WHEN IMAGES MATTER: INTERNET CHILD PORNOGRAPHY, FORMS OF OBSERVATION AND AN ETHICS OF THE VIRTUAL

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WHEN IMAGES MATTER: INTERNET

CHILD PORNOGRAPHY, FORMS OF

OBSERVATION AND AN ETHICS OF

THE VIRTUAL

David Oswell

Forthcoming: Journal of Information, Communication and Society, Routledge

In 1999 a postal inspector in Minnesota, in the US, uncovered the operations of Landslide

Productions run by Thomas Reedy, a computer consultant, and his wife, Janice Reedy. The

husband and wife team ran a website from Texas that provided access to a network of 5,700

child pornographic websites, mainly based in Russia and Indonesia. The network ran over 60

countries in three continents and had 250,000 subscribers. The press claimed that the couple

were making nearly £1 million a month. The US law enforcement agencies in an investigation

entitled Operation Avalanche were able to bring the pair to trial and to gain a conviction.

Thomas Reedy was sentenced to 1,335 years and Janice Reedy to 14 years. In 2002 US law

enforcement agencies passed on to the UK police (the National Crime Squad and the National

Criminal Intelligence Service) names of about 7,000 UK residents who had paid via credit

card to access the network of sites. Most of the names were male, but many on the list had no

previous criminal convictions. Operation Ore was initiated in the UK and was at that time the

largest UK police investigation into internet child pornography. In an initial series of raids in

May 2002, the police made 36 arrests and 1,300 properties were searched. By January 2003

1,300 people had been arrested. Those arrested included magistrates, hospital consultants,

teachers, and police officers.

On Saturday 11

January 2003, the UK press had got wind of a story concerning a well-

known, but as yet unnamed, popular musician downloading child pornography from the

internet. The Daily Mail had been leaked the story by a police officer and had placed the news

on its front page. On Sunday 12

January various newspapers reported that a well-known

musician was under investigation. By Monday The Sun newspaper had gained an interview

with the musician and was able to disclose on its front-page, and at this time along with other

newspapers, that Pete Townshend, once lead guitarist for The Who, had been brought in for

questioning at Twickenham police station, West London. In a public statement to the media,

Townshend stated that he had come across some child pornography while surfing the internet

with his teenage son. Townshend claimed that on another occasion he had made a web search

for a Russian orphanage using the key terms 'russia', 'orphanage' and 'boys' (purportedly to

find information on a television documentary he had viewed) and come across a list of child

pornographic websites. Townshend claimed that he only visited three or four sites and only

used his credit card to access one particular site on one occasion. Townshend also stated that

he had contacted Jackie Malton, a former detective chief inspector (who retired in 1997 and

was then advising the producers of the ITV police series The Bill), in October 2002 and

informed her of his discovery of these child pornographic websites. Throughout the case

Townshend claimed that he was writing a book concerning child sexual abuse and internet

child pornography and that he had looked at the offending material in the interests of

research.

On the evening of Monday 13

January, Pete Townshend was arrested on suspicion of making

and possessing indecent images of children and of inciting others to distribute indecent

images. He was arrested under the terms of the Protection of Children Act 1978. The wording

of the charge was explained in the UK press: namely that the former charge would refer to the

downloading of internet child pornography and the latter to his paying for images to be sent to

him (cf. The Sun, 14

January 2003). He was released on bail. The UK press over these few

days released reports of other public figures (a public school teacher, a local government

official and a deputy-prison governor) being investigated under Operation Ore and engaged in

a widespread discussion of the issues of the case. Discussion ranged from the responsibility of

credit card companies, such as Visa, in ceasing their facilities for the purchasing of on-line

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child pornography to Johann Hari in The Independent arguing that paedophiles are human

beings and should be treated accordingly. On 7 May 2003 Townshend was cautioned by the

police and placed on the sex offenders register for five years. Although child abuse

campaigners condemned the leniency of the punishment (The Guardian, 8 May 2003),

Townshend escaped the possibility of a drawn-out publicly aired trial, and the law

enforcement agencies were saved from a possible defeat and the prospect of 'research' being

seen by members of the public as a legitimate defence with regard to downloading child

pornography from the internet.

I want to consider this particular event in terms of the emergence of a form of ethics of the

image, an ethics of virtual observation. Rather than drawing out the 'virtual' from some of the

more obvious works in the field (as found, for example, in the philosophy of Bergson or

Deleuze (1988, 1994) or the social theory of Castells (1996) or Levy (1996, 2001)) and

mapping a resemblance between the theoretical and the empirical, my discussion focuses on

three substantive aspects of this event concerning internet child pornography - legislation in

the UK and the US, expert psychological discourse, and public discussion in the UK press - in

order to present a particular and more situated rendering of forms of virtual observation. The

context to this discussion concerns the notion that digital imaging technology presages a need

for new legislation, law enforcement and social analytical frameworks for understanding and

tackling the production, distribution and consumption of images of child sexual abuse.

