
daring even for it to be addressed? One cannot
say ‘unseen’, as in broad daylight, child
marriage included in the US, sex tourism
regions on every continent or whole quarters in
India (Whitaker et al., 2008), of children and
under-age individuals exploited in such
atrocious ways, remains juridically untouched,
standing as the epitomes of sexual abuses on
children international realm. Even though
muffled, reporting appear on popular, highcirculated
papers, without anyone managing to take
serious actions against it. If the spotlight
stays discreet, legal decisions result in
letting paedophiles predators advocating, pressurizing
for paedophilic crimes as activists and
directors of organisations in the Netherlands.
I: VICTIMS AND FACTORS PUTTING THEM AT RISK
a) Definition.
A ‘child’ is defined in international law as
any person under the age of 18 years. (O Briain,
2006, p.5).
‘The United States in 2000 passed The
Trafficking Victims
Protection Act (TVPA), a national policy
addressing human
trafficking which defines ‘‘severe forms’’ of
human trafficking ii as
sex trafficking in which commercial sex is
induced by force,
fraud, or coercion, or in which a person
induced to perform such
9
an act has not attained 18 years of age; or
the recruitment ,
harboring, transportation, provision, or
obtaining of a person for
labor services, through use of coercion, for
the purpose of
subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage,
debt bondage and
slavery (U.S. Department of State in
Broughton, 2009, p 6)’
Although, the abuses that are the objects of a
trade and the abuses that do not consist in
trading or ‘abused by single perpetrators’
(Broughton, 2009, p.19) are two different types of
abuses that require different types of
interventions (Fong and Berger, 2010)iii they will rarely
be the object of a strict differentiation
here.
b) how many victims? - and the statistics
deficiencyiv.
"Underground" industry’s estimates
about the number of the victims are very hard to
establish (Esposito, 1998). Due to paedophilia
being legally punished and the consequent seal
of secrecy placed around it, statistics or
serious representative studies are hard to found or to
assess (Broughton, 2009). The lack of certainty
or even relevance might be caused by
paedophilia being a taboo, and of the low
rates of it being reported- be it because the
perpetrators are family, or cannot be
prosecuted nor found, or because they manage to have
total control over the lives of their victims
(Kelly et al, 1995).
Besides, others deplore research paucity, or
‘data vacuum’ (Lalor, 2003)v (Schlebaum, 1992).
The data inexactness or absence is also due to
a lack of data at the national level (UNICEF
Pacific, 2006) that will logically impair or
render impossible worldwide data to be assembled
(UNICEF Pacific, 2006). By extension the
absence of study, survey or data collection
indicates the most disturbing lack of will or
interest, or absence of reaction from the
10
authorities. On those lines, many draw
attentionvi to the ineffectiveness of Interpol (Galiana,
2012), and the lack of cooperation between
most governments (Schlebaum, 1992).
Limoncelli portraits the nationalistic
approaches of trafficking, not protecting victims as a
whole but only nationals versus foreigners
(Limoncelli, 2010). Many instances proved that
historically countries, governments, armies
and NGOs run programs intended not to supress
trafficking but to regulate it or profit from
it (Limoncelli, 2010). More recently rich states
have been found to condole out-of-the-country
abuses, until very recently for the UK, when
they used to allow ‘double criminality’, a
system that prevented extradition when their
nationals had been found guilty of sex tourism
(Saxby, 2008). Nevertheless, these
discordances also echo the reality of the
international shortage of funds phenomena whose
paradigm is the UN famous lack of substantial
resources. However, troubles to obtain funds
and many other unresolved matters might be put
better in evidence at the supranational level
than national organs are prepared to admit of
their own. If we take a country like the United
States, reporting inconsistencies have been
pointed out as being a factor preventing accurate
data (Broughton, 2009). Of course if data are
corrupted then whole policies and perspectives
of actions will lose in quality. Still some
figures emerge, and when one victim or the threat on
one victim would incontestably impair the
system as a whole, millions are left at the hands of
the perpetrators.
Estimates from the year 2000 suggest that,
worldwide, 1.8 million children were
involved in prostitution and pornography, and
1.2 million were victims of trafficking
(UNICEF Pacific, 2006) Furthermore, the World
Health Organization (WHO)
estimates that in 2002, “150 million girls and
73 million boys under 18 experienced
forced sexual intercourse or other forms of
sexual violence” (UNICEF Pacific, 2006,
p.4).
11
In fact, these United Nations Children’s
Fund’s (UNICEF) estimates may be regarded as
rather conservative like Daniel Broughton
observes in his report. The US Department of State
in its ‘Trafficking in Persons Report-June
2008’ stated that at least two million children are
exploited in the international commercial sex
trade (Broughton, 2009)vii.
c) Growing numbers
One of the most publicised information is that
the number of children victims of sexual
abuses and networked sexual abuses attest of
its globalisation and growth (Broughton, 2009)
(Fong and Berger, 2010) (UNICEF Pacific,
2006). This figure in augmentation in developing
country (Lalor, 2004) (UNICEF Pacific, 2006),
is also rising in rich countries such as the
United States (Boxill & Richardson, Estes
& Weiner, Spangenberg, in Broughton, 2009)
(Fong and Berger, 2010)viii ix. In some
countries of the Pacific or in Africa, results have been
equated with being an ‘epidemiology of child
sexual abuses’ (Finkelhor in Lalor, 2003,
p.454) or as ‘rampant’ (UNICEF Pacific, 2006,
p.49). Also ‘studies in 19 countries produced
findings similar to North American research’
thus ‘undermining the assumption of North
American exceptionalism’ with ‘prevalence
ranging from 7 to 36% for women and 3 to 29%
for men’ sexually abused when they were
children (Lalor, 2003, p.454). Another estimate
from ‘international studies estimate that 25%
of children around the world experience sexual
abuse, physical abuse or domestic violence’
(Cohen & Mannarino in Fong and Berger, 2010,
p 313).
Light canning in schools and incest are
sometimes standing in the same figure (Fong and
Berger, 2010). Of course, if these statistics
cannot help anyone on the subject of pedophilia,
they should call on the emergency of abuses to
be talked about in order to be tackled, but they
also reveal political insisting unwillingness
to deal with it as the necessity to stop SAAC is in
12
fact quasi nowhere to be found in political
discourses and are merely left to the NGOs to
campaign for.
d) Victims’ profiles: Aggravating factors
To sum it up,
‘Trafficking children for sexual abuses and
slavery will predominantly
target children of very defavorised
communities ’ (O Briain, 2006, p.17).
or of deprived children within their own
communities.
Below are some of the factors that make
children especially vulnerable to being trafficked.
Information on overall trafficking have to be
analysed since they are the subject of many
more investigations and reflexions than sexual
exploitation is. Also exploitation ‘may start
out as exploitation of a person’s labour, and
end in their sexual exploitation’ (O Briain,
2006, p.3). Children victims of sexual abuses
are often victims of so many other abuses that
the extent of their traumas will ‘facilitate’
their being held by the perpetrators (Dottridge,
2008). Inversely, it is because trafficking
might eventually lead to its worst possible forms
that people urge more and more the resolution
of trafficking in children as it also implies
sexual exploitation (Dottridge, 2008).
Within the lists of aggravating factors and
causing research to become rarer are the other
dangers they will face alone or within their
communities, such as war, disease, poverty,
hunger (Lalor, 2003). Targets s are more
likely to be children who experience parental
neglect and abuse, children living without
their natural parents (including those who are
informally adopted) and children suffering
economic hardship, poverty of opportunity
13
(UNICEF Pacific, 2006) (Whitaker et al.,
2008), discrimination, or particularly youth from
minorities (O Briain, 2006, p.16)x. The worst
perspectives socially on these fragilities is when
a family is made vulnerable in order to be
more and more defenceless against abuses, and
ultimately sexual trafficking.
e) Consequences of abuses: traumas and
symptoms
Traumas, more than consequences, are also
utilised as ‘tools’, as means for perpetrators to
operate ‘disablement’ on individuals with what
will be regarded as abnormal and stigmatised
by the very same society that even if it
prohibits those crimes still let them happen. Also
children’s special needs (Fong and Berger,
2010) is one further reason why one has to set
specific tasks force on rescuing victims and
beating the pressures initiated by perpetrators
inspiring permanent, controlling terror,
capable of sabotaging external too feeble
intervention.
Other mental health problems may include
‘acute post-traumatic stress symptoms, acute
anxiety and stress disorders, affective
disorders, conduct disorders and personality
disorders., low self-esteem, suicidality, poor
academic achievement, substance abuse,
disassociation and poor interpersonal
relationship quality, affective, behavioral and
cognitive problems, depression, low
self-esteem, problems with trusting others, anger, poor
social skills, substance abuse, various forms
of physical harm, and suicide’ (Broughton,
2009, p.39). (Cohen & Mannarino, Corcoran
& Pillai, in Broughton, 2009, p.18). The list of
psychological and cognitive traumas that may
have been caused is endless. Sexual abuses and
the way torturers manage to violate and
seclude children affect all dimensions of the
individuals. Of course sexually transmitted
diseases and drugs consumption will also directly
affect physical health (Broughton, 2009).
14
II: THE MONETARISATION OF PEDOPHILIA AND ITS
DE
FACTO OR DE JURE LEGALISATION
a) ‘Commercialisation’
Commercial sexual exploitation of children may
take the form of juvenile prostitution,
child pornography, trafficking of children for
sexual purposes, and child marriages
(Lalor, 2003, p.441).
In any circumstances, even though more
networked actions and groups of institutions
show endeavours towards being responsive to
paedophilic diverse crimes, it is met by
the admission of an ever developing
commercialisation sexual exploitation of children
(UNICEF Pacific, 2006: p.36)
Trafficking in children is considered the
third most lucrative illegal
trade in the world, following only the sale of
illegal drugs and weapons (Esposito,
1998). "
Commercial sexual exploitation of children
(CSEC) may take the form of juvenile
prostitution, child pornography, trafficking
of children for sexual purposes, and child
marriages. Concern originally emerged regarding
the involvement of minors in “sex tourism”
in South East Asia, particularly in Thailand
and the Philippines, culminating in a global
15
conference against CSEC in Stockholm in 1996
(Lalor, 2003). For the USA, little is known
about child prostitution (Fong and Berger,
2010).
However, conservative measures indicate that
between 300,000 and 400,000 children
are exploited through prostitution in the
United States each year (Spangenberg, 2001;
Willis & Levy, 2002 in Broughton, 2009,
p.12)xi.
On what is still called prostitution in a 1994
study by the Institute for Medical Research on
some Pacific Islands known for prostitution
‘found that 30% of the 250 sex workers were
between 13 and 19 years of age and some were
as young as 11’ (UNICEF Pacific, 2006,
p.49).
While thousands of children worldwide are
abused, pornography and all other degrees of
representations or actions have been protected
by some for being a psychological outlet that
could help potential abusers to fantasize
rather than concretely commit crimes (Beech, et
al.,2008).
No country is exempt. There is an almost
insatiable market-by 1977 there were 264
separate child pornography magazines in
America alone (Schlebaum, 1992, p.916).
In 2005, TopTenReviews, Inc. estimated that
child porn generates over $US 3 Billion
annually (Ropelato, 2005 in Schell et al.,
2006, p.47) and over 100,000 Websites exist
with the primary purpose of selling it to
others, according to customs service
estimates (Ropelato, 2005 in Schell et al.,
2006, p.47).
16
b) Monetarisationxii.
One of the main reasons why and reasons how
such crimes are not efficiently tackled are to
do with the massive amount of money these
trafficking and crimes representxiii. Here again
people abuse other people for gain. Child
pornography only is hugely profitable (Esposito,
1998) and has international returns of six
billion dollars (Schlebaum, 1992). Schlebaum in
her account of Tim Tate, goes on recalling the
so frequent scandals involving academics,
politicians, legal authority, businessmen,
etc. (Schlebaum, 1992). It is anyhow known that
pedophilia occurs regardless of the class,
social or revenue groups perpetrators are in
(Galiana, 2012). Now, sex tourism is here to
demonstrate how higher revenue people go to
developed and less protected countries to
abuse children exploited by local population
(Schlagenhauf, 2005).
In contrast, the price of legal
implementation, and societal watch guards is sometimes
mentioned by authors. States’ obligations
under international law to child victims of
trafficking are more onerous than their
obligations to adults (O Briain, 2006) -or at least the
way they are envisaged to be conducted-, which
let understand that they will be applied with
less rigour (O Briain, 2006).
Territorially, there are remarks about how
communities and localities are more scrutinized
than developed networks (Lalor, 2003).
