Most parents are at least 80% sure that they are doing everything they can to protect their kids from anything that might harm them out in the big bad world. They take them to the bus stop and watch them go off to school. They censor what their kids can see on the internet. They put the parental controls on the TV so that they can feel secure knowing that those little tykes aren’t hearing any F-bombs or seeing naked body parts. But what if the thing parents should be paying more attention to isn’t what the kids are seeing, but instead, who’s seeing them?
The issue of child sexual exploitation on the internet is bigger than most people realize and there’s no doubt that it’s a sensitive subject, that can be hard to bring up. But nevertheless, the question is there. How massive is this lingering epidemic, and how easily could it become something more than that thing that ‘would never happen to you?’ This question is a very important one to ask if society is ever going to recognize a social catastrophe when it’s there. And, in retrospect, there aren’t many that quite take the cake like this one. One thing is for certain, however, there must be a serious change in perspective and awareness if anything is going to improve for these kids. The people in charge and everyday members of society can all do things as large as terminating entire forms of currency, or as small as just making sure their kids are being safe on the internet. An article about the direct sexual grooming of children on the internet, used a quote from researcher Elisabeth Staksrud that said, “the Internet does not make children more vulnerable, but might make already vulnerable children more accessible” (Winters, 65). And that is exactly what the internet can mean when the increasingly useful technology is used for the worst possible thing a human being can do.
This issue is just as extreme as most of those big ticket issues you hear about on the news everyday, but the difference between all the other issues and the one at hand, you ask? This topic doesn’t end up in the headlines like the others because it is so heavily avoided by those who can actually do something about it. This is all because the hard truth is that most of the corporate thumbs that we are under, are participating in the very thing that we are so incredibly disgusted by. The people who direct our children’s favorite tv shows are rumored to be molesting the child actors behind the camera. But even outside of that hollywood drama, even at home, parents who are not fit for the title are parading their kids around on Youtube doing extremely suggestive things for views and likes from the most despicable crowd. For instance in a recent epidemic of pedophilia on Youtube, all a person had to do was search up a specific term and they would be met with hundreds of videos of children spredding their legs, holding up pairs of their underwear, and posing in very suggestive positions.
One of the phrases was “Webcam video from”, which would bring up results of webcam style videos of children who all appeared to be younger than ten years old, doing all the things listed before, and more (LeafyIsHere). These kids weren’t nude which was ultimately the reason why Youtube wouldn’t do anything about it in the beginning, but if the thumbnails alone are anything to go by, these children were still being heavily exploited. The comments on these videos were an obvious sign that the posters were reaching their the intended audience, in that they would say extremely perverted things encouraging more sexual behavior from the kids in the videos. Not to mention the videos with the most sexual thumbnails (i.e. the kids posing suggestively or holding up pairs of their underwear) would receive anywhere from 500,000 to a couple million views, while the more innocent looking videos wouldn’t achieve anything even remotely close to that (Thafnine).
While all of this is going on barely anyone is talking about it because it makes them uncomfortable and they don’t think it’s their problem, while the children who are falling victim to this everyday are kept silent because their voices are too soft to make waves. They are ignored and made to feel responsible for something that they should have been protected from. In fact out of all the kids who suffer from abuse, only about 80% of them disclose it to someone, and while that seems like a fairly solid number, less than half of those kids are telling an adult or person of authority. Instead they are mentioning it to a friend who likely can’t do anything to help them (Lahtinen et al., Abstract).
So why are we letting this happen and why haven’t larger steps been taken by companies who claim to be in favor of the people? How can we look down on something and yet turn a blind eye to it at the same time? And what exactly can we as regular people with little political platform actually do to make a change in something so deep-rooted and sick?
There are many ideas that the people in charge have been toying with to stop the circulation of child sexual exploitation material (CSEM). For instance, the debate in 2017 for a ban on net neutrality would’ve essentially made the internet less accessible to the everyday person. That may have stopped some of the sickos on Youtube and other perfectly accessible sites, or at least made it more difficult for them to carry on doing what they were doing. But the people from the massive cesspool of sites underneath those, would’ve, no doubt, found some way to keep going.