Central to my argument in this paper is that the construction of internet child pornographic

images as cultural artefacts and objects of concern has less to do with the actual evidential

status of these images (as revealing particular criminal acts) and more with the configuration

of forms of observation that disclose the relations between scene of crime, image and user

(creator, downloader, viewer) in terms of their virtuality. The construction of the image as the

record of a crime is significant in the event I consider, but secondary to the splitting of forms

of observation along the lines of legality and illegality, normality and the pathology (as a

scientific distribution and, in this instance, formed within psychological discourse), and

righteousness and condemnation (as indicative of the moral vocabulary of public media

discourse).

The Indecent Photograph as Cultural Artefact

Let us start with the photograph itself. In many ways the lead character in this particular story

is not the child or the abuser or the child porn user or even those wanting to care for and

protect the child; it is the indecent photograph of the child or children. This is the actor that

we first meet or hear about (whether as police officers or future abusers or those abused or

members of the public); this is the actor who appears in all of the major scenes (the scene of

the crime, users downloading child pornography, psychiatric sessions, police interviews, and

legal courts); and this is the actor who, from many constituencies, is seen to speak with the

most sincerity.

Research suggests that until the late 1960s it was rare to find children in pornographic

material, but by the late 1970s the market for this material had grown substantially and

legislation has correspondingly been introduced to tackle the problem in a number of

countries across the world. The question of how to define 'child pornography', though, is less

than clear cut. For example, different national and regional jurisdictions contain different

ages of sexual maturity, different cultural notions of what constitutes an obscenity (or an

image or text that might be seen to constitute an offence to the wider community) and

different ways of framing the relation between legality and illegality. Agreement of definition

across nation-states emerges within the context of supra-national agencies such as the Council

of Europe, which defines child pornography as 'any audiovisual material which uses children

in a sexual context' (1993) or the International Criminal Police Organisation (INTERPOL)

which defines it as 'the visual depiction of the sexual exploitation of a child, focussing on the

child's sexual behaviour or genitals' (1995) (cf. Healy, 1996). But even between these agencies

there are visible differences of definition.

Nevertheless, since the mid-1970s in the US, the UK and elsewhere an understanding of child

pornography as the record of actual child sexual abuse has emerged and become widely used

in legal discourse and the public discourse of law enforcement agencies and child protection

charities. As Nigel Williams, long time campaigner against child pornography and founder of

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Childnet International, stated some time ago, the indecent photograph is seen as a

documentary record. It is seen as the record of an event.

Child pornography is no less than a visual record of child abuse. Each video

or photograph records a criminal offence against a child. (Nigel Williams,

1991, 88)

Its truth is thereby seen to be transparent. In this sense it is no different from a family

snapshot or a press photograph. Supposedly, the photograph says no more than the world it

captures. It is, to quote from the early work of Roland Barthes, seemingly 'a message without a

code' (Barthes, 1961/1977, 17). But the indecent photograph is not simply constructed as a

recording of the real. It is also figured in terms of the subjectivity of the spectator, or more

accurately the observer, that it brings about. In a later piece Barthes views the photograph in a

more phenomenological light: 'The type of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed

truly unprecedented, since it establishes not a consciousness of the being-there of the thing

(which any copy could produce) but an awareness of its having-been-there' (Barthes,

1964/1977, 44).

This is not the place to review older debates about photographic realism, but claims regarding

the affordances of new digital imaging technologies have questioned the referential status of

the photograph and corresponding forms of observation. William Mitchell in his discussion of

the difference between 'traditional' photography and 'post-photographic', or digital imaging,

technologies talks about how a photograph constitutes a positionality for the witness; it

frames the spatial and temporal co-ordinates of the witness of the event: '[p]hotographs like

those of Cartier-Bresson make us catch our breath in amazement that the photographer was

there, that he actually saw it, that he somehow seized the instant and framed the action'

(Mitchell, 1992, 188). In contrast, digital photography 'creates an ontological aneurism - a

blowout in the barrier separating visual fact and fancy'; it constitutes 'an electronically

assembled event [that] has ascertainable coordinates, and there is no flesh-and-blood

photographer - alive or dead - to find' (ibid., 189). Mitchell has declared that '[t]oday, as we

enter the post-photographic era, we must face once again the ineradicable fragility of our

ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real, and the tragic elusiveness of the

Cartesian dream' (Mitchell, 1992, 225). Accordingly, the disturbance of this dream impacts

not just on the classical table and grid through which the image records the real as ordered,

but also on the positionality of the witness. The singular apex through which the observer had

a vantage on the ordering of the real is certainly problematised. But much of this discussion

has been framed in terms of an opposition between 'new' and 'old' technology. Kevin Robins

has shown that 'old technologies (chemical and optical) have come to seem restrictive and

impoverished, whilst the new electronic technologies promise to inaugurate an era of almost

unbounded freedom and flexibility in the creation of images' (Robins, 1995, 30). A number of

contemporary critics, Robins included, have argued that this opposition is far from credible

and that many of the features attributed to digital imaging technologies in fact have a longer

lineage than is often credited (cf. Lister, 1995; Manovich, 1995 and 2001). Genealogies of

perception, technologies of vision and classification are altogether more contingent in their

historical connections (cf. Crary, 1992; Foster, 1988).