Nevertheless, in an international context the opposite
is possibly to be found, and could even evince
individual or personal responsibilities in
developing primarily a discourse perhaps more
political but reinforcing the perpetrators’
anonymity- the physicality of people concealed
behind much debated concepts of
internationality, conventions, cultures, etc.
There are treaties at the UN level framing
trafficking such as the ‘Optional Protocol to
the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the
sale of children, child prostitution and child
Pornography’ (UNHCHR, 2008), the ‘World
17
Congresses against Sexual Exploitation of
Children and Adolescents’ (CSEC World
Congress, 2008) under the aegis of the UN not
only through UNICEF but also through the
‘Office of the United Nations High
Commissioner for Human Rights’ (OHCHR), the ‘United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’, and
the ‘ILO/IPEC’, that is the’ International
Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour’
(IPEC) within the ‘International Labour
Organization’ (UNODC, 2008). Though these
treaties seem to predominantly be concerned
by the monetisation of sexual abuses or by its
networking, fewer documents are on
paedophilia per se that would also target lone
individuals not ‘promoting’ or financially
benefiting from the occurrences of the abuses.
c) The problem could be the law
1) Leniency
These are crimes, universally recognised by
every nation as crimes by their legal systems.
Although as appalling as human trafficking
is,– harming adults and children, the latter who
will in addition suffer from diminished knowledge
on how to defend themselves against
gangs, if that is at all possible- it is
notoriously policed with much more ‘leniency’ and
sanctioned less than drugs trafficking
(Galiana, 2012). Notoriously pimps, and procurers even
when inculpated and this is very rare, go away
with negligible two-year sentences (Galiana,
2012), often because they are condemned for
other crimes as evidence is not gathered or
because the very crimes they commit is not
listed on the national legislation-example, abuses
on boys- (UNICEF Pacific, 2006). Legislative
deficiencies may mean that police or court
records do not accurately capture the nature
of the offence. For instance, many criminal codes
only recognize sexual abuse as a crime against
girls, thus overlooking boy victims of sexual
18
abuse; and cases of child sexual abuse
occurring within the family unit may be mislabelled
solely as “incest”, without noting the age of
the victim. Similarly, the criminalization of
prostitution can result in child victims of
sexual exploitation being charged as offenders
(UNICEF Pacific, 2006, p.15). Law enforcement
officials are reported to frequently find
expedients to charge suspected traffickers
with lesser offences, such as corruption of a minor
or assisting a child to enter a country
illegally. This is because collecting the evidence to
secure convictions on such charges is easier.
This may mean that the child concerned is not
recognised as a ‘victim of trafficking’ and
hence does not receive appropriate assistance or
compensation. In effect, there is a danger
that trafficked children are denied access to justice
because of the way the law is formulated and
the economics of the criminal justice system
(Dottridge, 2008). As an outcome, SAAC crimes
are in fact low risk and well-paid criminal
activities (Galiana, 2012) even compared, for
instance, to civil servants’ wages in developing
countries. Those low convictions rates compare
only to the opacity of the police actions: the
millions of victims go in stark contrast with
the low figures of indictment or victims’
protections issues by Interpol or other
police. Like the UN’s and other international websites,
and certainly Interpol in particular, these
organisations do not let any precise information
about operations, on what they do or achieve
as a simple visit to their website leave the
searchers with very little information
(Interpol, 2015). Here again this power relation is
extremely upsetting and problematic as for the
possibility of further and future operations.
2) Legality, illegality.
We have viewed how, however illegal, such
crimes perdure, but there are also instances
where people want these daily atrocities to be
endowed with absolutely no boundaries, or any
morality or humanity upheld- to become legal
or toleratedxiv.
19
‘This secretive, highly organized trade is
protected’ (Tate in Schlebaum, 1992). The upperhand
of a paedophile mafia helped by many external
components, including public ignorance
and indifference, or countered too often with
inadequate and poorly enforced laws weakened
by many 'legal loopholes’. Tate’s account
might be 20 years old, but is drawn out of a legal
background allowing confusion, approximation
in the texts to be exploited. Once more
paedophilia atrocities may found ways as far
as being ‘advertised’ and that with the help of
the law.
Obscenity is illegal pornography; it could be
that the sex is too explicit, or it could be
that otherwise legal porn is just displayed to
the wrong audience or advertised in the
wrong way. The Supreme Court has had trouble
drawing a line between legal and
obscene sexual images. Some judges, like Black
and Douglas, argued that the First
Amendment protected all speech, including
sexual speech and images. (Schlebaum,
1992, p. 917).
The amount of pornographic material available
in parallel to the suggestive images within the
main stream media or other sexualisation
(Daily mail, 2007), and particularly almost in daily
diffusion as regular adds on the internet (Esposito,
1998) (Daily mail, 2007), contrasted with
the quasi or total absence of activism and
awareness campaign about these criminal offenses,
bring to the deduction of a so striking
unbalance or upfront pornographisation of
relationships, and of all relationships in
publicity and the media that would legitimised and
almost incentivised the ‘sexual utilisation’
of children.
The law of freedom of expression, and the
loopholes or grey areas between legislature and
courts (Schlebaum, 1992) as to what are ‘permissible
sexual images and illegal ones’
(Mirkin, 2009, p.239), might protect
suggestive photos, depictions through cartoons or
20
fictional writings (Mirkin, 2009)xv.
Legislators have gone as far as protecting freedom of
assembly and therefore freedom of campaigning
up to the 1980’s in the U.K with the
notorious ‘Paedophile Information Exchange
scandal’; notoriously involving two MPs (The
Daily Beast, 2013) (Castella, 2014), but less
noted, the whole nation harbouring openly
paedophile ‘activist’ organisations. Still in
Europe, in Holland, in 2013, judges ruled out in
favour for an organization campaigning for the
legalization of paedophilia to be able to
continue to be legally registered (Taylor,
2013). Authorised by the jurisprudence of the
Netherlands, if people are allowed to campaign
for being a paedophile, then there would be a
collapse of the boundaries between this,
inciting to commit these abuses, and committing the
abuses themselves.
d) Testimonies, disclosure and judicial
failures
At the prosecution level, children, mostly
teenagers may end up being prosecuted rather than
looked after (Fong and Berger, 2010)xvixvii.
When calling for help or when giving testimony,
victims or families of victims may not be
believed but be put into doubt, or will not be
investigated (Schlebaum, 1992)xviii, will not
be helped, or protected (Fong and Berger, 2010).
Victims of families and of traffickers may
then end up being victims of legal and static
institutions.
Otherwise, the very traumas inflict upon the
victims often will impair if not impeach
testimonies to take place. Very high level of
distrust will lead to refusal to communicate and
even to hostility towards social services,
police or any possible rescuers (O Briain, 2006).
Psychologists talk about cognitive impairment
following the abuses but also the
manipulations of the vision of the world: a
constant and consistent indoctrination by the
21
perpetrators plays a fundamental role (Kelly
et al, 1995). The question of the victims’ special
needs is often cited (Fong and Berger), and
the role of the perpetrations onto the victims
could even go as far as ensuring adverse or
anti-social behaviours, or at least impairing any
communication skills in order to make sure the
victims do not talk or link with tiers people.
In fact, rehabilitations of the victims take
so long that it makes more difficult for the
perpetrators to be traced (Fong and Berger).
Traumas will be also be induced just to cause
further impairment to the victims and thus
make potential identification very difficult. Also,
the problems of occurrences happening in
childhood is in general faced with difficulties in
clear remembrances, at least as long as mental
or psychological trauma are concerned. As for
the physical traumas they might be at the
earlier age and then could not be factually
remembered at all. Even prosecution processes
take a long time (O Briain, 2006) and we are
reminded of the means and money that are made
a problem in many reports. The longer the
time between the contact with the traffickers
and the interview, the more likely the child will
be to feel safe and to disclose details of the
experience.
Finally, the one reasons why things are not
changing the way they should is the fear criminal
networks inspire (and certainly more when
officials are involved actively) (Fong and Berger,
2010) and the opaque veil under which they
operate. Trafficking networks may be very
specialized (each person having very defined
functions not knowing about the rest of the
rings – ranging from paper forgery, to
transportation, to distribution-) (O Briain, 2006)
(Broughton, 2009). This fragmentation will
make them difficult to investigate and
dismantled, or even for the criminals to be
fully aware of the degree of their offenses. If
officials fear reprisals or are not in the
position of actions, one can only image what children
may go through in term of retaliation to them
and to their family, against highly dangerous
criminals ready to do anything to get away
from investigations. In this case including the
riddance of evidence (O Briain, 2006) and to
view witnesses as ‘physical evidence’: since
22
criminals of this kind are only logically
renowned for beyond extreme violence actions and
murders. Shaming is also used, as fearing the
law and the police are (O Briain, 2006).
Unbelievably enough trafficked teenagers have
been charged with prostitution, ‘illegal work,
petty theft, begging, drugs use for which they
are taught to flee the police’ (Fong and Berger,
2010, p.313), under those circumstances there
is no wonder left as to why and how those
crimes against humanity sustain themselvesxix.
In terms of disclosure, usually victims wait
for years before talking about the abuses (Jensen
et al., 2005). Manipulations by the perpetrators,
the fear of escalating violence and the one of
not being believed are additional reasons to
the unspeakable suffering experienced sometimes
a long time without even knowing that their
perpetrators should be or could be have been
incarcerated for years for the very crimes
only the victims may know about. On the contrary,
easing disclosure would mean that it results
‘in some positive consequences, and not too
many negative consequences’ (Jensen et al.,
2005, p.1410). In fact, that abuses and threats
stop with perspectives of better care would be
a good enough start if not overridden by a
system that incredibly might discard and
discredit them. Children more often need a specific
structured and solid support to start talking
about the abuses (Jensen et al., 2005). As others
simply say, another prerequisite for them to
start telling their stories is ‘thinking they would
be believed’ (Orchard, 2007). It is obvious
that the ‘humiliation’ of being rejected by the
safeguards of the society cannot but doubling
the state of shock, and disbelief, the state of
utter horror at the certitude of being
completely surrounded. In 2013, in Oxford region, for
the years long trafficking of 50 girls (The
guardian, 2013)xx and in 2015 , police finally
apprehended several local gangs having
sexually abused and exploited 373 girls (The
guardian, 2015) (BBC, 2015), does not let us
wonder about the degree of incompetency at
play to ignore such an amount of abuses,
because the police have been found complicit of
23
denigrating systematically complaints from the
victims in saying that they were consenting to
a ‘way of life’, to drug consumption and
subsequent systematic abuses (The guardian, 2013).
There is a larger need for disclosurexxi as to
how society as a whole manages or fails to face
and even fails to be speaking about those
crimesxxii. Although there is need for exposure to
the realities of sexual crimes against
children, on how these can be, and should be stopped;
this disclosure itself could be threatening
the dominant moral order since concurrently
unveiling its invalidity (Jensen et al.,
2005). Joining what is said on how the burden might be
put on the victims to fight off (Whitaker et
al., 2008), how can we deem a child or teen to
have the capacity of disclosing what society
itself maintains practically unspoken of, without
being its direct victim and ‘letting it
happen’.
III: THE PERPETRATORS WITHIN THE SOCIETY:
VISIBILITY, FACILITIES, SECLUSION AND
SILENCING
a) Where
If no society is exempt of this grievous
crimes (Lalor, 2003), certain regions, or countries are
particularly at risksxxiii (Walker, 2014). At
the extreme end, some countries afflicted with
armed conflict, such as ‘civil unrest and
inter-tribal warfare has led to child sexual assault’ (O
Briain, 2006, p.16). However, in some part of
the world, the danger is constant. For example,
Eastern Europe (Walker, 2014) xxiv and Asia
(Lalor, 2003) might be more susceptible to sex
tourism with in some places a very high
proportion of under-age girls (UNICEF Pacific,
2006) preyed on by what is still called by
most people ‘prostitution’. Logically, criminals
24
target the places where weak legal systems
turn regions into sex tourism destinations (Willis,
2002). While one has to keep in mind not to
commit the mistake of minimising sex tourism,
studies also reveal that, contrary to popular
belief, the perpetrators of sexual abuses and
exploitation of children are also
overwhelmingly men from the local communityxxv (UNICEF
Pacific, 2006, p.1). The threat therefore
remains mostly local not international. In richer
countries the type of abuses is lessened but
still very clearly occurring with ‘many girls
reporting "sexual victimisation",
for example, by harassment or exposure to pornography’
(Walker, 2014). In the UK, the 2013 Saville
scandal broke. Saville, a TV and BBC Radio
anchor whose audience was principally
teenagers, was very famous, socialising with British
royalty and knighted for charitable services.
