Thesis: just like recently rapes have been recognised as war crimes, paedophilia is used as a genocidal leverage.
HERE THE LINK TO THE PDF DOCUMENT WITH THE CORRECT LAYOUT:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B951r5KrNXNeUXZTSXd5MHFzRm8/view?usp=sharing
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
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 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 system[i] 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.
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 (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 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 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
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 appears on popular, high-circulated
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
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
deficiency[iv].
"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 authorities. On those
lines, many draw attention[vi] 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).
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 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
(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).
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
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).
b)
Monetarisation[xii].
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 represent[xiii].
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 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 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 tolerated[xiv].
‘This secretive, highly organized trade is protected’ (Tate in Schlebaum, 1992). The upper-hand 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 find 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 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)[xvi][xvii].
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 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 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 themselves[xix].
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 or could 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 the 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 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 disclosure[xxi] as
to how society as a whole manages or fails to face and even fails to be
speaking about those crimes[xxii].
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 these grievous crimes (Lalor,
2003), certain regions, or countries are particularly at risks[xxiii]
(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 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 community[xxv]
(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).
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
across-borders (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.
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 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 must work to
create a permanency plan that is in the best interest of the child (O’Neill
Richard in Broughton, 2009, p.45).
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 cash-makers’, 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).
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 manipulation[xxviii].
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 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 individuals[xxix],
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 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 like[xxx].
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 illiteracy[xxxii]
.
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), 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 Catholic[xxxiii].
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 demonstrates how a system has lost sight of humane
humanity, of sanity, or humanity itself and rules through dire seclusion as
girls and women 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 internet[xxxiv]
(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 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)
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 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 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 above, 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, 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 place[xxxvii]
(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 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. 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 informed[xxxviii]. 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 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
wrongdoing 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 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, self-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 functional[xlii],
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 targeted[xliii]
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 pre-established 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 default[xliv].
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, homophobes[xlv] or
simply people wanting to harm, and control others, would use a paedophile 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 these parents, to put
anything into place to bar any danger of sexual molestation[xlvi].
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 (example of underage person
with someone just a few years older), 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 castration[xlvii].
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.
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 REVIEW[xlviii]
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
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 beforehand- which 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 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 abuses[l],
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.
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 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 crimes- that 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 stigmatisation[lii].
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 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.
The number of children involved
in national and international sex industry (Broughton, 2009, p.2)
as it is inappropriately and shamelessly called
e)
Rehabilitation, resocialization[liii]?
”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 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 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
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 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 conducting 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.
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 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. 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 programs 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
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 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).
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 investigations 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.
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’. Everyone 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
children[viii] within
the United States are at-risk of sexual exploitation (Broughton, 2009).
[ix]
A growing number of American children are trafficked into the
national and international sex industry (Fong and Berger, 2010).
At the family
level[x]: 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).
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 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).
[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).
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 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.
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.
[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.
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).
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.
[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 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 assaults 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 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. I therefore came to the conclusion that it is an
academically very under-researched subject.