Nevertheless, such postmodern claims concerning the affordances of digital imaging

technologies frame many public responses to the issue of internet child pornography. Zoë

Williams, in her article 'Panic on the screens' for The Guardian, states:

If... it's [an image of child sexual abuse] all photoshopped, then although it

remains very unpleasant, it's nevertheless victimless... But the technological

advances of photography have effectively nixed its legitimacy as proof of

reality; a photo is no more necessarily true now than a painting is. To

become inflamed by images whose truth content is open to question seems

irrational. (The Guardian, 14

January 2003)

Williams, in her discussion of digital imaging technologies, distinguishes between

'photographs' that record an event and those that produce an event as if it were real.

Moreover, she argues that any ethical response is dependent on the ontological status of that

which is represented (and on the evidential or epistemological status of the photograph) such

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that the ethical response is one predicated on reason. The implications of her argument are

twofold: that ethics is a rational enterprise and that child pornographic images that are

produced ex nihilo through digital technology do not warrant an ethical response any more

than a cartoon image of a wily coyote being flattened by an anvil. To some extent the deflation

of the status of the photographic image (and technology) in the social epistemology of child

sexual abuse and the equivalent deflation of this object's ethical value can be aligned with

other commentaries that see internet child pornography as a highly mediatised issue in which

the scene of abuse circulates only as a figural, de-objectified, entity.

There are those who are critical of a public discourse around child sexual abuse and even

more so of public concerns over internet child pornography. In the liberal (even libertarian)

balancing of rights and liberties, crimes against the child (as they are with women and people

of colour) are often given lower value than, for example, crimes against property. The Daily

Telegraph in its editorial column on 15 January made this clear:

Nobody denies that the sexual abuse of children is a revolting crime, or that

those who ply for child pornography encourage that abuse. But many may

think that, while burglaries and muggings are on the increase, the police

have more pressing work to do than hunting for those who surf the internet

in search of filth.

Moreover, the public discussion of such crimes of sexual abuse is seen as articulating a

broader mediatised therapeutic culture. Mick Hume, in a piece titled 'Scratch a rock star, and

you're sure to find a victim trying to get out' for his column in The Times, wrote:

When the news headlines bizarrely announced that 'Pete Townshend says he

is not a paedophile', my first reaction was to wonder if there was anything

sad celebrities would not do to get their picture in the papers. (13 January

2003)

Hume is particularly concerned with the way in which police investigations about child

pornography are 'conducted through the media'. For Hume, such public declarations say

much about 'the sordid obsessions of contemporary culture' and the 'prevailing climate of

prurient curiosity about child sexual abuse'. The public visibility of internet child pornography

and child sexual abuse 'risks destroying the self-image of society' (ibid.). On 15 Jan The Times

in its editorial column argues that, although child sexual abuse is a serious crime, we should

be wary of creating a 'moral panic'.

The editorial comment in the Daily Telegraph of the same day similarly dismissed the public

disclosure of concern about internet child pornography: 'Paedophilia is the bogeyman of the

modern age'.

The contrast between a series of distal and proximal relations across user, image, scene of

abuse and ethical response helps frame the contours of this event (cf. Cooper and Law, 1995).

The supposed closeness of the indecent photograph to the scene of abuse sets the tone of

moral condemnation and call for action, just as the distance of image from abuse presages a

more nonchalant response. But relations of closeness and distance are poor indicators of

ethical responsiveness once we take into account the fact that all relations, however distal or

proximal, are 'mediated'; we cannot judge an image according to its mediation or, to put it

another way, mediation cannot constitute the measure of an ethical response only the

relations of it. In the following sections I investigate this in more detail in relation to a series

of specific legal, psychological and media discourses.

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Legal Discourses

In both US and UK legislative discourse, over and above the medium of production

(photography, film, computer imaging), the ontological status of that which is represented

provides a major focus of concern. Thus the US Child Pornography Prevention Act (CPPA) of

1996 states:

… `child pornography' means any visual depiction, including any

photograph, film, video, picture, or computer or computer-generated image

or picture, whether made or produced by electronic, mechanical, or other

means, of sexually explicit conduct, where--

(A) the production of such visual depiction involves the use of a

minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct;

(B) such visual depiction is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in

sexually explicit conduct;

appear that an identifiable minor is engaging in sexually explicit conduct; or

(D) such visual depiction is advertised, promoted, presented,

described, or distributed in such a manner that conveys the impression that

the material is or contains a visual depiction of a minor engaging in sexually

explicit conduct. (2256 (8), 1996)

On 16 April 2002 the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in response to an appeal by

the Free Speech Coalition and others, held that statements 2256 (8) (B) and 2256 (8) (D), of

the federal code as stated above, were 'overbroad' and 'unconstitutional'. The Court

considered three lines of argument with respect to 2256 (8) (B). Firstly, it stated that the

CPPA was 'inconsistent' with the decision of an earlier case, Miller v California (413 US 15,

1973):

It extends to images that are not obscene under the Miller standard, which

requires the Government to prove that the work in question, taken as a

whole, appeals to the prurient interest, is patently offensive in light of

community standards, and lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or

scientific value.