Post mortem investigations found he was guilty
of dozens of sexual assaults on children (8
out of 10 of his victims) and adults in National
Health Service hospitals over several decades
(Evans, 2015). Reports suggest NHS
participation with staff turning a blind eye
to Saville’s wrongdoings, as he campaigned for
and raised donations for hospitals, leaving
Saville with 24-hour staff access to services users’
rooms and ambulances (Evans, 2015).xxvi.
b) Migrations
Socio-economic and socio-cultural changes have
been linked with an increase in child
maltreatment that may be in large part due to
migrations (Lalor, 2003). Traffickers target
preferably people already victims of poverty
or underprivileged. Lack of opportunities locally
make people willing to take a chance elsewhere
and as they move, they get caught in the
migration process (O Briain, 2006)xxvii. The
migrants are especially at risks, moreover when
teenagers travel alone (Dottridge, 2008).
Also, the children of migrants whose parents have to
work in other provinces or towns are left
under sometimes unsuitable care (Lalor, 2003).
25
As a result, many children are left either
alone at home during the
weekdays after school or with nannies and
grandparents, who may not
give them proper care. Thus, they are
vulnerable to sexual abuse from
opportunistic predators (Madu & Peltzer,
2001, p.318 in Lalor, 2003,
p.446).
However, it might be observed that immigration
problems are predominantly internal rather
than cross-national. (Dottridge, 2008). Still
this finding may seem logical as globally, internal
migrations are much more voluminous than
cross-national ones. Nevertheless, those locations
that are at the national level and within
regions could reveal itself to be without much hope to
fall under any international purview and
protection. Here the extremely difficult situations of
being in no specific territories, being
outside or outsiders to communities, with financial,
administrative papers, identity and
nationality issues become what traffickers and other
abusers thrive to profiteer from. The
traffickers will transport some of their victims acrossborders
(Broughton, 2009) turning incompetency from
states to provide security into human
trafficking.
c) Employability
The traps of trafficking, and the need for
cash in absence of a regular job get interwoven.
People deprived of work become desperate for a
job and are taking many risks to obtain one.
Traffickers know it and exploit people
willingness to move out of their region (Orchard,
2007), which make them of course vulnerable to
any attacks.
26
Amalgam, is also used under the shape of
deception in ‘recruitment’. Migrants and other workers are
being trapped under false pretence of a job (O
Briain, 2006). They follow a recruitment
process and end up tied, physically
constraints, with their papers stolen (Galiana, 2012) and
any types of situations of forced trafficking
might involve.
For example, a young person might answer an
advertisement for work in a hotel or bar, but
end up prostituted in such a place. (O Briain,
2006)
Unemployment when imbricated with poverty will
have people facing survival dilemma. In
dire financial situations people then ‘may
then turn to theft, robbery and prostitution’
(UNICEF Pacific, 2006, p.21). They also may
then turn to trafficking.
d) By whom
The paedophiles and sexual trafficking
networks are becoming bigger, more complex, more
technologized, more internationalised, more
specialised and difficult to localize. However
here will be discussed not the traffickers as
people belonging to organized criminal networks,
but all perpetrators in the surroundings of
the children.
e) Surroundings
Just like for rapes, the mistaken emphasise on
‘stranger danger’ reinforced the false idea that
sexual abuses on children come predominantly
from strangers, but just like the whole
criminologist community of experts
acknowledges, in the majority of cases it actually comes
from the victims’ ‘extended family’ or from
friends, neighbours or acquaintances. Thus
‘abuses usually but not always are organized
by an intermediary (parent, family member,
procurer, teacher and so on’ (Lalor, 2003,
p.446), or in psychological term, ‘directly from
27
people they know and trust’ (UNICEF Pacific,
2006, p.viii). One can also remark that ‘the
use of inaccurate stereotypes’ on who may
abuse them and who may not or on the contrary
help them, will pose an even greater problem
to children’s vulnerability and how they may be
manipulated (Dottridge, 2008).
f) Family
That perpetrators are family members and
acquaintance (Finkelhor et al., 2005; US DHHS,
2007) is a general knowledge in every
comprehensive and representative survey on
paedophilia. It also would suggest that
intended perpetrations will be done by people
purposefully creating a family or family ties
or entering professions in close contacts with
children. This closeness to the victim makes
it particularly difficult for children to control
(Whitaker and al, 2007) and for others to
intervene.
Contrarily to what might be seen in the media
or entertainment platform, in US CSI movies
featuring ‘good’ to ‘very good’ cops ending up
‘re-entrusting’ abandoned child to sexual
networks to parents, more secured approach
should prevail. Although that the state can take
over children from parents is indeed a huge
concern as any abuses from the social services
(that are known to be at the sources of many)
would have too dramatic consequences on
family lives to be welcome whenever sexual
abuses were in fact non-existent within the
family. But at least very close enquiry and
partnership with the parents must happen when
suitable.
If family reunification or repatriation is
unsafe, child welfare agencies
mustwork to createa permanency plan that is in
the best interest of the
child (O’Neill Richard in Broughton, 2009,
p.45).
28
g) social services/care
Another very worrying data for the integrity
of the social services, and also for the possibility
of taking someone out of those circles, is the
incredible percentage of children ‘promised’ to
prostitution whenever they are under ‘social
services care’ (Kelly et al, 1995), or ‘vulnerable
youth on the street or from the foster care
system’ (Broughton, 2009).
h) Schools
Sexual exploitation and assaults against
female students and pupils by male pupils and
teachers have been documented as serious in
scale and gravity by Human Rights Watch in
South Africa. Another phenomenon on the rise
is the one of “sugar daddies” and “sugar
mommies”, that is older people targeting
teenagers need for help as teenagers lack of money
impact on their ability to pay for school
expenses (Lalor, 2003). Just like in Europe and
America where university students are said to
be more prone to ‘escorts types of cashmakers’,
alarmingly the raise in students’ fees and
living costs is at the origin of this
expending forms of exploitation.
At the worst of time, children may be sexually
abused and exploited
everywhere they go: ‘in the home, school,
community, in the workplace
and brothels more so especially in some
regions (UNICEF & ANNPCAN,
in Lalor, 2003, p.441).
29
i) Gender
Sexual exploitation is also gendered and in
particular where gender relations are violent
based (Dottridge, 2008) (Fong and Berger,
2010). Sexual abuses could be backtracked from
the very ‘social relations between men and
women, adults and children’ (Fong and Berger,
2010, p.19), and particularly due to ‘the low
status of women and children’ (UNICEF
Pacific, 2006, p.53).
Globally, sexual abuse and sexual exploitation
of children are due to
factors such as gender inequality and the low
status of children
(particularly girls), increased pressure on
families to engage in monetized
economies, separation of parents from children
due to conflict, natural
disasters and the migration of parents in
search of employment. (UNICEF
Pacific, 2006, p.53)
Also perpetrators are overwhelmingly males and
typically men with resources or other power
in the community’ (UNICEF Pacific, 2006, p.1).
Many feminist writers theorised on how
pornography or other representation
depicturing unbalanced gender relations, is in fact an
image or transcription of the power that men
have and exercise over women (Purvis and
Ward, 2006). Pedophiles are also said to look
for characteristics of children (e.g., compliance,
petiteness, submissiveness, etc.) in their
sexual relationships with women (Schell et al.,
2006). Of course the opposite must be true,
while infantilising women, they give to the
perpetrators legitimacy in how women are made
younger to satisfy the desire for a power that
brings (or is brought by) dependency and
manipulationxxviii. Even though feminist theories
have been deemed being not credible as their view
on how the state are supportive of abuses
because it is a conspirational theory and
therefore proves to be a reductionist view of men and
30
patriarchy (Purvis and Ward, 2006); here only
the word patriarchal is to be moved to render it
credible in the sense that the victims are not
all women but women, sexual victims of the
system as a whole, made by both sex.
j) Mediatisation
What the media has difficulties to report on
is the way people knew about it and never
reached for the alarm, as media themselves may
well under-report or under-investigate
situations not yet or not yet on the brink of
being the object of general scrutiny.
What might let someone in search for
information wonder with the media is how under the
spotlight are cases made famous- perhaps
sometimes because of their being more
researchable or because of the personally,
sociability, or popularity of the people involved.
Notwithstanding the causes, media will
typically be focusing on the plight of a few
individualsxxix, leaving the thousands other
at risks or in the shadows. They also take over
extraordinary cases, for example the murder of
Sarah Paine in 2000, and the lengthy
campaign following, advocating the
"Sarah's law", that would allow people to know the
whereabouts of released sex offenders, and has
been used thereafter as a pilot in policy in
some regions of England (Greenslade, 2008).
What makes this types of reporting questioning
the probity of the media as a whole is that in
contrast the work around ‘200 000 estimated
Britain’ s paedophiles of other paedophiles
hunt’ (BBC, 2002) stays very discreet, only
statistically mentioned without an effort at
discussing policies, protection, prevention, etc.
At the same time, one well may stop being too
disparaging of those reporting done by the
BBC for example as other media, from other
parts of the word may not even initiate the
debate or harbour the subject. Even if BBC or
other types of mass mediatisation are not
31
generally very informative, some images say long,
and succeed in showing what the
dereliction of a system that does not manage
to protect children from their sexual abusers
might look likexxx.
k) Socio-economic and socio-cultural changes
One of the parameters justifying the
socio-economic and socio-cultural changes argument is
the amount of secrecy and taboosation, even
though this is incrementally being overturned (O
Briain, 2006), found in what call themselves
‘traditional societies’. On a double account, not
secrecy but a forged version of what happens
or does not happen will getting worse, if
minorities or all other people do not trust
the judicial system or the police- moreover so when
the society at large practise a ‘do not tell
policies’. Out of this puritanism schema, some
traditional societies do not taboos things but
formalize those crimes, often societal crimes in
their scope and scale, through child marriage
(Lalor, 2003)xxxi, for example, or through
inextricable poverty, censorship or
illiteracyxxxii .
To illustrate how ‘forces of modernity,
“foreign influences,” and rapid social change’ (Lalor,
2003, p.440) have been pointed to as the
ready-made culprits is the simultaneity with which
people regard them to be the causes of abuses
but delayed ‘attention given to sexual abuse of
children in their own homes/communities’. As
SAAC are ‘qualified as being “unnatural,”
and very rare’, or unworthy of the
commentators’ origins or nations’, (Lalor, 2003, p.440)
perpetrators are covered and left unworried as
warnings against their crimes do not have a
place even in the oral tradition, or only to
assert them as inexistent or impossible- in one
word- unsayable.
As far as ‘religious’ societies consider
themselves to be traditional, child marriages whose
toll represent about one third of today’s
women aged 20 to 24 globally (UNICEF, 2015),
32
enforced prostitution (which in case of
under-age individuals can never be done with consent,
so will always have to be treated as
aggravated forms of tortures) and child molesting occur
in countries overwhelmingly defined as Hindu,
Islamic, or Catholicxxxiii.
Pope Francis has provoked a debate within the
Catholic Church after
being quoted as saying that one in 50 Catholic
clerics is a paedophile
(Mckenna, 2014).
Recently, and after disclosures of many sexual
abuses perpetrated by priests, Dumortier,
rector at the Pontifical Gregorian University
advocate the development of a ‘culture of
listening, a different face to the culture of
silence,” (Hornby, 2012, p.1)
This remark though supposed to support
effective punishment and imprisonment for SAAC
crimes, have been branded as “window dressing”
and that the Vatican should hand over their
files on abuses to the International Criminal
Court (ICC) in the Hague (Hornby, 2012).
Hindu societies have made ‘child prostitution’
- that should be called ‘child sexual
trafficking’ be it by their communities or
families - part of the cast system. Within the
Devadasi ‘cult’ women are being told that they
‘sell their body’ in order to provide for their
families (Orchard, 2007). It has transformed
forced prostitution into the appearance of an
obligation interpreted as a donation from
designated women to the community. To close-up
on any successful attempt at stopping that
plight, the devadasi’ victims are stigmatised while
put under unquestioned coercion coming from
the society as a whole as soon as they are
teenagers and obviously at an earlier age,
with that has been called “the power of the ‘whore
stigma’, which functions are to distinguish
‘‘virtuous women’’ from women in prostitution
(Pheterson, in Orchard, 2007, p 2387)”. The
devadasi’s inextricable social situation
33
demonstrates how a system has lost sight of
humane humanity, of sanity, or humanity itself
and rules through dire seclusion as girls and
awomen do not leave the houses (Orchard,
2007). The devadasi-dhandha cults literally
explain how seclusion from a knowing
mainstream society has worked in maintaining
social horrors in plain sight without them
being even denunciated.
l) Modernisation and the internet
The Internet has caused the most explosive
growth in child pornography than at any other
time in history. One of the reasons for this
explosion is that technology itself has greatly
reduced the barrier to entry for the production
and distribution of child porn. Cameras and
powerful editing multimedia software are
becoming more affordable and easier to use,
simplifying the process of creating and
distributing child porn (Schell et al., 2006, p.50) of
transmission from one pedophile to many other
pedophiles and from one country to many
other countries. (Schell et al., 2006, p.47).
