12.09.1996
Dehumanised world
Over the last few weeks there has been a flurry of stories about child sex abuse. This has seen everything from grisly accounts of child murder in Belgium to worries about child pornography, especially at the prospect of such material ‘flooding’ the internet. All this media attention has been focused, primarily, around the question of paedophiles and their activities.
The case of Trevor Holland has particularly agitated the press. The 52-year old Holland escaped from a supervised outing to a children’s adventure park in Surrey, the Chessington World of Adventures. He has a violent history of abusing and assaulting young boys and was currently a patient in an NHS-run secure unit. He was quickly recaptured, but the air of scandal still lingers.
This entire area, almost by its very nature, poses difficult and complex questions for communists. Facile, superficial or ‘response by numbers’ needs to be avoided. The bodies of murdered children in the Belgian village of Jumet should remind us of that. However, communists need to distance themselves from some of these current scares, otherwise we will find ourselves lining up behind the reactionary agenda of the media and the establishment.
We see this with the Trevor Holland episode. Even though the media have used him to conjure up scares about paedophiles roaming the streets, it is starkly obvious that the man was mentally ill and desperately needs medical attention of some sort - that is the real problem, not his paedophilia. Yet the two questions have become hopelessly conflated.
We should also be wary of letting the bourgeoisie define what is ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ when it comes to sexuality and sexual practices. For large swathes of the media - and unfortunately this tends to find an echo in popular consciousness - homosexuality is decreed to be ‘abnormal’, and the tabloid press love to darkly link homosexuality with paedophilia.
Also, what is paedophilia? We should not so readily assume that we know the answer. The current age of consent stands at 16-years old: if an adult of 20 has sex with a 15-year old, does that automatically make him a paedophile? Some no doubt would say ‘yes’. This should serve to remind us that sexuality is, in the first and last analysis, a social-cultural construct, not a biological one. It is also pertinent to remember that in the days of Aristotle it was considered perfectly ‘normal’ to have sex with young boys - will the Sun or the Daily Telegraph run a campaign to expose Aristotle as a ‘pervert’ or ‘child molester’? It seems unlikely.
It is also monstrous hypocrisy for the likes of The Sun to get outraged by child pornography, when they daily saturate their paper with pornographic, degrading images of women, a large component of which involves reducing them to the status of children (‘infantilisation’).
Yet this is undoubtedly a serious social problem. The Observer newspaper recently highlighted how child pornography is made available through the internet, via supposedly ‘respectable’ companies in Britain and Finland. The fuss generated by The Observer’s ‘revelations’ - which was more of an open secret, in reality - forced Demon Internet, Britain’s largest internet service provider, to propose a series of measures which could restrict access to a number of news groups containing explicit paedophile images.
Similarly, Stockholm has recently hosted the first World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children. Experts at the conference said that, on average, around one million sexually explicit pictures appear on the world net, which has some 40 to 50 million pages. Apparently, during one week in December last year, 5,651 messages about child pornography were posted on just four electronic bulletin boards.
Only the most ardent and irredentist libertarian would remain undisturbed by such statistics (accurate or not). Such a high level of interest in child pornography, and the increasingly sophisticated and organised nature of these operations - such as child prostitution rings in the Philippines and Thailand - point to a society which is becoming dehumanised and treats human beings as mere objects.
Given the fact that capitalism is a global system of exploitation, we need global answers. Any attempts to ‘police’ the internet, to purge it of paedophiliac imagery, will always prove to be a futile, never-ending task. Only when the working class becomes a world class, exercising its own authority across the globe, will we see an end to the scourge of child pornography - and all manner of other degrading images. Yet we must recognise the nature of the problem as its exists now and resist all attempts to brush it under the information super-highway carpet, or indulge in ‘net-worship’.
Communists must also point out that it is hardly surprising that there is commercial (sexual) exploitation of children, when the entire system depends for its survival on the exploitation and oppression of the masses. While campaigns to bring attention to the evils of child prostitution and exploitation have their place, it is only the fight for the revolutionary transformation of society that can really deliver the goods. Any attempts to remedy the plight of children, when capitalism remains in place, can only ever be partial and impermanent.
Frank Vincent