Whereas the earlier ruling had construed the obscenity of an image in terms of a set of

contextual factors (i.e. the context of the 'work' as a whole as constructed within aesthetic

theory (cf. Barthes, 1977; Foucault, 1980), of inappropriate address, of the values of a

community that needs to expunge alien material, and of knowledges that might elevate the

image through the light of reason), the CPPA, it was argued, would have allowed the

possibility of prosecution on the basis of the image alone.

Secondly, the Court stated that New York v Ferber, an earlier trial that established precedent

in this area, provided no support for the CPPA. The Ferber decision prohibited the

production, distribution and sale of child pornography on the grounds that 'these acts were

"intrinsically related" to the sexual abuse of children'. This earlier decision, in the Ferber case,

was based on the fact that the child pornography, was seen to be 'a permanent record of a

child's abuse, the continued circulation itself would harm the child who had participated' and,

moreover, 'because the traffic in child pornography was an economic motive for its

production, the State had an interest in closing the distribution network'. The Court argued

that '[u]nder either rationale, the speech had what the Court in effect held was a proximate

link to the crime from which it came'. The Court thus stated that '[i]n contrast to the speech in

Ferber, speech that is itself the record of sexual abuse, the CPPA prohibits speech that records

no crime and creates no victims by its production'. The proximity or distance of the speech

(photograph) from the scene of sexual abuse (event) thus constitutes an important point in

the legal understanding of child pornographic images.

Thirdly, the Court rejected the US Government's argument in the CPPA that virtual child

pornography may be used to seduce children. It stated that:

Virtual child pornography is not "intrinsically related" to the sexual abuse of

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children. While the Government asserts that the images can lead to actual

instances of child abuse, the causal link is contingent and indirect. The harm

does not necessarily follow from the speech, but depends upon some

unquantified potential for subsequent criminal acts.

Thus, just as the court decided that virtual child pornography has no link to a crime of sexual

abuse that has actually been committed, so too was the virtual image seen to have no

necessary link to future cases of abuse (i.e. through grooming, through the effect of child

pornographic images in creating child abusers, and so on). Moreover, as with adult

pornography, virtual child pornography cannot be prohibited, it was argued, on the basis of its

possible harm to some children or the possibility that some children may be exposed to it: the

CPPA, it was stated, 'runs afoul of the principle that speech within the rights of adults to hear

may not be silenced completely in an attempt to shield children from it'.

In contrast to the US, legislation in the UK is clear that 'indecent pseudo-photographs of

children' as much as 'indecent photographs of children' constitute a crime. Part VII of the

Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 simply inserts 'or pseudo-photograph' alongside

'photograph' in the relevant sections (chapter 37, subsections 2 and 3) of the Protection of

Children Act of 1978. The Act defines a child as 'a person under the age of 16'and it defines a

pseudo-photograph in the following manner:

(7) "Pseudo-photograph" means an image, whether made by computer-

graphics or otherwise howsoever, which appears to be a photograph. (8) If

the impression conveyed by a pseudo-photograph is that the person shown is

a child, the pseudo-photograph shall be treated for all purposes of this Act as

showing a child and so shall a pseudo-photograph where the predominant

impression conveyed is that the person shown is a child notwithstanding that

some of the physical characteristics shown are those of an adult. (9)

References to an indecent pseudo-photograph include - (a) a copy of an

indecent pseudo-photograph; and (b) data stored on a computer disc or by

other electronic means which is capable of conversion into a pseudo-

photograph.

In UK legislation, the indecent photograph and the indecent pseudo-photograph are not

identical, but are treated as if identical. The crime of downloading child pornography is a

virtual crime in the sense that irrespective of whether the downloaded images are records or

not of actual abuse, they are treated as if they are so. The pseudo-photograph is constituted in

the same terms as the photograph-as-document, even though its difference is marked. Both

are deemed records of crimes, although in one case the crime is virtual, rather than actual. If

the legal status of the indecent photograph rests on it being a record of a real crime, then the

indecent pseudo-photograph equally constitutes the record of a real crime. It is not a question

of possibility. This is a crime that has occurred in a virtual space. Just as when a stick is placed

half in water it appears to bend at the point between water and air, the pseudo-photograph is

real. It has reference and extension. The virtual image of the submerged part of the stick has

all the observable features of the stick once removed fully from the water, but when you place

your hand in the water the stick is not where it appears. You cannot touch it where you see it.

For UK legislation there is no dispute about the original and the counterfeit; both are defined

through the criterion of the virtual image, of the simulacra.

