Sunday June 27, 2004
Society still buys the lie about kiddie porn
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Why does it take a child killer to point out the obvious to us?
Last week, Michael Briere pleaded guilty to the sexual assault and murder of ten-year-old Holly Jones in Toronto, on May 12, 2003.
Warning – if you have a weak stomach, don\’t read on.
According to Briere\’s own videotaped confession, he grabbed Holly around the neck while she was on her way home from school, took her to his apartment, stripped her, tried to rape her, strangled her, and then stuffed her body into his refrigerator. He didn\’t know how fast bodies decompose, he told police, “but I didn\’t want the neighbours to be able to smell it.”
Then he cut her body up into disposable pieces with a hand saw. He stuffed her torso into a black gym bag, her head and arms into an old suitcase. He took them on the subway down to Toronto\’s waterfront, and dumped them there. He cut up Holly\’s legs, put them in a garbage bag, and put them out for municipal pickup.
But here\’s the point. Briere said that he was driven to his crime by watching child pornography on the Internet. “The more I saw it,” said part of his statement, “the more I longed for it.”
And to the police, he said, “I really wanted to have sex with a child. That was all-consuming.”
Cause and effect
\”Times New Roman\”> “It\’s one of the few cases that we can point to and say, this guy was triggered by looking at images of child pornography,” said Hank Goody, the crown prosecutor. “We\’ve always speculated that that was the effect, but I\’ve never seen a case that so clearly demonstrates, he went literally from viewing images of child pornography to snatching and sexually assaulting Holly Jones.”
Reactions split over Briere\’s confession. Roz Pober, of the anti-child-porn group Beyond Borders, said the case confirms the link between child pornography and sexual abuse. “If a person\’s watching sexual abuse,” she said, “they\’re watching it for one reason and one reason only – they want to have sex with children.”
But some saw Briere\’s confession as an attempt to shift the blame, to portray himself as a victim of wider sinister forces. In a column headlined “The abomination of Briere\’s excuses,” Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno wrote, “But for the images he\’d downloaded from the Internet on that fateful day, Briere insinuated, he might never have stepped outside his apartment to abduct a child off the street…”
Briere even became a political issue. Stephen Harper accused Paul Martin of being soft on hard-core kiddie porn, because the Liberals had failed to crack down on it.
In one sense, the charge had no more validity than Jack Layton\’s claim that Paul Martin was personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of homeless transients, because he had failed to build affordable housing.
Soft on pornography
\”Times New Roman\”> But in another sense, Harper\’s accusation had some truth. Not just Paul Martin but all of us have been soft on child pornography. We\’ve treated it as a peripheral issue, affecting only a few disturbed deviants.
However, a U.S. Postal Service study found that 36 per cent of those who collected child pornography admitted to having had some physical, sexual contact with a child. And even that\’s only those willing to admit it.
Given the universal availability of porn on the Internet, that\’s hardly a peripheral number.
Porn publishers – in print or on the Internet – persistently claim that far from inciting criminal activity, their products offer catharsis. People can indulge their fantasies vicariously, without actually going and doing it.
They\’re lying, and they know it.
Do subscribers buy Better Homes and Gardens so that they won\’t feel an urge to fill their homes with leather furniture or elevate their gardens into showpieces?
Do women buy Cosmopolitan to rejoice in sagging breasts?
Do men buy Road & Track to feel content with aging Plymouth Reliants?
All these publications have one purpose – to encourage readers to emulate a selected lifestyle. Why else would advertisers dump dollars into their pages? To provide catharsis for potential customers? Hardly!
Why then would anyone suggest that graphic depictions of child rape, mutilation, beating, and murder have the opposite effect on viewers?
The proposition is ludicrous. By comparison, the spin on political gaffes fades into insignificance. Yet our society continues to buy the lie.
Virtual community
\”Times New Roman\”> The same week as Briere\’s confession, a Belgian court sentenced Marc Dutroux for equally horrifying acts against young girls.
Marc Dutroux and two female accomplices apparently kidnapped, raped, tortured, and ultimately murdered six girls between the ages of eight and nineteen. Two of them starved to death in a “dungeon” under the cellar of one of Dutroux\’s houses. Dutroux\’s ex-wife, Michelle Martin, fed the dogs guarding the dungeon, but not the girls. Two other girls were drugged, gagged, and buried alive in the back yard of another house.
Dutroux claimed he was merely – merely! – procuring young girls for other members of a pedophile ring.
Because porn is socially frowned upon, it requires a community of support. Even loners like Michael Briere can find that community by reading and viewing the activities of others.
Other harmful influences
\”Times New Roman\”> As a result of Briere\’s confession and trial, we may become a little less complacent about child pornography. Britain has introduced fairly stringent measures to control it on the Internet. Canada continues to have wishy-washy controls over print, and none at all over electronic transfers.
But if we do start to take child porn seriously, we may need also to examine some other social influences. We don\’t allow promotion of tobacco or heroin, because of their harmful effects. But we have been unwilling to examine seriously the social effects of constant portrayals in movies and television of violence, alcohol reliance, promiscuity, reckless driving…
Perhaps we\’re soft on kiddie porn because we\’re afraid of opening an even larger can of worms.
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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