Think about it this way; just like Sigmund Freud’s idea of the mind, the internet is similar to an enormous iceberg where mainstream websites are only the very top, floating above the surface, where the dark web (that is- similarly to the bottom of Freud’s iceberg- fueled by sex and aggression), takes up every inch of ice that is submerged in the pitch black, freezing water. Most of the content in there, besides the hitmen, drug dealers, and alleged cannibal chat rooms, is CSEM and other unspeakable things that are right up that alley.
So if this part of the internet is so vast, and yet the government can only access a small chunk of it, why wouldn’t the people behind the masks, be able to work around these things? Surely the ‘great minds’ running our country would’ve thought of this, unless they are too power hungry, and busy with their ego-centric feather flaunting, to consider the fact that there are people out there who are smarter than they are.
Don’t worry, they may not be willing to take on that plan of action, but there is still something that the government could push for from their positions of power: The termination of bitcoin. This is one of the more largely circulated solutions because bitcoin is the largest among the few currencies that can be used to purchase anything on the dark web, because it is untraceable (Piazza 521), and it’s no secret that one of the topics people love talking about is how much they hate bitcoin. I’ll try not to delve too deep into any conspiracies, but if all we ever hear about is how much everyone hates bitcoin, and how terribly counterproductive the system is, why are we keeping it around, instead of creating a better system in its place, if not for the link it has to the dark web? This only goes full circle back to the part that the people in charge are playing in this, and that almost indefinitely stretches even bigger than CSEM, reaching all the murky corners that the dark web has to offer.
Now apart from getting rid of bitcoin, another possibility would be increasing the criminal punishment for sexual crimes against minors, or at least making adequate punishment more of a concrete guarantee. In an article written on the subject, titled “Sex and Kids”, Jacob Sullum did make a point that I could seriously get behind when he said, “Something has gone terribly wrong with our criminal justice system when the same offense can be punished by five days in jail or by life in prison, depending on the whims of legislators and judges.” (28) Despite when this might obviously come off as, the message here isn’t that child sex offenders should be given longer sentences because sometimes that can only cause them to just come back stronger as soon as they get out of prison. To elaborate, in a study conducted by two researchers from Boise State University, who studied the rehabilitation rates of child sex offenders based on the varying punishments they received. And with all variables considered, it was ultimately found that offenders who were convicted and sent to prison to serve rather lengthy sentences, were more likely than any to offend again, as opposed to those who are put on probation and supervised (Patrick and Marsh 106).
Of course to anyone with a cultured view on these things, that would seem like a completely unfair outcome because how can we simply let someone so evil go with nothing but a slap on the wrist. How can we live with ourselves, knowing that they walk the streets? Do we just lock them up for life or even send them to the chair because we simply can’t take the chance of their relapse? This is where we come to a halt because morals are undoubtedly arguing with statistics. Yes, we don’t live in a world where sex offenders are always held accountable, in fact we even put them in positions of power so high as the President of the United States, even when they’ve at least been accused of sexual misconduct. But when it becomes personal and the victim is your own child, it’s very obvious that anyone- even those who cast votes in favor of alleged sex offenders- would back their kid up and want the worst for the scumbag who hurt that child. At least this is what we hope for from parents.
That’s not always what we get however, because as mentioned before, most kids who disclose their sexual abuse only turn to their friends or siblings, who usually can’t do anything to help. So when did we get to a point where the child’s friend is more approachable than the parent on a subject like this? Why are kids so afraid to tell anyone about what they are single handedly going through? Yes, we’ve drifted a little off topic into actual sexual abuse, but this is only because this goes hand in hand with the presence it has on the internet. Most of these kids, who are exploited on the internet, may not be getting touched but they are being filmed, and photographed on a wide variety of platforms. Those two things, both degrading, and both disgustingly predatory, are arguably just as bad as each other.
If, for whatever reason depending on the situation, the kid won’t come forward and confide in a parent or guardian, it becomes the adult’s job to look for the signs and do whatever they can to protect their child from this side of our world. Sure there are some cases where that’s impossible and no matter how much the parent did, they couldn’t have prevented it, but in most cases all it takes is a little more paying attention.