As discussed in the previous section, the notion that all internet child pornography documents

a crime committed is one publicly adopted by law enforcement officers and child protection

campaigners. Thus Deputy Assistant Commissioner Carole Howlett, the Metropolitan Police

head of child protection and spokesperson for the Association of Chief Police Officers on

internet child abuse, states that: '[e]very sexual image of a child on that internet is a child

being physically and sexually abused and we cannot forget that' ('Internet is where the big

growth in abuse will be', The Guardian, 15

January 2003). But such an equivalence (i.e.

internet child pornography = images of actual child sexual abuse) is clearly problematic in a

court of law. If doubt can be raised as to the evidential status of the image (as an image of

actual child sexual abuse), then the question can be raised as to whether the image is an image

of child sexual abuse at all. Both US and UK legislative discourse, in their different ways, avoid

such a problem. In both jurisdictions there is a distinction between actual images of child

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sexual abuse and virtual ones. However, where the US is keen to constitute only the former as

illegal, the UK sees both as illegal. Thus whereas the US Ninth Court of Appeal understood the

image as one only in relation to the primacy (and primariness) of a presumed referent, the

Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 understands the image according to the image

itself. The evidence is contained within the language of the image itself. The image needs to

appear to be a 'photograph' and hence needs to be encoded within the generic conventions of

century realism. But also the form of observation presumes that the observer (as idealised

in a court of law) is able to receive the 'impression conveyed' of a child (or rather a human

figure with majority characteristics of those of a 'child' rather than an 'adult'). The

'photograph' becomes the measure of the real and its observation. In this sense, the implicit

prioritisation in UK law of virtual child pornography means that the crime of possession,

making or distribution of child pornography (whether virtual or not) is a crime not only

against a particular child, but against all children. It is a crime against childhood as a

universal.

Psychological Expertise

Images of child pornography are distributed via credit-card access websites, through bulletin

boards and encrypted e-mails (Jenkins, 2001), and more recently through peer-to-peer file

sharing technologies (cf. The Guardian, 4

November 2003; The Observer, 9

November

2003). These are not simply new ways of distributing child pornography; these technologies

configure new relations between producers, distributors and consumers, new forms of

interaction between abusers and users, and new forms of abuse. But despite the growing

visibility of the scale and complexity of the problem (of which an ethics of the image is but one

particular aspect), there is still relatively little research on internet child pornography. Some

of the most notable research comes out of the COPINE project based in the Department of

Applied Psychology, University of Cork, under the directorship of Professor Max Taylor. It is

to research emerging from this unit that I want to consider, not to offer a critique of it, but to

consider what discursive form the problem of internet child pornography takes in this

research and how it differs from forms of articulation produced in legal discourse and, as we

shall see in the following section, press reporting in the UK.

In an article titled 'Typology of paedophile picture collections' (2001) a substantive argument

is made, elements of which appear in other publications of the unit, that shifts the problem of

internet child pornography from a legal problem to one understood within the terms of

psychological expertise and one predicated not so much on the relation between image and

scene of abuse, but between user and collection of images. Legal definitions of internet child

pornography are constructed within particular jurisdictions. Images that are illegal in one

context may be legal in another. Internet child pornography is a global phenomenon and users

download material from outside as well as from inside the national jurisdictions within which

they are based. Moreover, some images may sit on the boundary between legal definitions of

decency and indecency and hence pose problems with regard to legal prosecution. In the

context of these difficulties, Taylor, Holland and Quayle argue that 'an objective means of

judging the nature of collections independent of legal provision would aid understanding and

give a basis for international comparison'. Moreover, they argue that 'by emphasising a

psychological approach to pictures attractive to adults with a sexual interest in children,

rather than pictures legally defined as obscene, we can identify a range of discernibly different

kinds of pictures only some of which may be illegal' (2001: 99).

In order to construct a psychological account of the problem - and one that provides the

ground for appropriate law enforcement and legal judgement across jurisdictions - Taylor et al

constitute the domain of the problem in broader terms than found in either legal or, as we

shall see, press discourse. Taylor et al draw on Kenneth Lanning's behavioural analysis of

child molesters (1992) for a distinction between child pornography and child erotica.

Whereas the former is seen as explicitly sexual in terms of the content of the image, the latter

may refer to any image that is used by an individual for sexual purposes. Thus they state that:

'[t]he significance of this distinction is to emphasise the potential sexual qualities of a whole

range of kinds of photographs (and other material as well) not all of which may meet

obscenity criteria' (Taylor et al, 2001: 97). The distinction between pornography and erotica -

used normally in the context of debates about adult pornography to distinguish between

harmless and harmful material or, to put it crudely, between material with a sexual use and

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material with an aesthetic use - is now used to extend the range of concern predicated on the

underlying personality of the individual user. But for Taylor et al, as for Lanning, the

personality of the paedophile is disclosed, not through direct investigation of the mind itself,

but through the manifestation of its motivated actions. It is the collection of images that

provides the symptomatic evidence of motivation and hence of the underlying personality.

Thus, for example, supposedly innocent pictures of children may be read as 'erotic' and

interpreted in the context of the collection as a whole.