The entire literature is pervaded with messages of
caution about how internetxxxiv (Schell et
al., 2006) (Esposito, 1998) (Beech, et al., 2008) and
means of communication. The multiplication and
inexpensiveness of media, and the hi-tech
level of forfeiture the mafia uses are a
direct threat to ‘cyber patrols’ that try to contain and
stop them (Prat, 2005). Internet is also
widely used because of its capacity at evading the law,
or of its not being regulated (Esposito,
1998). Internet addresses stay unanimous and is a
secure way to exchange illegal materials.
Addresses and websites are open and closed with
great ease (Esposito, 1998)xxxv. Of course
pornography will help intensifying ‘large scale
sexual exploitation of children and fuels the
myriad networks of active child abuse’
(Schlebaum, 1992, p.917). Finally, it will
participate in ‘legitimising’, ‘officialising’ and by
34
extension ‘legalising’ sexual abuses. When
material is found, the providers is asked to
remove child pornography, and it is only when
the provider fail to do so that the police will
have to intervene (Esposito, 1998). In other
words, evidence is just got rid of instead of being
traced.
IV: PROGRAMMES AND POLICIES
a) Convention
Covering sexual exploitation and abuses, the
UN convention on the Rights of the Child
(CRC) has been and remained famously the most
signed of all the UN conventions, every
country in the world signed it (except for the
United States of America and Somalia)
(Tepelus, 2008).
Such a universal stamp of approval only
reflects the common strict opposition to pedophilia
and stays essential to start true
international cooperation and shared converging effort.
The CRC has agreed to protect children against
all forms of sexual exploitation and
sexual abuse, and to prevent children from
being abducted, sold or trafficked for any
purpose. An additional Protocol to the CRC
sets out the minimum requirements for a
national law that will protect children from
sale, prostitution and pornography. (O
Briain, 2006, p.10)
35
Another one is the Council of Europe’s
Convention on Protection of Children against Sexual
Exploitation and Sexual Abuse (Lanzarote
Convention) ratified by 39 states (C.O.E, 2016)
with its Lanzarote Committee bringing together
all states that ratified it in 2007 came into
force on 1 July 2010 (Saxby, 2008). It looks
into a number of different areas including
‘prevention, assistance to victims, treatment
of offenders, prosecution and investigation, and
international co-operation’ (Saxby, 2008, p.
282). These treaties promulgating legal actions
against SAAC with intent at being
comprehensive are the clear signs that pedophilia is
politically addressed. Nevertheless, no matter
how public and diverse programs against
sexual abuses might appear, they all tend to
be for professionals and others already looking
for information. This will have to be warmly
welcomed because professional networking and
real build-on information and coordinated
actions remain a huge problem for professional.
Now, however vital the information to
professionals is, as long as the general public and the
potential perpetrators or victims are not
reached nor targeted, all will forcibly seem like a lost
battle.
b) Dysfunctional: a system of impediments
We saw how the judiciary failed at times in
the chapter II, here we will draw attention to
sexual abuses being internationally untouched
partly due to its getting away with sanctions
through playing with laws and locations. While
this global problem by nature especially
requires multi-layered organisations (Saxby,
2008), it suffers xxxvi from a lack of cooperation,
and liaison between non-profit organizations
and governmental organizations (Fong and
Berger, 2010) and even between non-profit
organizations to themselves and governmental
organizations with international,
intergovernmental or regional ones or across different
36
departments of a same organ or of a same
country (Galiana, 2012). Stubborn and endemic
refusal for keeping or sharing information is
recognised as being at the heart of the
impossibility of inaction (Galiana, 2012). The
lack of international cooperation cannot be
stressed enough as trafficking and the
technology they are using, including internet, make the
sexual exploitation of children an
international (Esposito, 1998) plague. On a topic of
international ampleness, a lack of
intergovernmental efforts creates vacuum, i.e.
unlawfulness. When international efforts are
made through legislation, the lack of homogeneity
for example, in definitions, changing
according to various national laws (Hornby, 2012) makes
cohesion and improvement hazardous and tedious.
The lack of uniformity also affects
strategies implementation and may cause their
being under-utilized in many countries
(Broughton, 2009) (Fong and Berger, 2010).
c) Human right, duty or responsibility
Most programs for the prevention of child sexual
abuse have focused on
potential victims, teaching them to avoid
child molesters. Such programs can be
important, but they are likely only part of a
broad solution. Programs focusing on
potential victims put much of the prevention
burden on the child, who may
have limited ability to engage in prevention
behaviors (Whitaker et al., 2008, p. 529).
A rights-based approach holds the aims of
ensuring that ‘the child’s best interests be given
primary consideration’ in all actions
(Dottridge, 2008, p 27); and is crucial in putting the
child needs as the objectives, as well as
structuring long-term types of interventions.
However, the child rights-based measures to
trafficking have for possible unwanted side-effects
37
the classic limitations of some feminist theories,
dominant in health and care, in that its focus
on the child has for consequences the
diminishing focus on perpetrators (Purvis and Ward,
2006)- here protection, prevention, punishment
and therapy. However, to avoid facing the
children’ carers or wardens cannot not solve
the problems in depth or before they occur,
particularly as children cannot fight for
their rights as the results of their dependency and
sometimes financial and legal tutelage. It had
to be noted that debates such as whether a
child's human right to education applies not
just against governments but also against a
child's parent (Stanford, 2016) still take
place within the human rights philosophers’
communities. As children abusers will use any
possibility for their crimes to stay ‘private’
whenever not in the possibility to officialise
them, this example of prominent question on
rights and duties could be troubling as
education is a key to children and teenagers’ bringing
up and for many the only public places they
actually have to attend.
d) Aid and Program’s solutions- holistic or
specific
The overwhelming message seems to be that
protecting children from this kind of
abuse is both complex and difficult, requiring
constant re-evaluation of methods and
strategies. (Saxby, 2008, p.281)
Just like Saxby notes below, what is true of
the social services, families, communities, is true
politically and the only way one will be able
to find justice and decency with lay in the
constant renewal, and thought again search for
better programs, policies and practices. Three
main objectives for actions to be
comprehensive come to the fore: to prevent human
trafficking, protect victims, and prosecute
traffickers (Fong and Berger, 2010) (Orchard,
38
2007). Just like explained in the first
chapter, holistic considerations are necessary to prevent
abuses. It is often because children run away
from harming situations that they start being
exploited (Dottridge, 2008). Responding to
these sets of needs and actions UNICEF has
advocated to address child trafficking for all
purposes (Willis, 2002). It however insisted on
taking specific measures to stop child
trafficking against mixing it with measures taken
against human trafficking as a whole
(Dottridge, 2008). However, when donors and actions
insist on dealing with all ranges of child
exploitation covering labour, physical violence etc.,
it diminishes the possibility for clear and
sustained programs specifically on sexual
exploitation or sexual abuses to take
placexxxvii (Dottridge, 2008). Variances will be present
between countries, and across community
(Willis, 2002). Besides, children suffering from
incest, and trafficking, two different abuses
processes and different abusers, will need
different type of intervention (Fong and
Berger, 2010). That children rights had not been told
apart from adult rights is of course an
aberration, as it meant that they were left at the hands
of their torturers. That a child’s history be
taken holistically makes sense as people have to be
aware of all the dangers, and too selective
approaches could not be but dangerously
incomplete, but amongst all these erroneous
amalgamations one more could be the one of
treating abuses of totally different gravity
the same way.
e) Raising awareness
A specific stance insisting on raising
awareness and building community resilience through the
use of public campaigns, training and
telephone hotlines (Orchard, 2007) is now often taken.
Awareness of the danger is of course fundamental
for people to be able to fight it off. It has
39
been said that even specialised professionals
(ex: social workers, police or immigration
officers, teachers, or here any professionals
in contact with children (Kelly et al, 1995)
may be very unknowledgeable about the dangers
but also the means of countering it (Kelly et
al, 1995); and let alone individuals, parents
or communities’ leaders. Awareness may also
seem the most urgent and sensitive as lack of
awareness strikes also the victims. They may
not know about their future (Orchard, 2007)
and do not realise they are the objects of
exploitation and not care, and thus cannot
entirely or successfully fathom on the present
calamities, the gravity of their situation and
of what they have been made to endure, or the
implications of what they have undergoing. If
raising awareness is not always enough, is that
the victims also may think it is impossible to
go away (Kelly et al, 1995), but more than that
one can be sure that everything is done by the
perpetrators to keep the victims in that state of
doubtless fear, resignation, ignorance and
more and more harming traumas for the rest of
their lives.
Though raising awareness offers great hope as
it would transform the latent inaction and
silent by default postures taken by the
authorities, the vast pool of ideas and prototypes
projects inducing awareness raising might also
hide the fact that campaigning the public
could have become NGOs’ prerogatives. And that
on the other hand scrutiny by or into the
states, only true powerful enough to beat very
organised criminals apparel or entire
communities will not be possible.
f) Schools
The states, after having suppressed
proportionate punishment by too well-known lenient
sentences on acts of paedophilia are also not
providing any awareness programs in schools.
40
Like HIV campaign education never or scarcely
reached schools, and when it was up to most
popular soap to make a significant raise in
people screening for the disease. Just like DST,
topics such as incest’s and juvenile
prostitution (sexual trafficking or sexual abuses), will
never appear at schools and yet less on the
soaps broadcast by the BBC or any other channels
(Gould, 2010). If a lack of education affects
vulnerabilisation; however, the education system
itself does not touch upon the subject albeit
its remaining the only way for children in danger
to be informedxxxviii. Awareness campaigns
play an important role in triggering disclosure
(Jensen et al., 2005) xxxix as well as helping
the communities towards preventive actions
through raising the problem and keeping people
on the watch.
g) Health reasons given as the redundant
reasons for countering paedophilia, not the
necessary attacks on predators
In terms of resolution, and justifications in
debates, the overemphasis on health to justify
condemning sexual abuses against children may
indicate that the health of children here is
primordial to establish, as cynically as it
is, as only the least of SAAC’s consequences can be
expressed through words: that sexual
exploitation is profoundly harming to its victims and
the society as a whole.
The society is partly guilty of it, which is
never the case with the victims.
The great insistence on women’s physical and
mental health and their ability ‘to other kind of
productions’, see (Whitaker et al., 2008) is
or may be again a way of minimising why sexual
abuses must be stopped. Insisting on people’
health versus their being tortures might remind
similar arguments used in environmental issues
where people keep forests not for all what
they represent, are and shelter but to have
future energy to burn. Within that types of
41
discourses, health might become a way of
advancing political agenda, enriching certain
people and institutions to the detriment of
others. Somewhat a person’s needs are attended for
what she will bring ‘materially’ to her
community’s economic potential, to a community that
would and have used her life for the same
effect via ‘prostitution’. In this framework of ideas,
the individual still belongs to the community
who is asked to bring her health in order to be
able to have better re-conduction, or
production rate. Yet again the stigmatisation of
prostitution serving the mainstream society in
that they are above questioning, to stop this
trade not because we let those atrocities
happen but because they would be healthier?
There is a growing recognition that the
prevention of child sexual abuse is a critical
public health concern (Daro, 1994;Hammond,
2003; McMahon & Puett, 1999;
Mercy, 1999; Whitaker, Lutzker, & Shelley,
2005 in Whitaker et al., 2008).
Ultimately, to try to convince people or
perpetrators of the wrong doing through means to an
end theorisation all over the literature and
put forward by the UNICEF itself, is of utmost
concern. Following the cosmopolitan view that
we might not reach an agreement not because
we agree on the causes but on the outcomes.
That is prostitution might well be ok, or not here
is not the question, women’s health only and
not the way people treat people and maintain
them into prostitution. A taboo on the state
of our society, displacement of the subject on how
come this type of violations co-occurs with
wealth and a more modernised, efficient,
elaborated world, that allow have and
have-nots and that anyhow could start counting
prostitution as work. Within these programs,
some initiatives can drive away from helping
the victims as far as harnessing the
‘distribution of condom or sexual health advise instead of
tracking down perpetrators and punishing them
with penalties’ (Siverts, 2003). If one cannot
deny that it will be preventing sexual
transmissible diseases; it is also mere accommodations
towards the crimes. Some will say that it
minimises the impacts without addressing what is
42
wrong and evil. But one could also say that it
is only enabling the terrors to last longer, with
professionalised ways surrounding them, with
nurses and social workers as helpers, instead of
the location holding child and adult sexual
trafficking to be judiciary, or militarily sized when
necessary, and no doubt it would be in many
cases in order to dismantle then. Instead of this,
children and under-age teenagers are given
‘sex aid’xl.
h) With what to help?