This doesn’t all mean that we need to be further excluding all the ‘sketchy’ looking people that we see or have in our lives. Because for most, that’s exactly what “paying more attention” and being cautious means. In fact, while everyone is busy deporting the mexicans, pulling their children away from black people on the street, and ex-communicating their LGBT relatives, the real culprits are skating by without a second glance. To put this into perspective, a study was conducted on child pornograpy offenders, in 2013, by five university researchers from New Zealand. They studied the demographic of the male offenders and what made them do the things that they do.
Overall, one thing that stands out in this study is the fact that the very large majority of the men that were observed were caucasian, heterosexual, married fathers in their mid-forties (Merdian et al. 5-6). These concrete results go against everything that people have been feeding the media about predators for years. The things that fuel hate and discrimination aren’t even true and all it’s doing is moving us further and further away from protecting the kids. Even when the offenders in that demographic are caught they’re very rarely given the same punishment when compared to those of different ethnicity or sexual orientation. This teaches kids that if they are being exploited by someone who fits this build, they shouldn’t come forward because their attacker somehow isn’t as bad if he’s white or straight. It also shows the offenders that because of their privilege, they can get off scot free, even with a truck full of incriminating evidence, while a black man is only accused and already hauled off to a cell. Yes, I can admit that this might be a little bit of an exaggeration and the world doesn’t exactly operate how it did in To Kill a Mockingbird, but nevertheless, our cultural views on certain things are still quite corrupt.
The point here is that the perspective is due for a serious shift if anything’s ever going to change. People need to stop judging off of appearances and recognize that anyone is capable of anything. Not to mention, equal punishment absolutely must be implemented among every single offender regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation. Female offenders should be treated just as harshly as male offenders, white offenders shouldn’t be looked over, and members of the LGBT+ community, as well as people of color, shouldn’t be singled out as pedophiles and dangerous perverts.
While it might not be completely clear what the best approach to attacking this problem would be, that is the very purpose of exploring these methods. Because while we want this to go extinct, nothing will happen in this dark and screwed up world we live in unless we do something. Whether that’s something as large as the termination of bitcoin, or something as small as simply knowing paying attention to the signs that your child might be keeping something as big as this from you. Either way, whether we want it or not, it’s our responsibility to at least help the majority of the kids who could be doomed to become statistics in a messy legal system that should’ve been doing the bare minimum to help them.
Works Cited
- Lahtinen, Hanna-Mari, et al. “Children’s Disclosures of Sexual Abuse in a Population-Based Sample.” Child Abuse & Neglect, vol. 76, Feb. 2018, pp. 84–94. Academic Search Ultimate, doi:10.1016/j.chiabu.2017.10.011.
- LeafyIsHere. “Child Exploitation on YouTube.” YouTube, YouTube, 6 Jan. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU_kgAqr5Og.
- Merdian, et al. “So Why Did You Do It?’: Explanations Provided by Child Pornography Offenders.” Research Commons, 9 Sept. 2013, researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/handle/10289/7976.
- Patrick, Steven and Marsh, Robert. “Sentencing Outcomes of Convicted Child Sex Offenders.” Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, vol. 20, no. 1, Jan. 2011, pp. 94-108, doi:10.1080/10538712.2011.541356.
- Piazza, Fiammetta. “Bitcoin in the Dark Web: A Shadow over Banking Secrecy and a Call for Global Response.” Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal, vol. 26, no. 3, Summer 2017, pp. 521–46. Academic Search Ultimate, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=123824519&site=ehost-live.
- Sullum, Jacob. “Sex and Kids.” Reason, vol. 48, no. 11, Apr. 2017, pp. 26–35. Academic Search Ultimate, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=121231055&site=ehost-live. https://doi.org/10.1080/10538712.2011.541356. Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.
- Thafnine. “Child Exploitation on YouTube.” YouTube, YouTube, 19 Mar. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=cm7v07zYq1k.
- Winters, Georgia M., et al. “Sexual Offenders Contacting Children Online: an Examination of Transcripts of Sexual Grooming.” Journal of Sexual Aggression, vol. 23, no. 1, 2017, pp. 62–76., Academic Search Ultimate, doi:10.1080/13552600.2016.1271146.