Taylor et al's work on child sexual abuse and collections of child pornographic images builds

upon, but also diverges from, earlier research that constructs the user of child pornography as

a collector. Quayle and Taylor, in a piece on 'Child pornography and the internet: perpetuating

the cycle of abuse' (2002), quote Tim Tate's journalistic work on child pornography:

'paedophiles don't simply view the material they collect, they catalogue and index it as well'

(Tate, 1990: 112 quoted in Quayle and Taylor, 2002: 353). More systematically, and not

mentioned by Taylor at al, Carl Goran Svedin and Kristina Back, in their research for the

Swedish Save the Children charity, have documented how users divide into different types of

'collector': the 'closet collector' who looks at child pornography, but has no direct involvement

in child sexual abuse; the 'isolated collector' who collects images and is involved in child

sexual abuse; the 'cottage collector' who shares his collection of images with others, is

involved in child sexual abuse with other adults, but is not interested in financial gain; and the

'commercial collector' who produces, copies, distributes and profits from sales and

exploitation. These collectors are also differentiated according to varying degrees of

organisation: from, on the one hand, groups involving an adult leader, a number of children,

but no exchange of children or pornographic material to other adults; and, on the other,

groups of adults, well-structured (normally as syndicates), involved in systematic abuse and

exploitation of children for profit (Svedin and Back, 1996, 16 and 20).

The collection is seen to be symptomatic of the pathology of the individual, but also to be

indicative of a series of broader social relations mediated by the internet and on-line

environments (whether e-mail, web-based, bulletin boards, peer-to-peer, or other virtual

environments). Collections of internet child pornography are seen to be collective

endeavours. The trading, swapping, marketing and selling of internet child pornography

constructs forms of market and gift relations and corresponding forms of sociality. As with the

collections of Pokemon cards (cf. Buckingham and Sefton-Green, 2003), those engaged in

market and gift exchange mediated by the internet collect series of images and thus construct

forms of community on the basis of possession or lack, presence or absence, of images within

particular series (cf. Jenkins, 2001; Healy, 1996; Quayle and Taylor, 2002; Svedin and Back,

1996). In contrast to this work, Taylor et al focus less on the 'user as collector' and more on the

collection itself, such that the collections 'are not accidents', but 'result from deliberate choices

by an individual to acquire sexual material' (2001: 99). Neither the sexual and abusive nature

of the images on their own nor the pathological personality of the collector are visible in their

own right. They become visible through the organisation of the collection and in doing so the

image of sexual abuse is clearly linked with the mind of the user inasmuch as the former is the

intentional outcome (motivation) of the latter; abusers make images of children abusive

through the organisation of the collection, but we only know this through the visibility of the

collection itself.

Over and above the ways in which the collectors themselves might classify the organisation of

their collections, Taylor at al interpret the collection of pictures in terms of a continuum

ranging from 'accidental pictures involving either no overt erotic content, or minimal

content… to pictures showing actual rape and penetration of a child, or other gross acts of

obscenity' (2002: 100). The classification and ordering of typologies of images is not novel to

COPINE research, but Taylor et al have attempted to construct a scale that is indicative of the

seriousness of motivation rather than the obscenity or indecency of the image per se. Thus

COPINE's ten point scale (1. Indicative, 2. Nudist, 3. Erotica, 4. Posing, 5. Erotic Posing, 6.

Explicit Erotic Posing, 7. Explicit Sexual Activity, 8. Assault, 9. Gross Assault, 10.

Sadistic/Bestiality), is constructed not in terms of legal definitions of the 'obscenity' or

'indecency' of individual images, but in terms of the combination of elements within the

collection and of 'a continuum of increased deliberate sexual victimisation'. Each image in a

collection (inasmuch as it can only be interpreted in the structural context of the collection) is

seen to constitute a form of victimisation; the scale indicates the degree of victimisation.

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Moreover,

… each time a picture is accessed for sexual purposes it victimises the

individual concerned. In a sense, the function of picture collections for the

offender is to repeatedly victimise the child concerned, and the victim status

is exaggerated by continuing use. (Taylor et al, 2002: 100)

Taylor et al make no distinction between an actual child and the image of a child. The sexual

use of an image of a child constitutes the victimisation of that individual. Moreover, picture

collections, the size of which also indicate the degree of psychological motivation and

seriousness, allow the user 'instant access to the child (or a child) as victim' (ibid.). It makes

little difference whether the image is an 'actual photograph' or a 'pseudo-photograph'; both

represent forms of victimisation (ibid.: 104). Other researchers have argued that there is a

clear distinction between those who view and use child pornographic images and those who

actually physically abuse children. Philip Jenkins, in his investigation of bulletin boards and

newsgroups addressed to users of child pornography, makes a broad distinction between two

types of user: those 'who freely admit to being molesters'; and those 'who admit to being

sexually excited by child porn images, but actually condemn actual contact' (Jenkins, 'Cut

child porn link to abusers', The Guardian, 23 January 2003; see also Jenkins, 2001). But for

Taylor et al there is no such distinction; the degree of pathology of the paedophile is measured

by the size and nature of the collection of images and by the degree of victimisation that such

a collection demonstrates. Over and above the nature of the photograph itself, all such

material, held in such collections, is seen to dehumanise and victimise children (ibid.: 103), on

the basis of the differential calculus of the collection, but also on the basis that such a

differential calculus is actualised through its orientation toward the child as a virtual image:

each time the catalogue is accessed, each time an image is used the virtual child is victimised.