Even though many things are to be improved,
the support to victims of human trafficking is
also said to be getting better (Broughton,
2009). Priority should be on the need for a better
education (Brabant, 2011) (Siverts, 2003),
vocational training, recreational and social
services (Siverts, 2003). This is true for the
children as well as for the caregivers (Brabant,
2011). Organisations such as ‘Stopping child
marriage’ and many others, campaign for better
maternal health and every step towards the
inclusions of girls into sustainable economic
development (Brabant, 2011), that is basics
principles of equality and human rights for all
that are keys Millennium Development Goals
(Brabant, 2011).
Of course money and resources are
un-controversially needed to break the state of deep
vulnerability in which children and their
families, or future victims are secluded (Brabant,
2011), fated to inter-generational repetition-
even though perpetrators will take
families apart in order to prevent solidarity
(Orchard, 2007) or the better
possibility for self-help to succeed xli.
Although funds are crucial, questions remain
about how effectively they could be used if
societies are not using the big alleys, such as
schools, police, and judicial active
participation. Also as long as work is not a right, self43
sufficiency will not be reached by a portion
of the population. Finally, since paedophilia is
also a community, or society related problem,
it cannot be staunched by money only, but will
be fuelled by the power unbalances generated
by the injustice money provokes or permits.
Give money to the victims, while money has
been the tools or the motives of perpetrators,
just cannot be enough.
i) The danger of a so powerful tool
One absolute crime, the one of sexual abuses
against children, appeals for ultimate resolution
but what if justice becomes distorted
(Astapenia, 2013). One can feel how people in power
could end up resolving in transferring the
decision making concerning the child to the
institutions, going as far as separating
families that was functionalxlii, or just bullying and
pointing out parents whose only fault is the
lack of means (abuses of power where risks does
not exist in the family, for example how gay
parents could be targetedxliii as not being stable
enough because of their sexual orientation are
enough for the society to alienate or target
them). For yet another confusion in term and
amalgamation, paedophiles seek protection
under ‘sexual minorities rights’ often saying
that homosexuals are protected under that
category (Munro, 2014) (Huffington Post,
2016). Every at work dishonesty, and preestablished
power abuses could be used to pretend as a
right for an adult to enforce sexual
assaults upon children- or to attempt to lower
the age of consent (maybe similarly to the age
for voting to be lowered) in order for not
qualifying as rape by defaultxliv. Gay people or very
poor people or in precarious situations are
the typical examples of who have been
systematically pointed out as being
paedophiles (Daily Dot, 2015) because of course,
homophobesxlv or simply people wanting to
harm, and control others, would use a paedophile
44
label as the ultimate insults and through it
to put doubt on every aspect of the integrity of
those slanders’ victims. On the other hand,
decisions must be taken, and without forbidding
the child to still have this parents, to put
anything into place to bar any danger of sexual
molestationxlvi. Did sexual abuses on children
stay under-checked because of the enormity of
the allegations or revelation? What would
happen if people start pointing at without real
proofs, or abuse their power, i.e. the power
of assessing family suitability- no greatest distress
for a parent that the loss of their children
in case of offspring unjustly remove from family.
Or could it impeach, strong bond between
adults and kids to be formed, through the fear of
what situation of proximity or intimacy could
then inspire? Or stop distinguishing cases of
relationship between 16 years old and 25 years
old, and the persecutions by serial rapists or
expert traffickers?
In parallel to laissez-faire, usually the very
people, amongst them politicians that advocate
deregulation will champion punishment such as
castrationxlvii. Castrations as tortures have
been widely utilised historically; castration
laws are now applied in Macedonia (The
Associated Press, 2014), are considered in
Russia (R.T, 2011) and even Australia, and have
been used recently in the US (Johnson, 2011),
and in many other countries such as Indonesia.
Such mutilation will not stop a whole business
or social or mediatisation trend, that are
backed otherwise and nor will it stop the
financial causes, incentivising, domineering,
harming and sadistic attitudes, often at the
heart of sexual abuses (Purvis and Ward, 2006). If
failure of justice cannot be repaired. Also
paedophilia is torture and do not need a sex drive to
torture. Usually very fundamentalist people
asking for castration, might well be the same
people practising FGM or people for so
un-equalitarian society that they want to dig deeper
classification, that is castrated the
paedophile that did not stay hidden enough or without
enough protection. People advocating castration
the same people using prostitution, mainly
fed by un-equalitarian society and women
abused from the start of their childhood.
45
Emasculation, bundle of very violent emotional
reactions, while backed by regimes
producing inequalities, passive police, economic
and educational abysses. And creating
empires too separated and free from a too bias
and costly law. One therefore cannot count on
a circus trick, (while Female Genital
Mutilations are reintroduced in Europe and in the US,
just as cultural features) analogical enough
to the substitute ablation of the entire justice
system guilt.
LITERATURE REVIEWxlviii
a) Are collections of data working at all?
Writers’ opinions diverge. On one hand,
statistics attest that data processing has multiplied
(Dottridge, 2008) (Schell et al., 2006)
(UNICEF Pacific, 2006), on the other, that they are too
few or vague. Supranational successes have,
for example permitted the adoption of the UN
Trafficking Protocol, ‘prompting new research
and numerous publications on the subject’
(Dottridge, 2008, p.7). Of course the sine qua
non question of availability of data will occur.
UNICEF replies that the visibility of SAAC and
children sexual trafficking (at the other end
of the ones on measures promulgated to end it)
and the short period of time over which one
can gather insights is in itself telling about
how sexual violence against children is alarmingly
present (UNICEF Pacific, 2006). If growing
concerns maybe be witnessed, the reality on the
grounds says otherwise. Millions of children
are victims of paedophiles, rapists and captors
(Fong and Berger, 2010)xlix. If statistics
when they exist present an altogether different
viewpoint from those opinions, from people
affirming that things could look up while
46
statistics are tragically high, it must then
be the summary or typical diagnosis of a pervasive
phenomenon just coming to the surface. To
reconcile these data could be a simple appeal to
deduction. It must be that statistics are
implicitly assessed to have been higher beforehandwhich
is historically very likely true in many parts
of the world- whence a present
improvement on SAAC compared to a past
commonly afflicted with it. Amongst denials,
complicit atonements or normalisation of
paedophilia; concerns might in fact arise from an
otherwise desolate land. Even though results
from representative samples of populations are
more than disturbing, no appropriate sets of
actions are taken matching it. Is the production of
data working at all? Is a real dissemination
of the information taking place? Research cannot work
alone, but on top of their practical
limitations, they are not conceptually either resulting or
focusing on the eradication of these networks
or on pro-active, active and widespread
prevention, if research questions are more on
the nature of the crimes rather than on how to
put an end to them. When the eradication of
sexual abuses, its stages, efforts, failures, and
successes have not been the intense object of
queries, studies then would become the
repository of the determinative enclosure of
those violations to the few victims cared for and
to the criminals caught up occasionally and
released so distraughtly too soon (Kelly et al,
1995) (Galiana, 2012), escaping any suitable
length of punishment, so much so that their
inculpation could end up being the
attestation, and the public the witness of these harassing
crimes not being under threat, almost even to
the slightest.
b) Data collection
Findings will typically leave some regions and
languages under-scrutinised (Lalor, 2003). In
addition, ‘different adoptions of definitions
by regional or static organisations make data
comparison and research as a whole extremely
difficult’ (Dottridge, 2008, p.50). More
recently, a briefing paper for the 2ndWorld
Congress against CSEC (commercial sexual
47
exploitation of children) reported the
difficulty for quantification particularly in zones such as
the sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) (Lalor, 2003).
But these barriers to quantification do not
prevent the problems to be felt as existing
extensively (Lalor, 2003). Searchers do not need
surveys, statistics or professionally tightly
gathered data with the help of the government to
try to figure out the extent of sexual abuses
against children. In the sub-Sahara regions for
example, where the subject is openly,
willingly undiscussed (Lalor, 2003), ‘commercial
sexual exploitations’ of children in the
region continue to be extensive (Lalor, 2003). This
perception in this case comes from the ‘amount
of anecdotal evidence’ (Lalor, 2003), that are
more intuitive or deductive assessment than
statistics can be. Since sexual abuse goes
unreported (Whitaker et al., 2008), surveys
could play a special role, as a tool permitting to
initiate late disclosure, or bringing
awareness to the existence, the reality of what occurs.
Finally, enquiries or any investigations
related to the victims has to answer concerns over the
victims’ safety (Willis, 2002) through
specific ethical procedures. The victims’ safety is
given the possible degree of violence, gravity
and barbary of the offences is more than a very
serious prerequisite for the research
implications, but also may have people doubtful on how
much experts have been in a real, and
pragmatic manner fighting abuses- what are research
made with? Proper independent investigations
seem to be unlikely without very strong
security enforced by the states themselves.
Once rescued or sheltered, even then, while
thematically, psychology might be felt to be
dominant over other fields of study (compared to
political sciences or social sciences), if
there are many reviews on the impact of sexual
abusesl, there is much less said about how to
reduce the consequences of these traumas (Fong
and Berger, 2010) still affecting the victims.
At some point the accounts of the victims’
ordeals might stand for being the vestiges of
the rescue process of one individual only (‘lucky
enough’ to have been dealt with)- since the
vast majority have not been detected and have no
hope to be.
48
c) Aggregation of data
Amalgam in research comes under the shape of
data aggregation. However, how many more
specialists have been put on the task, we know
that results are impaired by groupings that
may not differentiate adults from children
(Broughton, 2009).
Countries, such as the Republic of Benin,
which have incorporated the concept of
‘worst forms of child labour’ into their
legislation about human trafficking
(Dottridge, 2008, p.8)
The data emerging from research are so
agglomerated that one cannot always differentiate
people suffering from domestic violence,
poverty, lack of education and when having
determinate that people suffer from
trafficking, the data cannot specify whether the
trafficking was work exploitation such as
child and force labour or trafficking related to
sexual exploitation (Dottridge, 2008). Some
others discard the enquiry on sexual abuses
altogether, and instead will list it under
‘physical forms of child abuse such as excessive
corporal punishment, infanticide, and female
circumcision’ (Lalor, 2003, p.443). The
resulting vagueness and approximation of
information could be at the sources of
impoverished, in fact misleading, almost
senseless, perhaps demeaning views- creating more
confusion or obscuring the truth about the
suffering and harm taking place. The practical
reasons for the origins of those entangled
pictures of real situations are that a crime is in
general followed by other crimes- whence this
accumulation. Also the multiplicity of the
assaults experienced is one of the main
factors rendering people less and less apt at fighting
back and at appearing in any surveys anyhow
(because of the possible many and repeated
49
traumas and tortures of various nature made by
the perpetrators purposefully). The
complexity and the extreme cruelty of what the
victim has endured might mean that someone
may be on statistics when she is a woman,
though having been a victim since she was a child;
she might suffer from drugs abuses,
prostitution, mental health, and illnesses related diseases
(Whitaker et al., 2008). She might be
exploited as a worker, and also abused and used
sexually. She might be the object of trade,
and be on record for poverty (Whitaker et al.,
2008).
Yet again, it demonstrates of an amalgamation
of ideas and data, but this could hide another
reality, that these violations such as sexual
violence are not singularised and therefore are not
more targeted and punished than other type of
abuses, less significantly ‘destroying, or
stealing’ the lives of the ‘imprisoned’
victims. This could be signs of an agenda of levelling
down of the penalties as to not being able to
punish any crimes efficiently, in a society that
had reverted to secrecy and not telling
anything to the authorities out of fear of being
sanctioned by abhorrent laws unable to set appropriate
and proportionate responses to crimesthat
is to sentence petty larceny and crimes of
this level of infamy with same penalties. This
absence might also come from it to be less
provable, as crimes might be conducted with more
discretion, secrecy, and that pedophilia is a
subject of great ‘shame’li, astonishingly for the
victims, and stigmatisationlii. Sadly,
professionals here to help might also be in no position to
further assistance in front of victims so
afraid and ‘brain-washed’ that they will refuse the
help given. Help might turn to be too sporadic
and hesitant, with the child and professionals’
situations being too at little protected, or
in too feeble situations to rally the resources
necessary to be safe from the abusers, the
networks of abusers or incompetent civil servants,
police, social services or NGOs’ staffs.
