EDITORIALS
Editorial: Target child porn
Aggressive action needed to remove rotten apples from vast Internet barrel
Evil as old as time has metastasized globally in recent years, as the rise of the Internet has intersected with the fall of the Soviet Union. These newfound political and technological freedoms are being horribly abused by a few purveyors of child pornography.
Those purveyors of unspeakable acts should be pursued relentlessly, and punished for the lives they have destroyed. Consumers of evil also should be rooted out, carefully, and either punished for funding this abusive trade or treated for their addiction.
But this week’s eye-opening series of reports in The Buffalo News, starting Sunday and ending today, also leads to a crucial question — how are we to protect little brother from the predations of child pornographers without ourselves becoming Big Brother in the process?
The response must be well-considered, forceful action on many levels, from global cooperation in law enforcement to local efforts to break the cycle of suffering by offering the abused real treatment before they, in turn, become the abusers.
The culture of the Internet rightly resists regulation. The free flow of ideas it enables is overwhelmingly a force for progress. It stands in opposition to all totalitarian regimes, as it did in the old Soviet system, as it may yet in Burma.
Picking the rotten apples from this vast barrel will require not only a lot more manpower but also a new digital standard of what the lawyers call probable cause. Police, based on legally obtained information and with judicial oversight, must be able to pin down the origin and creators of child porn sites, developing methods that are both efficient and respectful of the freedoms of the Internet universe.
The News documents how the remains of the former Soviet Union have become a Petrie dish for photographed child sexual abuse. The grip of the old regime crumbled as economic conditions went to ruin, leaving untold numbers of poor and abandoned children who make easy marks for abusers.
The United States, meanwhile, is home to most of the paying customers for child pornography, as well as the Internet servers and credit card clearinghouses that funnel images one way and money the other. But even though that puts much of the responsibility in American hands, it will be difficult for the United States to lead the effort.
Globally, we would be accused of cyber-hegemony. Domestically, there would be little faith that the search for pornographers, like the search for terrorists, would not be used to justify the digital equivalent of ransacking randomly selected homes. Thus it will be necessary for us to encourage and cajole, not command and control. We need formal treaty obligations, and pressure on those nations that have not yet forbidden trade in child pornography to do so.
But we must also realize that all the shocking arrests and tearful guilty pleas are ultimately pointless unless we do a better job of providing mental health treatment both for those who are the subjects of child pornography and those who risk everything to see just one more picture.
Federal judges are known for cracking down on kiddie porn users who appear before them but, when the federal prison system can provide treatment to only about 1 percent of the inmates who clearly need it, the cycle of abuse is only bound to continue.
More investigators, armed with 21st century warrants specifically aimed at the many leads and tips that are always available to them, must be provided by governments across the globe. Internet providers, though right to stick to their role as the neutral traffic managers of their brave new world, should step forward to help design this new regime, lest the new rules be written without their ethos represented.
There is no need to magnify this evil by burning down the whole house of the Internet in order to get to these vermin. But the merchants of pain who first victimize countless children in making their pornography, then ruin the lives of their own paying customers, deserve no quarter.
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