KNOWING my topic for this week, my boss warned me not to log on to any child pornography Internet sites. He needn't have worried. I have no wish to see what they are selling; my dreams are disturbed enough without leering into the murkiest depths of the humanity barrel.
But this is nothing less than an admission of journalistic failure. It is the hack's duty to investigate and expose the worst of mankind. The adage "out of sight, out of mind" fails the exploited and comforts the corrupt.
If we are to believe Pete Townshend, it was for these altruistic reasons that he accessed a child pornography site. He intends to expose the horrors of this trade in a book, he said, after it was revealed that the police were investigating him.
It would be wrong to speculate over Townshend's motives any further as the investigation is continuing. But we should be exposing the worst of this vile trade to broader scrutiny. How many thousands of children will we allow to be degraded before forcing ourselves to look?
Townshend's arrest, part of the Operation Ore police investigation, coincided with two other developments yesterday. Firstly we revealed how the Church of England is placing child protection officers around the York diocese. And Rebekah Wade took the editor's chair at Britain's biggest-selling daily newspaper, The Sun. She is the woman who caused a storm at the News Of The World with her name-and-shame campaign against child abusers.
Hopefully, she is not planning something similar at The Sun. That was one of the stupidest stunts in recent newspaper history. It whipped up public hysteria to the point when paediatricians were beaten up by vigilante mobs, and drove child abusers from the law-enforcers' horizon. Instead, we must strive for balance. We should seek to protect children from the warped sexual drives of adults while not leaving children and their parents too scared to trust anyone.
The Church's scheme is on the right lines. Anglicans have learnt from the Roman Catholics that hoping the child abuse problem will go away is not a sensible approach.
There will always be paedophile clergymen, just as there are paedophile teachers and scout leaders. Every occupation which involves unmonitored access to children will be attractive to an unreformed child abuser. The Church's child protection officers are trained to spot the danger signs before harm is done. That is a welcome additional level of security, not the brand of base revenge peddled by Ms Wade.
It is harder to police the internet paedophilia industry. Already it is a crime to log on to a child pornography site. One national newspaper commentator, Rod Liddle, argues that this is too draconian: "We should not be in the business of putting people in prison for simply looking at things".
He is so wrong. If people did not pay to look at pictures of children being sexually abused, those pictures would not be taken, and many of the children involved would never be violated. The internet customers are accessories to the actual crime as much as if they were in the photographer's studio. They know it, and they deserve to go to jail for it.
That is why Operation Ore is good news. British officers now have the details of 7,000 people who subscribed to a US paedophilia website. They must all be waiting for a knock at the door. Others who considered stepping down this dark path will be deterred by the knowledge that the internet is not as anonymous as they had hoped.
Updated: 11:12 Wednesday, January 15, 2003
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