Societies permitting sexual abuses are clearly a threat
to the individuals interacting within or with
them (Brabant, 2011) (Orchard, 2007). If one
individual was victim of paedophilia it would
not be a lesser problem, but the numbers of
50
children violated instead of being the result
of isolation are the result of rejection, and render
less and less impossible hope for
interventions, changes, preventions, and even education.
d) Misappropriation of the language by
professionals
All the way, reports mention such things as
‘labour and smuggling’’ instead of ‘trafficking’,
‘child prostitution’, ‘sex industry’ and so
forth. To talk about prostitution instead of horrific
crimes and the punishment that are linked to
them, will with certainty impact on how these
issues are considered, tackled or ignored.
Prostitution should have been reworded to phrases
conveying how children have been traded and
sexually raped, neutralised, harmed and
tortured against money. The same applies with
children called prostitutes but not trafficked,
enslaved children by the sex trades. Alongside
it people tend to use vocabulary from a milieu
that endorses sexual abuse against children.
It is not even about the percentage of
professionals using these terms instead of
words reflecting the crimes they attempt to
designate. It is no longer the question, this
paper uses these erroneous terms similarly since a
lack of reformulation rules over the impossibility
of naming those abuses otherwise.
Professionals use the ‘new wave’ name
depicting what have been defended as being ‘sex
work’ for adults, and from there, one will
define victims as being within (or rather belonging
to) the ‘sex industry’ (Broughton, 2009, p.2).
The ‘sex industry’, as it is erroneously called,
using children as victims, is expending. Left
indefinitely like this and the by default
classifications, academic quotes and phrases
would then legitimate it as being a business
rather than a crime industry of the most
horrendous (if not so vilified) and punishable type of
abuses.
51
The number of children involved in national
and international sex industry
(Broughton, 2009, p.2)
as it is inappropriately and shamelessly
called
e) Rehabilitation, resocializationliii?
”13 Article 9.3 of the Optional Protocol
requires States Parties to “take all feasible
measures” to ensure all appropriate assistance
to children who are victims of offences
mentioned in the Protocol, “including their full
social reintegration and their full
physical and psychological recovery”
(Broughton, 2009, p.12).
It is true that aiming at full inclusion, and
full protection is essential and has by any means to
be reminded and observed. Though this kind of
formulation also infers that these same
professionals do not know what they specialise
in. They are the signs of a too easy,
permissive, self-uncritical, satisfied jargon
typifying once again that the burden is put on the
child (Purvis and Ward, 2006) to fully recovered
from what may be nearly impossible to. In
that case pathologies could be treated as not
normal and be punished as particularities, and
symptoms or signs (type of resilience or
healing processes that will be discounted, ignored or
unexamined) could then be perceived as
backwards or as inner deficiencies. It is also
forgetting or erasing the ongoing realities of
people having been or being harassed, and
victimised. It pronounces the abuses as
mendable, just a blip in the course of one’s life- it is
trivialising it. Even though people jargon
about sexual exploitation on children, they routinely
used economic terms just like ‘rehabilitating’
them into general trading, and where even
there, growth is ‘attained’. ‘Full
reintegration’ resounds as the pride of a social system that
52
simultaneously ‘allows’ that to remains
well-known and left aside perpetrations,
promulgating or providing at last, the
perspective of being integrated to the system: as a
reward, a final and late join-in.
f) Too little is conscientiously done
Research should demonstrate very detailed ways
of fighting networks, now not one example
is to be found. This would be possible while
respecting privacy data and other sensitive
information but the supposition is that the
police or social services doing investigations,
preventions schemes, or of detection, are not
really researched by independent boards,
assessing and evaluation information and
procedures, and also keeping the work of the state
and civil societies, and of diverse agencies
in check- with the enhanced possibility for
coordination, or self-awareness. Here again a
culture of secrecy harms professionals and
public with censorship on information, there
is no tracking down even towards the
institutions who are supposed to protect
population. That work frame impediments
transparency, and obligation to results.
Endnote on methodology: liv
CONCLUSION
Vulnerability, candour, ignorance,
inexperience, the need for help with self-development and
education- the inevitable dependence of
children or teenagers upon maturity and adulthood
are of course key elements at making the
enslavement of children easier. Perpetrators are also
using and exploiting poverty, as well as
employing deception, while the victims tend to come
53
predominantly from parents or communities
themselves undergoing precariousness, or from
families of perpetrators. When it comes to the
types of abuses, the statistics available tend to
not differentiate between them. Many reports
translate into agglomerated data not
distinguishing between physical abuses and
sexual abuses. Whereas agglomerated data blur
assessment accuracy and reliability, often
children sexually molested suffer from many other
abuses. Though a lot of research has been
carried out on traumas, writers denounce a lack of
literature around how to treat the victims
towards better recovery; this also reflects the lack of
social and legal measures ending the victims’
isolations and sufferings.
Abuses reflect also how criminals organize
sexual tortures and other excruciations as sexual
tortures generally imply innumerable forms of
deprivations and agony, compiled in order to
maintain the victims in states of complete
coercion and imprisonment, be they physical,
mental, financial or social. While labour
exploitation could be compensable, sexual
exploitation is not, as it leaves unhealable
physical, psychological and mental injuries. It
involves successions of manipulative
onslaughts achieving the objectives of stifling, stealing
lives’ skills, or any possibility of even
living. Chapter two has at its core the main causes of
low rates of convictions. These are proven
records of inappropriate legislation, defective
enforcement or even complaisant police or
magistrates. These deficiencies show a practically
de-facto tolerated pornography, rife on the
internet that has become a venue for abusers,
strengthened networks, and participated in
‘legitimising’ the occurrences and recurrences of
crimes.
Agonisingly, under-aged individuals may be
harassed for ‘prostitution’ related offenses such
as solicitation or incitation instead of being
taken care of. Judges might protect pedophiles
associations and activities or literature
under ‘freedom of expression’ regulations. The
children, not only the victims of organized
crimes sometimes of international scale, will be
the victims, and the admonishment-bearers of
police itself. Police and the judicial systems
54
proven to be criminalizing children and
teenagers as if they were part of or responsible for
associated crimes, is the ultimate betrayal,
stigmatisation and denial by the only or at least the
unavoidable place where one should be given
and be able to ask for protection- more than
that they are openly complicit in acts of
terror. Between people pushing for predations to be
accepted and the reprobation of victims, one
could draw a parallel with what happens with
prostitution, and how it could be used for
sexual abuses against children (SAAC). The
criminalization of prostitution spurred on the
movement for the legalisation of prostitution,
because officials do not help people victims
of prostitution but in fact further harm them.
Chapter II and III converge in reviewing the
lack of coordination and cooperation between
international and national legislative
departments, policies and agencies, and the openly
disengaged judicial prosecution and punishment
systems, supported by a culture of secrecy or
of toleration that validates abuses.
Chapter III addresses the larger communities’
reactions or roles. Rare peak viewing time
programs about pockets of child sexual trade
operate unhidden serve as indicators of how the
rest of the society is ‘tolerant’ ‘or
blinkered’. The subsequent but not subsidiary question is
by whom the abuses are perpetrated, condone,
downplayed, normalised or ignored. What has
started to be demonstrated is the way these
crimes perdure, and this tacitly because of the
mainstream systems’ inability, the systems of
the majority, and therefore everybody’s failure,
at fighting back. Within that account, the
question still not quite answered in the literature or
in this dissertation, is how much vulnerable
society itself may be (and how come it is) to let
itself and the children it is supposed to protect
be violated in such horrific ways. Half of the
answer lies in the rate and frequency SAAC are
committed, in places including family,
schools, and social services. Economic, social
and cultural changes may be accused of many
an evil while cultures or the patterns within
which people insist on hiding behind the
protection of amorality they benefit from, are
at the origins of a system tolerating, even
55
pushing for abuses to happen. The depiction of
pasts or places rid with paedophilia is often
use for ideological reasons, or for nostalgia
to help getting away from present responsibilities;
if not for openly adulating situations that
were more prone to incest and explicit enslavement.
The traditional argument is an epitome of how
cultures use social reproduction in order to be
conduct atrocities they do not combat or
acknowledge.
Advances in technologies that are made in
favour of criminal rings and that are not matched
up by police or legislation, and social
fractures not social changes, have facilitated people
exploitation of one another. To talk about
changes for the worst being responsible is also true,
what does not change however is that whenever
societies permit the fragilization of
individuals, then plights often extensionally
growing onto the vulnerabilised individual loom
and hit. Chapter IV acknowledges the
building-up of conventions and programs of
intervention. At the international level,
professionals are still tied and in many ways defeated
by a lack of data at the national level. The
lack of will or of means will logically impair or
render impossible worldwide data collection,
and coherent, coercive actions. As for the
NGOs’ input, though indispensable, a trend in
correlation with lesser sentencing, their
programs tend to focus on how warning parents
and children (though parents may often be
made powerless or the direct/indirect reasons
or the facilitators of the abuses) or
psychologizing the situations of the abusers
or victims alike without aiming enough at
tackling causes external to the immediate
children’ s environment such as targeting networks,
or solving the debilitating results often
yielded by police, social services, and all other
specialised agencies failing their duties.
Perhaps though hopes might lie in better efficiency in
coordination, cooperation, prevention,
protection and recovery schemes, all of which are in
place already.
56
Health reasons has been given as the redundant
reasons for countering paedophilia, not the
necessary attacks on predators. Justifying the
crack down on SAAC this way is to assist to a
diminished argument of justifications and
morals between people who fight paedophilia and
those who would like to see it legalised. To
have to argue this way is the proof that
combating the rape of children is not to be
taken for granted but has to be positively and
strictly protected), as people winning over
the possibility of the laws becoming even more lax
on these crimes against humanity could in fact
be imminent.
Facing an overwhelming numbers of unresolved
cases, politicians also could be prone to have
recourse to sporadic means of tortures, like
castration, or the stereotyping of perpetrators in
launching homophobic campaigns advocated
within societies that back pornography the rest
of the time.
That the amounts of academic inputs have risen
is only normal, and go with increasing
interest for social sciences in general. Poor
quality has shown through reiterated
classifications or disqualifications of
aggregated data, of which amongst many others, is data
being about adults instead of being about
children - or of surveys not distinguishing between
the two. Data and information collection at
times are so extremely vague that it suggests a
taboo strongly influencing professionals and
researchers. Furthermore, very serious questions
about definitions or wording are present
through core texts. Severe lexical malapropisms such
as disserting about ‘the prostitution of
children’ rather than sexual atrocities and
sequestration, and repeated, organized,
institutionalized serial rapes, or about an industry of
sex rather than designating it as criminal
coalitions conducting the perpetrations of those
atrocities. Offenses that with not doubt when
organised or the subject of re-offending belong
to crimes against humanity
However, one will have to interrogate
themselves on whether this is a predicament due to
language limitations or not. Academics and
professionals in many papers and lectures or
57
interviews, and in fact purely academic ones,
that have for responsibilities to establish
communication, public relations, and a common
and shared vocabulary, cannot misuse words
by mistake on a regular basis. The role of
scholars is to understand and use words in an
appropriate manner as they convey directly or
indirectly the frame of meaning in which the
more official side of society will be able to
communicate, legitimizing unfit vocabulary can
only be the officialisation of atrocities into
trade or into normativity (reflecting or following
decriminalization). People’s and above all
academics’ inadequate lexicon could be nothing
but still slightly hidden political statements
about their approvals or not entire disapprovals of
‘prostitution’ and the violation of children’s
entire lives. If children are said to be easy to
manipulate, then how should we qualify or
interpret these words, the keys of understandings,
of premises, the leading and asserting powers
they have on people?
While erroneous words are used, the same
impasses are met when writing; more appropriate
words are just not there. Similarly, it is
when trying to avoid repetitions that one has to come
to the conclusion that crimes with such
implications do not have synonyms. Then tortures,
abuses, crimes, agony, excruciations, are in
use permanently and at all time one must come to
the admission that even the strongest words
cannot but abysmally minimize the truth. In this
field, one found themselves, in a continuous
manner at a loss for designations, real
descriptive or prescriptive phrases or expressions.
When looking for synonyms of victims, the
dozens supposed to be the closest to the term
“victim” ’s are derogatory and colloquial.
Names such as ‘scapegoat’, legal or insurance
vocabulary such as ‘party’, or ‘casualty’ that
stop conveying the nature of the attack, and
therefore the culpability. Lack of preventive and
punitive actions, lack in data and access
bringing awareness and enabling criticism of how
seriously and effectively or not SAAC are
stopped by the authorities just shows how the
overall mechanism is unsuccessful in treating
it as a national concern. Parallel to SAAC, two
huge reasons for it being unsuccessfully
tackled is prostitution as a whole and unemployment.
