Kieren

Another, more general, point to raise is that, according to the Copine report, 85-90% of indecent images of children on the internet are at least 10-15 years old. This seems to be completely at odds with the ‘accepted truth’ that the production of child pornography has increased eponentially since the arrival of the internet. The poster above talks of an ‘industry’ being fuelled, but is there any evidence of such an ‘industry’?
I understand that myriad organisations have claimed that there’s a child porn industry worth $20billion a year. I find this impossible to believe. There are about a billion people with internet access… they would each need to spend $20 a year. I don’t know how many people per year pay for such images, but I would assume it’s a couple of million at most, meaning that each of them would have to spend tens of thousands of pounds per year on child pornography. Absurd, yet this figure continues to be bandied around as an accepted truth.
What we really need is for good journalists to look into all of this to find out the truth of the matter. Unfortunately, were they to do so, they would be guilty of a variety of crimes and would be locked up. As it is, we are stuck with accounts that just don’t add up.
Someone needs to ask questions about what evidence there is for such claims, and why normal legal process doesn’t apply in cases like Langham’s as well as unpicking the incredibly woolly logic behind the crusade against those who download child porn and behind sentencing applied in our courts. It seems insane that someone can be sentenced to years behind bars and lifetime monitoring by the police for looking at a picture. Even worse is the fact that people who aren’t even guilty of looking at a picture can suffer the same fate, as has happened with many of those caught up in Operation Ore.
I find it deeply disturbing that logic, evidence and due process (which should surely be the cornerstones of any legal system) all seem to be abandoned in any case with a whiff of terrorism or paedophilia. The general public have always been a potential mob of pitchfork-weilding witchhunters but it seems that, in any case involving terrorism or child porn, the legal system and the media become equally unhinged and unreasonable. The way it’s escalating, with thousands of pages of new legislation being churned out each year, I dread to think what kind of world we’ll be living in a few years down the line. Presumably thousands of people who enjoy a little bondage will be on the sex offenders’ register once the government passes the planned laws against porn with violent/bondage content. No doubt they will then be denied access to their children and will find it impossible to get a job. When I was at college, the first jurisprudence lecture law students would attend was on the Spanner case - brought against a group of sado-masochists who enjoyed things like having their scrotum nailed to a table. The thrust of the lecture was that a lawyer must get over his/her moral squeamishness about something most people find abhorrent and deal with the logic. Harm must be demonstrated, it’s not enough to lock people up because you find - in the Spanner case - homosexual sado-masochism distasteful. It’s sad that the principle seems to have been lost.

Despite the assurances of some very dodgy research and statistics, there is in fact no correlation between the suggestion that someone who looks at crap is going to go out and actually do it.

So Chris is guilty of a human character trait older than the desire to mate; curiosity. Lets be real, this hysteria isn’t about the ‘poor children’, but about control. Control in that some people believe it’s right and proper to control and micromanage every aspect of everyone else’s lives. Up to and beyond controlling even human curiosity.
What next? The need to pee?
Take it from me, it wont be long before those fulltime campaigners will have us all putting our hands up before we’re allowed bathroom breaks before too long.

Chris Langham has always had - and will continue to have - my support. He is no less of a person for having screwed up and his only screw up was not realising that curiosity like everything else these days, is a privilege that belongs to someone else.

Kieren