By D.J. Webb
I don’t have any interested in drawings of children being raped,
but I know of no legitimate law where people could be imprisoned for drawing
such a scene. See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2002181/Ex-leader-paedophile-pressure-group-person-convicted-making-drawings-children-raped.html
I have no objection to throwing the book at paedophiles, and
would consider penalties much, much stiffer than any contemplated by our leading
political parties – including the death penalty in many cases – but we have
seen
1. viewing pictures on the Internet equated with actual
child rape (in a free society the police would have to have good reason to
believe you had actually engaged in sex with a minor before viewing anything on
your computer anyway, and the possession of an easily copiable computer image
should not be actionable at all, no matter how repugnant it makes the person
downloading it).
2. the judicial insistence that all child nudity, including
nudity where there is no sexual component, is pornographic, including pictures
of children wearing no clothes at the seasides, whereas, no matter what the
motivation of the adult taking the photographs (eg a paedophile could be using
a camera on the beach), the image is simply not pornographic – unless the judge
himself is a paedophile… (actually…. I could believe that).
3. and now the drawing of imaginary pictures depicting
paedophile scenes is equated with physically raping a child.
4. It is worth asking (I don’t know from the article) the
presumed age of the children in the drawings: there are “children”
above the age of sexual maturity simply because the law says they are children
(eg the age of consent varies from country to country), and then there is the
real hardcore paedophilia of people who target those who are actually children.
I’m not suggesting eg 15 year olds should be subject to
predatory behaviour, but that there is a difference between eg rape of a 7 year
old (too young to know what is happening) and apparently consensual sex with
someone a week before his/her 16th birthday, who is biologically mature, old
enough to know what is happening, and only a “child” because we
choose to keep young people in education until they are 16.
It is easy to go down the kneejerk route and say that all such
people should have no rights – but we should think of how close the state is moving
into all our lives. When the state can monitor your drawings… there is really
no private sphere left. You will notice the case in that article is described
as a “landmark” case – in other words, a case making new case law
that will begin to be more widely applied. While it is true that the Coroners
and Justice Act 2009 does say “references to an image of a child include
references to an image of an imaginary child”, so this is not one of the
cases where new laws are being made by judges, statute laws that are an abuse
of power are also of great concern to me.
We have a very strange state! We read a while back of how a
young adult who raped a 6 year old was not given a detentionary sentence,
because the Christian parents “forgave” him (but real forgiveness
relates to forgiving something done to yourself: it was simply evil for the
parents to forgive “vicariously” on behalf of their child), only for
him to then rape a 7 year old – so real cases of paedophilia don’t necessarily
get condign punishment, whereas on the other hand, these drawings, which do not
include any violent act on any child, are subject to punishment. Does anyone
understand this?