58
They are of great concerns since the need for
cash will allow perpetrations to go on. In
contrast with the sizeable on air time or
items anwering to worries about how to perfect
childhood and all other periods of life’s
wellbeing in these parts of the society free from the
fear of trafficking, many other discussions
thrive on how to secure future ‘sex workers’.
Could society be the victim or culprit of some
kind of militantism in prostitution politic? As
succinctly demonstrated, the importance of
prostitution here is creeping in again, because
those destructive, violently, intrinsically
harming crimes against children are how criminal
rings secure future ‘sex workers’ or the
future of sex work. Abated through legislation,
media, inertia, SAAC are a societal product,
and must be resolved by society. Now SAAC are
also the effects of unemployment and the
glorification of financial gains by any means or
whenever one does not have to justify the way
money is exchanged. That SAAC do not urge
proactive reactions resulting in program able
to reach every child is or the sign of the
institutions being cynically drafted or
drawing onto arguments of debilitative fatality, or the
sign of social and political subservience to
SAAC.
The conclusive comment is how little is done,
and contrarily to how serious the propagation
or at least the consolidation of the problems
is, through technical means and more and more
complex networks and associations, of what
cannot be more heinous types of crimes. A
consensus of ‘that should never happen again’
has been issued on persecutions such as
genocides. Remembrances days and regular
campaigns have triggered awareness of these
horrors of the past and modern history as a
warning against present ones. Martyrizing
children (besides genocide other important
criteria: its being the result of mass violence)-
should be treated, as far as organised crimes
and recidivism are concerned, as genocide legal
equivalent, prosecuted and punished like any
gross crimes against humanity. All SAAC
obviously cannot be treated the same,
according to gravity, age of the criminals, nature of the
attack and moreover by the very possible lack
of awareness doubled by incentives of the
59
sexualisation of relationships potentially
playing an important role in the attacks or sexual
acts, i.e., people guilty of SAAC out of
ignorance or immaturity rather than intent to destroy.
On a whole, as a defence against legislative
ambiguity or defection, a duty of proportionality,
reciprocity and balance prevails, leading to
call into question how has been made possible
that daily rapes and molestations, the sexual
exploitations of children- without forgetting
those of adults- are not regarded and
sanctioned just as any other genocide attempt would be?
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APPENDIX
i Associations, laws, judiciary, executive,
civil servants, and civil society.
ii the United Nations Convention against
Transnational Organised Crime 2000, and in Article
4 of the Council of Europe Convention on
action against Trafficking in Human Beings 2005:
“Trafficking in persons” shall mean the
recruitment, transportation, transfer,
harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of
the threat or use of force or other forms
of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception,
of the abuse of power or of a
64
position of vulnerability or of the giving or
receiving of payments or benefits to
achieve the consent of a person having control
over another person, for the purpose
of exploitation (O Briain, 2006, p.22).
iii
Many of the girls forced into prostitution in
Atlanta were kidnapped or lured from
public places, such as movie theaters,
schools, bus stops and shopping malls. After
years of victimization, many of these girls
looked similar to child prostitutes from
abusive backgrounds despite their
circumstances and different means of entry into
prostitution. (Fong and Berger, 2010, p.313).
iv The millions of victims go in stark
contrast with the low figures of indictment or victims’
protections issues by Interpol or other police.
Despite explanation or rather watering down
factors such as growing population, more
powerful tool of ‘distribution’ and of unsupervised
or clandestine networking; or more positively
that actual abuses are not hidden by child
marriage, the complete absence of
criminalisation, of reporting or of prosecutions, we assist
to a growing strength and impunity facing an
often disempowered, distanciated or disengaged
public, politic and legal opinions or
mechanisms.
v From an attempt at mapping the general literature
about the fight against paedophilia, a
feeling of almost vacuum or desertion might
arise. Come up various, but not numerous,
articles about a few mediatised stories,
depicting the horrors lived or live by one, not by the
hundreds of thousands current victims left
aside. Also to test academics’ works against the
more populist viewpoint and actions led
publically through media, or information programs
aiming at the general population or addresses
to professionals such as social workers,
teachers, or within the tourist industry is
not really possible due to the, what could be named,
a taboo stance, a culture of secrecy only
rivalling or mirroring by the culture of secrecy of
criminality, or sectarian obscurantism on the
subject.
Paucity of data could or in fact more than
data but investigat ions and follow-up might
also be due to low level of disclosure. In
searching a topic, one has always has to
interrogate the present debate and
information. When individual analyses mostly in the field
of psychology resorting on the plight of a
little number of victims, the paucity of all of the
latter might come from the primary lack or
opacity of information or investigations. In turn,
blatant vacuum might come from the
disequilibrium of power the subject touches on. The
victims are caught between the grey area of
familial and private doing, easily manipulated by
abusers forcing people into ignorance, doubt
and silence, between a judiciary system
notoriously failing their duty, and traumatic
events that may have impaired the victims
cognitively, and a mid-lawful mid-criminal
mafia making billions of dollars through the
exploitation of sexual predation and
depravation – a consumption of sex supported by and
supporting violence, abuses, staging rapes and
entrapment, exploiting people made
vulnerable, and poverty, altogether aiming at
them becoming what will be then appreciated
and justified as being common and normalised.
65
If literature sometimes suggests or an
increased number of research or the too little quality of
them due to lack of funding, lack of
coordination or just political, judicial competency or
will; the overall acknowledgment is that even
though, there might be a growing concern for
sexual exploitation, and sexual abusers
preying on underage children, it is nearly not as much
as the echo of decupling actual means for
trade and spread of such paedophilic
marketization’. Every one attests of this:
through internet and the coordinated
internationalisation of criminality, networks
keep on developing. Those criminals are not
caught. It is due by the lack of cooperation
between different national or regional polices,
states, policy-makers and also by the weakness
or evasiveness of certain policies while others
are openly lenient, and damaging to the
children victims of these horrific crimes. Internet
stands as an ever extensionally decupling
means of sharing incredible amounts of
information, at a very fast speed, and at no
cost. Vastly unregulated criminals of such grave
and pervert, sadistic activities such as
paedophilia remain quasi-unworried, as websites and
forums will stay unanimous, and anyhow not
investigated. Protocols such as the internet
service providers deciding to close
paedophilic or other forums, without even to have a duty
to call the police, therefore precluding the
police in turn from exerting its duty to investigate
it, tied with a duty to perform in a proactive
and professional way.
vi Here lack of information is definitively an
issue for a person that think they are legally
being left at the hands of the perpetrators,
or legally detained or abused, but information still
is likely not to be enough without
authorities’ protection of victims. Even when it is there, the
nature of being children render the victims so
dependent of their abusers that to know about
the crimes if prevention is not done actively
would equate to just wait for the victims to turn
up by themselves, and to be immune to the
glooming perspective of becoming a victim when
in care via the social services.
Since families are the primary barriers to
abuse or the ones that may convey it, and the first
environment in which a child is raised;
unfortunately, solutions to abuses or at least to
patterns that would lead a child to being exploited
in the future are difficult to put in place.
As we will see later in this dissertation,
education within the communities and actions
forbidding children prostitution and
prostitution at large, together with real job opportunities
for everyone underlined how structural,
comprehensive and global, solutions have to be.
vii Most victims of international trafficking
come from Southeast Asia, Latin America,
Eastern Europe and Newly Independent States
and the average age of child victims of
trafficking is about 13 or 14 (Barnitz, 2001;
Boxill & Richardson, 2007). Although
the trafficking of boys for commercial sexual
purposes is typically unreported, the
International Labor Organization (ILO) and
UNICEF estimate that 2% of all
commercial sexual exploitation is with boys
(U.S. Department of State, 2008 in
Broughton, 2009, p.39).
viii Broughton goes on specifying that
trafficking of persons occurs also domestically and
vulnerable childrenviii within the United
States are at-risk of sexual exploitation (Broughton,
2009).
66
ix A growing number of American children are
trafficked into the national and international
sex industry (Fong and Berger, 2010).
x
At the family levelx: Low level of education
in the family, sexual abuse within the
family, lack of family support within the
educational system, substance
abuse/addiction/alcoholism, history of abuse
and violence within the family, lack of
communication between parents and children,
absence of parental support (O Briain,
2006, p.4).
including subcategories of Childhood Abuse,
Poor Parenting Practices, Parental
Instability, and Parental Loss. (Whitaker et
al., 2008, p.535).
When trying to established a profile of the
children the most at risks most of their
vulnerability comes from family themselves
being perpetrators, by letting perpetrators
abusing them or by not being able to protect
them (in case when family or communities are
the targets themselves). Though this account of
the situations does not help solving what will
appear to be caught in vicious cycles.
Moreover, it dismisses how much the environment, as
in the society and not the family, are letting
people suffering just because laws do not reach
the ones that are hidden, the ones without
resources, and in case of children the ones that do
not have knowledge enough because of not being
exposed to legal and societal system and to
what society should provide as safety nets in
order for familial and private abuses to not go
on.
xi Although child prostitution is often
associated with international trafficking, Estes and
Weiner (2002) showed that this is only one
aspect of child prostitution. Estes and Weiner
(2002) suggest that as many as 244,000
American youth are at-risk of commercial
sexual exploitation each year (Broughton,
2009).
xii
Commercialised or not.
This could constitute one of the causes or
consequences why no real attempt at educating
children against sexual abuses do not occur at
school. As a displacement of the taboos when
it is dealt with, whereas it has been proven,
even despite the fact that main campaigns put
forward the evidence that most predators are
known to the direct surrounding of the victims
and not caused predominantly by people
strangers to the child.
Of course, focusing on trafficking is crucial
but as in reproduction and production, as long as
criminal networks are not as powerful as to
kidnap and detain their victims, many of the
children and of the adults victimised this way
have been victims from their earlier age within
their familial or community environment. Not
tackling private or familial issues are an old by
default judicial and political stances that
lead to the impossibility of look into what
communities as a whole do. Yet again the fact
that situations are not defined properly could
67
lead to the system being unprepared vis a vis
intervention. However, that commercial sexual
exploitations are neglected is also a valid
comment. The focus is on the sexual abuse of
children in the home/community, as opposed to
the commercial sexual exploitation
of children (Lalor, 2003, p.460).
Maybe then when it comes to intervention as
news about rigs dismantlement is very few
apart, also through lack of testimony.
xiii crimes knowns to bring money, and whose
trade is to inspire a daily terror enabling the
trauma and tetanise people thorough their
lives.
xiv Child marriage, paedophiles networking, be
them informal, official or the outcome of total
abandonment to what is done within families or
within mafia or criminal circles are certainly
the main components attached to this effect.
xv The Supreme Court has had trouble drawing a
line between legal and obscene sexual
images. Some judges, like Black and Douglas,
argued that the First Amendment protected all
speech, including sexual speech and images
arguing that the legislature, not the Court, should
draw the line between (Schlebaum, 1992,
p.916).
xvi
xvii Boxill and Richardson (2007) found that
these children were frequently involved in
the juvenile justice system and their behavior
criminalized. As a result, their
abductions and long histories of physical and
sexual abuse were ignored (Fong and
Berger, 2010, p.315)
xviii Tate admits to "genuine fury at the
bland complacency of lawyers, judges, and law
makers," who persistently choose to
misunderstand, disbelieve or reject evidence
(Schlebaum, 1992).
xix Capture how children are found and placed
within societal circles seemingly seamed by
the very authority of citizens’ everyday
security and justice.
xx Girl C said her adoptive mother went to
social services in 2004 to beg
for help. She said: "Mum wrote to all the
key people in social services,
called her own case conferences, invited
agencies and got them sitting
around the table, but they just passed the
parcel between them – and all
the while, I was getting increasingly under
the power and influence of the
gang." (The guardian, 2013, p.1).
Two years later council agreed to put the girl
in a temporary care home, but by then
Girl C said: "It was too late: the
grooming process had run its course. I was
completely under their [the gang's]
control." (The guardian, 2013, p.1).
68
Shortly after she was trafficked from Oxford
to London for the first time, Girl C said,
she had tried to talk to staff at the care
home but was told the conversation was
"inappropriate" (The guardian, 2013,
p.1).
xxi A question on wording remain, on how
victims may be able to understand how to report it.
To this effect, and the one of prevention, and
also the ones of making sure that offenders
associate pedophilia as a crime and not be
themselves victims of immature judgments or be
influenced by pervasive tendentious societal
attitudes.
xxii Would it be due to a changing society
losing some of its humane values or economic or
social stability or the growing concern and
will of starting tackling or at least addressing the
problem or even the fact that paedophilia
cannot be hidden any longer within families’
system such as when the children are in total
dependence of adults or families or when facing
a reluctant police or states.
xxiii The UNICEF report found that 120 million
girls and women under 20 had endured forced
sexual acts, with such experiences especially
common in some developing countries - about
70% of girls suffer sexual violence in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo and Equatorial
Guinea - and an estimated 50% in Uganda,
Tanzania and Zimbabwe, UNICEF said (Walker,
2014, p.1).
xxiv A UNICEF report published this week
details the plight of more than 500 sexually
exploited children and a flourishing sex trade
serving mainly German paedophiles and “sex
tourists” (Schlagenhauf, 2005, p.1).
