[No more on the Web]

Amsterdam, January 18th, 1999

Dear ladies and gentlemen,

With interest have I read your web-pages regarding the pedophilia conference being held this week in Paris. Some parts of these web-pages struck me, and I'd like to comment on them and raise some questions via this E-mail message. If you feel my comments bear something important, or this message might give the conference some other viewpoints which could be of interest, you are invited to print this E-mail message and share it with the people attending the conference. Of course, I'm willing to answer any questions directed to me via my E-mail address […]

First, the meeting is said to be an *expert meeting*. I'm really wondering who those experts are. Will all sides of this controversial subject be represented? Will people who have suffered terrible child sexual abuse be represented? Will people be represented who experienced great benefits from their relationship as a child with an adult? Will psychologists and sexologists be there, representing different sides? Will child-lovers themselves attend? I just fear your meeting will again be one of those unilateral meetings. Your list of web-links seems to support this feeling.

The DSM-IV reads: paedophilia is the erotic and/or sexual orientation or preference of adults towards children under 13 years of age. There's no reference [there] to its being an aberration or perversion. Being a paedophile doesn't mean one actually abuses children, so a paedophile cannot be equated with the sexual abuser of children. But this is exactly what you did in your paper: explicitly defining the word paedophile as a synonym for "sexual abuser". Later in the paper you referred to the child molester and paedophile as being different sorts of people, as you differ between acts of paedophilia and the sexual abuse of children. This confused me, as I fail to see the difference when keeping in mind your own definition of the paedophile being a sexual abuser. For the sake of clarity, I will follow your definition of the paedophile and use the word child-lover for the person who feels erotically/sexually attracted primarily towards children. I do hope you understand and acknowledge the difference between the two.

From the DSM-IV definition, I didn't read paedophilia is a social sickness, nor will any social researcher agree that it is. But in your paper you literally wrote paedophilia is a social sickness. If we would be warped back 40 years, would you also have written homosexuality is a social sickness? And how about transsexuality?

How should I interpret what is known about the ancient Greek and Romans, as well as the customs of many tribes, when reading that sexual relationships between children and adults run diametrically counter to universal social and human values? If you had written "current Western social and human (and maybe Christian) values," I would have agreed with you, but here you seem to be ignorant of our history and of other cultures.

You twice suggested paedophiles are keeping children away from school for their own sake. Is this really true? Where did you learn this? My experience is that child-lovers really care for these children, encourage those children to go to school, to study -- they want only the best for them. In many cases, this friendship lasts many years, often even a lifetime.

I wonder how large the actual market for commercial childporn is at this moment. Do you have any serious estimates? Do you have any estimates about how many children have been involved in childporn movies in, let's say, 1997? Is it 5, 10, 500, 10,000? Has any research been done on how much child pornographic material has being made lately and how old (and previously legal) material keeps popping up, as if it were a terrorist handbook? Later in this message, I will provide some statistics.

Has any research been done for the conference about the extent the repeated presentation of the material actually repeats the sense of victimisation of the children? If so, has it been corrected with the social factor: how would the retrospective experience be in a somewhat more permissive society?

You refer to statistics in your introductory paper, but I couldn't find any statistics. I wonder, for instance, whether you've read the research printed in Psychological Bulletin 124 (1998) which revisited and corrected many important, well-known and often-quoted statistics.

The number of web sites containing childporn struck me: 100,000 to 1,000,000 sites!? I wonder how you got to these figures -- even the quite inexperienced Internet user can check the validity of your figure and realize it just has to be wrong. Having a web site always means you can be tracked down, and while childporn is illegal in almost all countries worldwide, having childporn on your site is one certain way to be caught and sent to jail. So, it's not too surprising that a simple keyword search on any search-engine won't reveal many sites containing child pornography. On the other hand, all search engines do return thousands of hits. When researching these sites, it soon becomes clear these sites are those which fight against childporn on-line or the more 'clever' adult porn sites which use phrases like "child-porn" as meta-tags to generate more hits (i.e., more people accessing their site).