Press Reporting

In the UK press coverage surrounding the Townshend case a series of verbal nouns (gerunds)

- clicking, looking, using, downloading, possessing, collecting, making, and distributing - help

to shape our understanding of the degree of involvement or proximity to the actual sexual

abuse of a child and to bridge the gap between distance and closeness, accident and purpose,

and innocence and responsibility. The degree of distance or proximity to actual child sexual

abuse thus becomes a way of organising different forms of observation.

Firstly, there is a form of looking-as-gratification with no link to child sexual abuse. The

argument that gratificatory looking at child pornography is qualitatively different from and a

lesser harm than child sexual abuse is one made by some experts, some users of child

pornography and also some journalists. Rod Liddle, columnist for The Guardian, argues that

looking at child pornography is different from committing child sexual abuse and that the

former does not necessarily imply a causative link to the latter. He states:

There is no causal link between viewing child porn and abusing children.

And even if there were, it would not be sufficient, within the philosophy of

our juridical system, to simply assume that an unpleasant penchant for the

former presupposes guilt of the latter. (Liddle, 'Should it really be a crime to

look at child pornography?', The Guardian, 14

January 2003)

Despite Liddle's suppositions, other articles made it clear that looking at child pornography in

itself constituted a sufficient and punishable crime. Mark Stephens, a lawyer who has advised

the UK Internet Watch Foundation, was quoted as saying that: 'it is wrong-headed,

misguided and illegal to look at or download or even to pay to download paedophiliac material

and if you do so, you are likely to go to prison' (The Guardian, 13

January 2003). Although

the UK press differentiated between users of child pornography and abusers of children, the

illegality of both was clearly presented. Moreover, the argument made by Liddle was one

rarely presented in the UK media.

Secondly, there is a form of looking-as-gratification with a direct link to child sexual abuse.

It is argued that those who look at child pornography are the same people that commit child

sexual abuse. In reaction to the argument made by Liddle, but residing within the same

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problematic, is the idea that there is a correlation, if not a causal link, between using child

pornography and abuse. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Carole Howlett, of the Metropolitan

Police, was quoted as saying that research on recent arrests in the USA for viewing or

possessing child pornography has indicated that 30% of those arrested had abused or were

abusing children. But in most reports related to this form of looking, there is an implicit

assumption that those found in possession of child pornography are also child abusers. There

is little discussion of whether that link between possession and abuse is causative or

correlational.

Thirdly, there is a form of looking-as-gratification with an indirect link to child sexual abuse.

Jenni Murray, in a letter to The Guardian critical of Rod Liddle's piece, states that:

People who look at such material for sexual gratification may well never

progress to physical abuse, but the children in the photographs or films were

abused on their behalf. Where there is no demand there is no supply... The

pornographers won't abuse them if no one's prepared to watch. (The

Guardian, 15

January 2003)

A moral argument against using child pornography is presented in terms of market relations

between spectator and event. This argument is reiterated by Shy Keenan, spokeswoman for

Phoenix Survivors group in an open letter to Townshend quoted in The Times:

The moment a person clicks that button, they may as well be molesting that

child themselves. What is the difference between molesting a child and

paying someone else to do it? (14 January 2003)

Fourthly, there is a form of non-gratificatory looking as research. There is an argument that

the looking at internet child pornography, if in the pursuit of research, implies that the viewer

is not caught up in practices and values of child sexual abuse, but is disinterested in the

material per se and looks at the material in order to produce knowledge. In this argument,

direct observation of primary material is seen as necessary in the construction of truth. One

'professional researcher', in a letter to The Guardian, states:

Primary research...cannot be based on 'hearsay' and relies on original, not

reported, evidence. All good primary researchers trespass into dubious areas.

Whether those areas are dubious in the academic, social, legal or intellectual

sense is irrelevant. The purpose of research is to discover the truth and push

the boundaries. (Jan Rockett, The Guardian, 14

January 2003)

This is the argument put forward by Pete Townshend himself: '[i]t's important police are able

to convince themselves that, if I did anything illegal, I did it purely for research' (The Sun, 13

January 2003). Nevertheless, the press made it clear that such a form of looking definitely

constituted an illegal act. Roger Darlington, of the UK monitoring body Internet Watch

Foundation, stated 'The minute you hit a website, technically you're downloading' (The Times,

13 January 2003). The Times stated that: 'The children's charity NCH also warned people not

to do their own research into child pornography on the internet: no English court had

accepted research as an excuse for having pornographic images' (15 January 2003). Bob

McLachlan, ex-head of Scotland Yard's paedophile unit dismissed the notion that researching

child pornographic images constituted any reasonable defence. He stated, in The Sun, that it

was a 'classic defence' of the paedophile (13 January 2003).

Looking at child pornography as a form of research, though, is precisely what the police and

others do during an investigation. Libby Purves, in an article titled 'Yes it's out there, but you

don't have to click on it', argues that:

Nobody has to click except police researchers, server censors, or the few

serious professional experts on this wicked trade. Clicking out of curiosity,

for a frisson, is prurience. (14 January 2003, The Times)

For Purves looking as research is a legitimate form of looking, but it can only be conducted by

particular serious persons. If ordinary people need to know about internet child pornography,

Page 11

then they can go to 'serious books'. They do not need to look themselves or to make spurious

claims to doing 'research'.