[…]
children are picked up at petrol stations,
supermarkets, bus stations, and lay-bys by male,
often middle-class, Germans (Schlagenhauf,
2005, p.3).
The clients are paedophiles or sex tourists
who drive to the Czech–German border
specifically for child sex, attractive because
of the reduced risk of “AIDS and other diseases”,
she said (Schlagenhauf, 2005, p.3).
xxv Amongst the Gusii people, crimes are
perpetrated particularly by ‘classificatory fathers of
their victims (i.e., they are closely related
members of their victims’ parents’ generation’) or
‘rape of prepubescent girls by adult men or
actual father-daughter incest’ (Lalor, 2003, p
442)
xxvi In as far as hidden or inclusive sexual
perpetrations are concerned, from castes, to
criminal rings, to child marriage, or dire poverty
and unemployment, and lack of resources
where peer pressures towards degradation is
more certain to take place, another confusion
might run its course. The inducing of amalgams
with consent or nature or functions where the
society is so corrupted that duress or
physical coercion is induced in and within the whole
system. Where people do not hold any power and
rights to their own person and in equality to
69
others, and in which subjugation is sustained
with mental and psychological brain-washing, a
culture of silence and a culture in fact a
community all pressurising or letting people
enslaving and torturing children. A system of
exclusion and seclusion practicing disablement
via social circles.
xxvii
Human traffickers operate in circumstances
where there are large
numbers of people who are desperate for a
better life, because of poverty,
or lack of real opportunities, or because of
personal difficulties, and when
there is a demand for their labour or services
in another place. Much of
the ‘demand’ is for sexual services. (O
Briain, 2006, p.6)
xxviii In any cases, all of these
characteristics are but derivatives of societal constructions that a
society looking for signs of possible
enslavement would like to imagine as being the best way
to suit all parasite-like stances they could
then impose.
xxix Only one story one at a time, impeach the
bigger picture to emerge, result maybe of what
cannot be investigated, journalists cannot
hold only on witnesses but would have to process
onto the gathering of other types of evidence.
xxx From the diverse scandals in rich
countries involving rich individuals, to the 2015
grooming scandals in the UK, to the USA very
high rates of child ‘prostitution’ and marriage,
to countries like Cambodia, Thailand and the
Philippines or specific towns in eastern Europe
or Africa, the targets of ‘sex tourism’
profiteering from what society as a whole proves itself
to incompetent to authoritatively stop.
The great advantage of the images is that they
prove how journalists, infiltrate or follow
networks of paedophiles, without any problems,
in an often completely open-air places where
the ‘sales’ of children for sexual abuses take
place daily. These reporting though not
academics by nature just demonstrate how
police, justice, law and human decency has then
disappeared from the very society ruling them.
xxxi Also what if the state is unable to raise
or help children, such as with the Saville scandals,
or the scandals that go on and on but quietly
in care industry = whatever privatised or not or
‘agencised’= the state care system leading
children to prostitution or condemned life barred
with education.
Poverty that makes everyone in situation of
vulnerability (Whitaker et al., 2008).
xxxii When no valid reason is given it has the
potentiality or role of a statement, fabricating
myths of arranged and forced marriage, child
marriage and what will be called ‘prostitution’
of underage girls and boys -maybe located in
neighbour places that the one discussed- and in
unreported situations, where all people are
foreign and strangers, where investigating one’s
clans would rhyme with banishment.
70
xxxiii Hidden as well through forced and
arranged marriage or ‘simply’ by ‘officialised’ or
totally despised ‘adult prostitution, which
just up to now, is not fought or is not viewed as
prostitution with sexual horrendous crimes
against minors, but just as prostitution whatever
the setting, degree of abuses, enslavement,
coercion, dependence, autonomy, and age of the
victims.
xxxiv
In a sense, excluded from the radical feminist
approach to intervention means that the
focus is shifted from men who sexually abuse
are not outside society but neither are
they wholly reducible to it. They are neither
totally powerful, nor the victims of forces
beyond their control (Purvis and Ward, 2006,
p.303).
Sexual practices serve to create and maintain
power relations between men and
between men and being: sexually in charge,
dominant, sexually successful, detached
and self-focused, predatory, conquest-like,
phallocentric, secretive, and immoral,
whilst minimizing sexual inadequacy (Purvis
and Ward, 2006, p.303).
For some men, therefore, sexual practices such
as sexual behavior with a child may
be a key experience through which power is
derived and masculinity is accomplished
(Purvis and Ward, 2006, p.307).
Such as the inevitability of heterosexuality.
Trained to appear heterosexual or not
homosexual, will justify any sexualised
behaviour, forced sexualisation role or enrolment
(allegiance, mimic, imitation) of the
relation.
Furthermore, the emphasis on children’s
obedience to adults and male supremacy over
females allow men to yield a double authority
over girls (Lalor, 2003).
xxxv
Internet is the ‘absolute best hunting ground
(for a) pedophile’. It is "the most
efficient pornography distribution engine ever
conceived." Child pornography is
particularly rampant on the Internet because
pedophiles can transmit and download
illegal pictures anonymously (Esposito, 1998,
p.3).
xxxvi Like for other types of campaigns aimed
at redressing tort or addressing government or
populations even with endemic and serious
topics, energy and information often get lost on
the way.
xxxvii We also have seen that added to the
confusion on how to define and target precisely
those abuses, the sense of their being
particularly horrendous, and the sense of its gravity, and
with it the appropriateness of sanctions and
the emergency of such situations, have affected
the cohesion and coherence of actions at the
same time as leaving people in inaction or
without the necessary tools.
71
xxxviii: Media though have an effect on this
issue, one it may render the issue unrealistic, from
the virtual domains, just like pornography or
suggestive images within mainstream mass
media features younger and younger people, by
process of infantilisation and others. It also
makes the ‘trade’ of paedophiliac literature,
image, depiction or actual acts, its proliferation.
xxxix
Another 6-year-old boy was able to tell his
mother of sexual abuse by his
older cousin after his sister, mother, and he
had watched a television
program about paedophiles (Jensen et al.,
2005, p.1408).
xl In any account how can we count on
disclosure of the worst evil, while professionals of the
mainstream society are all around facilitating
it to appear cleaner. The most horrendous on
that account is the sizeable amount of
academics and social workers of all types openly for
prostitution and supporting it.
The reason to counter pedophilia for the sake
of society, productivity and health and not to
free individuals from torture and enslavement,
brought up the questions on the debates
themselves- open towards a mean to what end?
xli Vulnerability is a key word. But instead
of being the vulnerability of the victims only,
‘vulnerability’ of community and even of the
society and its guards, such as policies, polices,
legal system and the social services are here
implicated. Or else how can one explain such
results. When not complicit, it takes to be
endangered, or to be too weak to be able to react
against, to account for the amount of inaction
or inappropriate measures taken, letting what is
called the sex industry to its atrocities.
xlii potentially dangerous a cohort of
psychologists and social workers, liable to subjectivities,
salaries pressures, judgmental attitudes,
social services eager to create jobs, normative
pressures, neglect, misinformation, tight
time-management, and much more given that the
notorious use of the system psychologists put
into place obeying pharmaceutical priorities on
one hand and possibly be a tool of political
coercion on the other hand could be when starting
to be invasive and judgemental of situations
that may be too complex and intricate to gather
without a much more profound work that the one
operating.
xliii Destroy lives in turn, as the same
mentality that permits children to be sexually abused or
enslaved, would permit the notion of
paedophilia to help them with destroying the lives of
those falsely accused with it- that clearly
deserves worst term of imprisonment and
disqualified sanity, and responsibility (could
affect right to vote, obviously to certain
professions, and in fact affect people action
and interaction within society). When in fact in
turn people would be held at gunpoint with
such accusations, ironically orchestrated by the
actual abusers themselves, as well as how adults/children
relationship could be affected in the
72
distanciation people would have to take facing
a suspicion or rather frantic control done out
of hysteria or power abuses).
xliv It is when one could suspect that
sentences are equal to rapes against adults but not on
rapes against children, of rapes, often when
rapes on adults are themselves trivialised, even
though both should be treated as egregious
crimes. All the same, rapes against children has
something the society cannot prevent without
the most drastic imprisonment- for recidivists.
xlv All very conscious fake attacks usually by
persons agreeing with other types of abuses, but
frightening enough for people to revert into
all kind of silencing.
xlvi This is a very delicate matter, as long
as psychological, and mental abuses are concerned.
But having stating that we have to admit that
a place for all family giving safe shelter, and for
all children, a place of education, equity and
security is not always available at all, and this is
the bigger issues of children that finally are
abused with so much ease, because of the
children being removed from society. This is
thus a societal problem concerning politics and
class, and the educational system, that are
all at the very heart of the construction of societies
and communities.
xlvii The gathering of thousands of indecent
assault on children on each computer (BBC,
2002) gives an idea on how widespread
commercial abuses is.
xlviii Growing number of victims. This phrase
is certainly the most shocking and widespread
in the literature on present sexual abuses on
children. While the number of crimes reported,
noticed and dealt with is on the rise, one
also can suppose that the number of the known or
suspected victims is up because concern itself
and world population are increasing, and not
due to a level of abuse that is getting worse
compared to past situations when cultures of
secrecy and tabooisation have stifled the
discussions or condemnations around them, and
normalised these horrendous perpetrations
altogether. Also the now possible or permissible
expression, reporting and criminalisation
contribute to a swell in statistics about the numbers
of victims, but might be a positive outcome as
before solicitude could not have been
expressed. If a better awareness of the extent
of child sexual abuses occur, then a better
defence ought to follow.
xlix ‘The United States are higher than
international estimates of abuse. In North America
several studies show that 30–40% of female
children and 13% of male children experience
sexual abuse (Bolen& Scannapieco, 1999;
Briere & Elliott, 2003; Corcoran & Pillai,2008 in
Fong and Berger, 2010)
l If the literature on the subject is very
interesting and the object of vast academic study, at
times the account of actions may be suggesting
inertia or data duplication. Redundancy of
data, and scenarios, same descriptions,
sometimes not really needed from official reports of
73
papers (UNICEF Pacific, 2006), make the reader
wonder whether people end up reading the
same classic information about perpetrators,
situations, without added details or notions.
li Whatever the reason, it is combined with
all other abuses, and at the same time includes all
other abuses, as aggressions by nature sexual
and the degree of coercion it requires, will also
be physical, emotionally, psychological mental
violations all at the same time (Lalor, 2003).
It also consequently aims at keeping children
as totally dependent in order to be kept in state
of slavery, the long term aims their abusers,
by triggering and upholding traumas who harm
children and teenagers cognitively.
lii lii More research than intervention, or at
least more papers on research (victims focused)
rather than papers on how institutions fight
back, and punish, and on how to improve their
efficiency. Many researchers remind the fact
that their studying a crime, in fact of the worst
kind, make the subject very secretive, at the
image of the criminal society perpetrating them.
But what can only make matters worse is that
in addition to enquiring into mafia-like or
‘private, familial horrors of incest’, is how
academics research itself has been impaired by
secretiveness. They themselves work on
statistics and case studies once one survivor out of
thousands have been sheltered. But what about
the process and the dire necessity of
surveying police, social workers, and
activists themselves into dismantling mafia networks?
Ultimately, what might push someone to research
the subject is not the lack of research
themselves but the lack of measures taken
against it
liii These amalgamations through data is one
of the many seeded by words. It makes us
oblivious of the gravity of what sexual abuses
are. The ‘killing’ of an individual, whose
traumas goes beyond repair, because of the
abuses impact themselves but also as society not
through disempowerment this time but complicit
actions often reacts with further
stigmatisation. Why these abuses could stay
unhealable? Not because of their victims’
fragility but because society knowing remained
passive, not actively enough stopping and
preventing.
liv I searched the web, randomly and openly to
have a vision of not only the academic debates
but also a more popular or journalistic
approach. I have consistently searched academic
libraries. In addition, I browsed the net in
order to address more specific questions and to
substantiate my thesis or suppositions, to
bring about precise evidence or to deepen analysis,
possibilities and limitations. I found that
the web was poor in information. This subject
brought often ‘no results’ in academic sites
or results but within what will be view as
'unqualified', informal websites.