Word of Mouse Issue 22
Jeremy Stangroom
Operation Ore is big news here in the UK. It is, in the words of
the BBC, the largest police hunt of internet paedophiles there has
ever been in this country. It started after the United States Postal
Inspection Service passed to the UK police a list of more than 7,000
people who had allegedly used their credit cards in order to access
web sites featuring child pornography. To date, some 1,600 people
have been arrested in the course of the investigation.
It is, of course, a good thing if this investigation prevents the
occurrence of harm to children. Nevertheless, it does bring to light
a number of interesting and difficult questions about ethics, the
internet and sexual imagination.
Paedophilia is normally taken to mean the sexual attraction of
adults to children. The first point to make, therefore, is the
obvious one that viewing child pornography is not synonymous with
paedophilia. Indeed, it is difficult to see how it is possible to
draw any general conclusions about a person from the simple fact
that they have looked at pornographic images of children. Consider,
for example, that such a person might be a regular user of child
pornography and also might pursue face-to-face sexual encounters
with children; might have viewed these images out of curiosity, been
shocked to find that they were sexually aroused by them, but have no
intention of looking at them again; or might have looked at these
images because they were curious about the internet, but have no
particular interest in pornography.
The situation is further complicated by the fact that the
internet is a new technology. Prior to its advent, possession of
child pornography, correctly or incorrectly, was widely perceived to
be a good indicator of a propensity to engage in the physical abuse
of children. But the internet has removed many of the barriers which
in the past might have deterred relatively casual "pornophiles" from
amassing collections of photographs. Easier access means that
increasing numbers of the simply curious will have viewed this kind
of material. In sum, then, the relationship between the use of child
pornography, paedophilia and child abuse is complex.
However, it is an important point that the absence of a sexual
response when viewing pornographic images of children is not
sufficient to guarantee that this activity is morally acceptable.
There are apparently strong arguments which suggest that simply
viewing child pornography is a moral wrong. For example, one such
argument is that the supply of these kinds of images follows the
demand for them, and that if people view these images – certainly if
they pay for them – they are part of a process which necessarily
involves children being harmed.
This is a persuasive argument, but it has its problems. For
instance, whilst it is plausibly levelled at the person who
regularly downloads child pornography from a commercial web site, it
is much less convincing when applied to the person who occasionally
downloads a picture from an internet newsgroup.
Also, there is a suspicion that the primary function of these
kinds of arguments, regardless of their veracity, is to provide a
rational underpinning for prior moral convictions. In other words,
even if there was no harm associated with adults finding children
sexually arousing, people would still think it wrong; but arguments
which show that there is harm associated with these desires
perform the useful function of solidifying this baseline moral
commitment.
This line of thought raises another thorny issue which is
integral to the debate about pornography on the internet. This
concerns whether sexual imagination, in and of itself, is the
kind of thing about which it is sensible to make moral judgements.
For example, if a person fantasises that they are a rapist are they,
for those thoughts alone, deserving of our moral
condemnation?
Yes, is the answer suggested by the philosopher Gordon Graham, in
his book The Internet: a philosophical enquiry. He argues
that the causing of an outward harm is not the only mark of a moral
wrong. "In an older language," he writes, "there are gross appetites
and interests. People can resist them, fail to do so or wilfully
indulge them. Which they do is relevant to moral character, just as
whether people’s thoughts about others are charitable or
uncharitable, contemptuous or sympathetic, are morally relevant
facts even if their outward treatment does not specially reflect
these attitudes."
As ever, though, these arguments are not conclusive. Most
significantly, they appear to presuppose what they need to
demonstrate; namely, that there are such things as gross
appetites and interests where there is no outward harm. Also, it
seems possible to come to the opposite conclusion to the one reached
by Graham. For example, it doesn’t seem counter-intuitive to argue
that the person consumed by uncharitable feelings, who nevertheless
behaves charitably, in some sense behaves heroically.
The fact that there are complicated arguments to be had about the
internet, pornography and sexual imagination in no way mitigates the
harm that some children suffer at the hands of pornographers and
predatory child molesters.
However, what it does mean is that it isn’t possible to arrive at
the truth about the internet, child pornography and its consumers by
uncritically taking the tabloid line, and indeed it seems the BBC
line, that Operation Ore is about unmasking more than 7,000
dangerous perverts.
Jeremy Stangroom is new media editor of The Philosophers’
Magazine (www.philosophers.co.uk) and co-editor of What
Philosophers Think (Continuum).
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