That's all we laymen need to know. It's a crime. It happens. It has to be

jumped on. The police, and a few lawyers with strong stomachs, need to see

the pictures. The rest of us - including artists and writers - have no business

with them. In any case, the reality of the event is not contained in the fleshy

pixels: it is locked inside the heads of the young victims. (ibid.)

The distinction between expert and layperson is seen to constitute an important boundary

between abuser and witness. The expert, with little justification, takes the position of the non-

abuser.

These discourses do not simply represent the views of expert accredited sources and address

these views to popular audiences. Nor do they simply provide a space through which a public

can become informed about new types of crime. They constitute specifically popular - as

distinct from expert - problematisations and configurations of forms of observation. They

provide popular spaces within which one's relation to the specific crime of using, viewing,

downloading, creating, or distributing internet child pornography can be orchestrated. The

particular strengths or weaknesses of the gratification and connection between looking and

abuse constitute particular configurations of proximal and distal, but also necessary and

contingent relationality.

Concluding Thoughts on Ethics

Across these sites - law, academic knowledge and the press - we see emerging a configuration

of problems that are concerned with forms of virtual observation. These sites are not

prescriptive and there are clearly other sites of problematisation that might have been

considered. Moreover, the forms of virtual observation are not consistent across these three

sites. Each site has its own specificity that helps shape the nature of the formation.

Nevertheless, across these sites we see the shaping of concerns about both distal/proximal

and necessary/contingent relations and about the orientation of a differential calculus. Across

each of the sites the relations of virtual observation (distal/proximal, necessary/contingent,

differential calculus/orientation) construct the problem of internet child pornography as a

problem about the referentiality of the image. In some formulations then, as discussed in the

previous sections, the virtual image refers to a scene of abuse that is real and our ethical

response to this image is predicated on its reality, albeit a virtual reality. Although the

evidential value of the virtual image is different to that of an actual image (and hence the

forms of police investigation and legal prosecution are different), until an image can be said to

correspond to an actual case of child sexual abuse all internet child pornography can be

viewed as real. In this sense, the primary concern is not one of the effects of the image on

others nor one of the relations of power encoded in the image, but one of the virtual

evidentiality of the image (i.e. on the image's capacity to refer to an objective reality that is

both internal and external to the image). The ethical intensity of the virtual image lies

precisely in its capacity to refer to a scene beyond itself.

Moreover, when the virtual image is taken seriously - when our ethical response is as if to a

real crime of child sexual abuse - the image takes up the position of the 'modest witness'

whose account of the scene is 'unadorned, factual, compelling' (Haraway, 1997: 26; see also

Shapin, 1994). But the virtual photograph, as with the actual photograph, is not literally

'obscene' (i.e. standing in the way of the stage); rather it must take a position that is both, to

coin two neologisms, endo-scenic and exo-scenic. The photograph must, in order to be

'authentic', be part of the scene that it records. It must be close to the scene, a necessary part

of its development and constitutive of the scene. In this sense, the photograph, as endo-scenic,

is performative (cf. Baudrillard, 2000). But the photograph must also be exo-scenic. In order

for the photograph to circulate as evidence, to witness the event, it must stand outside the

event itself. To act as a witness, to take on the authority of the witness as that which speaks for

a silent other (cf. Agamben, 1999), the photograph must take on a neutrality, an ethical

distance. Hence the ambivalence of this constitutive moment. This is an ambivalence that is

not novel to the virtual child pornographic photograph, but one that has been discussed in

detail in relation to the witnessing of the Shoah (cf. Laub, 1992a and 1992b; Felman, 1992).

Page 12

The transition from living inside the concentration camp to witnessing outside is one that is

deeply troubled, not least by the burden of truth: a truth that cannot be reduced to the

'factual'. As Dori Laub states, there is a problem as to how one can remove oneself 'sufficiently

from the contaminating power of the event so as to remain a fully lucid, unaffected witness'

(Laub, 1992b: 81).

In all of this the child slips in and out of view. And despite the pull of a crude hermeneutic -

for example, one which suggests that an ethics concerns one's relation to the child and not to

the image - the solution is even cruder: the ethics lies in our relation to the image itself.

Nevertheless, our orientation to the image is becoming increasingly problematic. As the

visibility of these crimes proliferates so too do the range of different forms of 'witnessing'

(legal, scientific, therapeutic) and the types of personnel assembled around these images

(such as police investigators, psychiatric counsellors, lawyers, court officials, those involved in

child identification, computer experts, and so on). Cases are ordered; photographs are

classified and placed in collections; images are used in the contexts of professional practice.

The forms of observation are discrete and rarified. Professional observations take place in

bounded, exclusionary spaces and only certain actors are allowed to enter. These forms mirror

the pathology under investigation. But, unlike the pathologised forms of observation

discussed in the above sections, these practices of investigation, legal trial, research and

therapy are not explicitly codified and open to public scrutiny. This is surprising given that

child sexual abusers have historically taken advantage of the veils of secrecy that forms of

authority might permit.

Page 13

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