Originally published at: https://prostasia.org/blog/preventing-performative-rage/
The obvious answer to the above is – well – everyone. Every person is responsible for ensuring the safety and well-being of the most vulnerable among us. But how safe are we and our children if we (the people who engage in this work) are not allowed to be their complete selves? There is a…
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Exactly, love and support are what we need to use to prevent more child sexual abuse, not hatred and stigma.
If you want to give emotional support to someone, but don’t really know how, I found an article that could help you with that:
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This is probably the hardest pill to swallow; even among many of us who find it easy to sympathize with non-offenders, it’s hard to think about supporting treating offenders with anything but hate even if you don’t have to personally sympathize with them.
But the uncomfortable truth is, even hatred towards and desire to severely punish actual offenders who actually hurt people is probably counterproductive. How many times do we see a survivor coming forward, only for people to accuse them of trying to 'ruin (their abuser)‘s life’, or specifically common with CSA within a family, for the family to defend the abuser because the abuser is also family and they still want them to be happy?
How many times do abusers swear their victim to silence, urging them not to tell anyone because of how much trouble they’d get into, playing the ‘please don’t ruin my life’ card? Imagine how little weight this would carry in a world that openly reassures everyone that no, reporting your abuser will not ruin their life, so even if you care about them, even if they’re begging you not to, speak up anyway; we’re going to help them, not hurt them.
More and more I’m starting to feel like we should actually try to ruin the abuser’s life as little as possible; the minimum amount required to protect other potential victims from them. Not for the abuser’s sake, but for their victim’s sake, so they can speak up without fear. You can’t be accused of ruining anyone’s life if speaking up actually doesn’t lead to anyone’s life being ruined.
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This is probably the most compelling and poetic way I’ve ever seen this point worded
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Everything you’ve said here reminds me of my analysis here: Review of Shut Up and Dance - #10 by Giacobbe
The final scene where our tortured and traumatized main protagonist’s life is completely and totally ruined is haunting. The entire sequence (the whole episode, really) lives rent-free in my head:
What did you do, Kenny?! They’re saying it’s kids! That you’ve been looking at kids! And Lindsey saw it, there’s a video of you, all of her friends have got it! KIDS, Kenny! Tell me it’s not…
There’s also this great summary edit of the episode that earns its 9.9m views!:
This and White Bear are perfect examples of why vigilante justice and overly-cruel punishments are barbaric. Torturing criminals serves no other purpose than to satisfy our own need for “righteous vengeance”. That’s not justice, that’s vigilante mob savagery best left in the days of Hammurabi…
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I will say though that I don’t want to make anyone feel demonized for being angry at their abusers (or abusers in general), even to the point of fantasizing about unnecessary violent punishments against them. As long as it stays thoughts, and words spoken in a contained space that people can’t stumble across without seeing a warning and choosing to disregard it, my support for that is a corollary of my general belief that thoughts are not actions.
Haven’t watched Black Mirror but read your review; I’ve been looking for more media with a more nuanced depiction of MAPs! (Though still haven’t found any depicting non-offenders, outside of some very obscure fics on AO3 :'D) What struck me is that they made a big deal of the fact that Kenny was masturbating to the CSAM, when he’s contributing to child abuse just by accessing the material regardless of what he does while viewing it. Recording him masturbating was completely unnecessary, but ofc it contributes to the outrage knowing that he does -.-
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A big point I made is how the hackers aren’t any better than Kenny when it comes to this. They download Kenny’s hard drive and distribute the contents to ALL of Kenny’s contacts (his family, friends and coworkers). The hacker’s distributed the CSAM Kenny was looking at! So they’re also contributing to the spread of CSAM, while simultaneously blackmailing Kenny into committing increasingly horrible crimes for their own amusement…
They did this to ruin Kenny’s life. But did Kenny deserve to have his life ruined like this? To be forced to brutally kill another man in self-defense? To have every intricate and sordid detail of his CSAM consumption exposed like it was to literally EVERYBODY on his contacts list? His mum, his sister, his grandma, his coworkers? I’m sorry, but this goes WAY too far. And that’s precisely the point of the episode. How does any of this torturing, suffering, and even murder make the world a better place? How is this justice? It’s not…
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Nah, I think it’s fair to draw such a conclusion about the overall message based on the sample you’ve shown :'D Was kind of hoping for better (most of the more sympathetic portrayals seem Lolita-tier from what you’ve told me, at least imo), but it’s also kind of what I expected XD Does help light a fire under me to write my own MAPfic though, even though I’m not a MAP. And I do get the feeling the stigma would eventually, gradually, alleviate enough for better representations to pop up :]
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tbh I’m not sure how I feel about saying they aren’t any better than Kenny, at least if their intentions were just to reduce CSAM demand rather than also blackmailing offenders into committing crimes for their amusement
AFAIK spreading CSAM you got from hacking someone’s harddrive doesn’t contribute to the demand the same way as getting from the source (and thus doesn’t incentivise more creation of CSAM), and if the proof leads to less CSAM in the future, I can sympathise with that action (just a tiny bit) more than I sympathise with viewing CSAM for a neutral reason like sexual stimulation ^^;
When I think of ‘the hunters are no better than those they’re trying to hunt’, I think of something more like this one-shot
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I don’t think that’s true. If the hackers get the reaction they wanted (which it seems like they did), they’re more likely to do the same thing to other people. Regardless of intentions, the end result is more kids’ abuse is being viewed by more people. The outcome is the same as if Kenny was sharing CSAM with other viewers
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True; what they’re doing is still terrible - I guess I was more talking about if their actions would incentivize the people who made the CSAM in the first place to make more CSAM (rather than incentivizing the hackers themselves to keep repeating what they did with Kenny, which involved spreading CSAM).
So the outcome is the same as if Kenny was sharing CSAM with other viewers, but the outcome isn’t the same as Kenny getting the CSAM to begin with (which from what I understand, contributes to the CSAM producers being monetarily rewarded for their actions)
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I can’t say I’d know for sure without research on the topic, but from the former viewers I’ve spoken to, most get their CSAM from a middleman rather than directly from the source, so I assume most people’s viewing doesn’t directly lead to increased production either.
Might be a relatively new phenomenon due to law enforcement getting more aggressive about prosecuting people who use the original source CSAM dark web sites (which, of course, raises questions about whether they’re actually making a dent in viewership or just driving people into DMs on innocuous platforms)
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Well shoot. I haven’t exactly spoken to many former viewers myself so your info’s probably more accurate than my assumptions at least ^^;
(At least the law enforcement might be cutting off CSAM producers from their profits, as well as making access harder for prospective viewers who don’t have connections to middlemen?)
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From the Statistics I have seen about 90% of all stuff found is the same again and again. That has been around for years if not decades. So yeah people viewing more stuff doesn´t need to mean more people producing the same.
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Well, law enforcement also shares CSAM, so I wouldn’t give them too much credit. Most of my experience talking to former viewers was for that article, btw
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(At least the law enforcement might be cutting off CSAM producers from their profits, as well as making access harder for prospective viewers who don’t have connections to middlemen?)
There is a relatively recent article that German police apparently does not work towards removing CSAM Content they find … so yeah wouldn´t bet on that.
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There’s been a disturbing shift in the last few decades to prioritize catching viewers over removing content, even though catching viewers does much less to protect children and support survivors (and in some cases does the opposite by preventing viewers from getting the help they need to stop)
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