Many sites exist on the Internet which do focus on paedophilia, but not in the way you define paedophilia, but the way I defined "child-lover". These are web-sites which exercise their right to free speech, bring information to the public, give room for discussion between child-lovers and often other people, et cetera. Most, if not all, monitor their discussion rooms intensively just to make sure their platform doesn't get abused as a location for people to make appointments with children, to orchestrate illegal acts or to exchange childporn images. I haven't seen any of these sites advocating sex with children -- most child-lovers will advise everyone to keep away from having sex with children. If these sites advocate anything, it's the discussion of this subject and sincere research. They know this is almost like fighting a losing battle, as the fight against child sexual abuse and child-porn is big business, whereas striving to find more of the truth regarding child-loving, child sexuality and such, isn't. Of course, you'll acknowledge these sites have a right to exist.

Didn't Noam Chomsky once say "If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." Don't think I need to add anything to this statement.

While childporn is extremely rare on the web, it apparently isn't in another corner of the Internet: on the Usenet, also known as newsnet. The Dutch police have done thorough research recently on this issue (my sources: Internet and several Dutch newspapers). The research focused on 48 so-called newsgroups. We can expect the police to have carefully selected these newsgroups as those where child pornography might be expected. The research period started on August 11th, 1998 and ended on September 23rd, 1998. Over this period, 120,000 messages were downloaded by the police of which 82% contained an image. 2.1% of these messages were judged to contain illegal child pornography. The total number of messages posted during this period can be estimated at 24,144,376 messages (using statistics at news.radio-msu.net). So 0.01% of the messages consisted of child pornography, as defined by Dutch law. Now it appears most of the material consists of reposts of already posted images. My guess is 95% of these images are reposts, and my sources came up with similar estimates. The conclusion is the growth of new childporn material is extremely small: 0.00053% of all messages are estimated to contain a new child porn image. These figures are easy to recalculate, if necessary. I can send you exactly how I calculated it. Do these figures really justify the attention this issue gets?

The assumption that child pornography leads to more child sexual abuse, as you seem to be saying, isn't one sexologists have found agreement upon. Another viewpoint is that child pornography keeps people away from children because the use of child pornography lowers their lust-feelings. I even know from some pedophiles who do use pornography as some kind of medicine before meeting any children. To my surprise this opinion got backed-up just this Friday by Judge Duncan Shaw (British Columbia Supreme Court judge in Canada) who ruled that possessing of child pornography should not be a crime. His [careful judicial] reasoning is available on-line.

Your paper stated the Internet leads to more internationalisation, which causes childporn to spread easier worldwide. Is this true? Indeed it's available worldwide. But, say, 20 years ago, many magazines -- which would be qualified as child porn magazine nowadays -- were legally available and got shipped worldwide as well, just by the ordinary postal services. The same happened with videotapes. By the way, many [old] pictures from both these magazines and movies are popping up on [the Internet] nowadays.

Commercial child pornography is very difficult to market these days, as one doesn't know if he's dealing with an undercover cop. So childporn networks are destined to stay relatively small, just because marketing the material too openly is just far too dangerous. Besides that, the need for commercial material is close to nil, due to the availability of old material which can be obtained for free and which answers to an existing need. But the increased patrolling of the Internet could have a terrible side-effect: the increase of child-porn production, just because the demand will increase due to the disappearance of free material. More children will get hurt due to the efforts of exactly those who try to fight child porn and to save children from being hurt. This should be a horrific thought for everyone! On the other hand, a laissez-faire approach isn't the right one as well: in my opinion the police should look for those people producing child pornography (focusing more on commercial/professional stuff) instead of the spreading of old material.

The safety of the child on-line isn't all that bad. Yes, I do advise children to never tell anyone their age, address, phone-number or last name on-line or at least discuss the issue with their parents or me. The chance that a child comes across childporn on-line is extremely small. On the web, it's almost impossible to find this material and on the Usenet, one has to be looking deliberately for it. But as with everything on the Internet: if you're really looking for something extremely weird, the odds are you'll find it in the end. The child looking for pictures showing a hamster being torn apart, he'll find it. But if this kid isn't interested in the abdominals of a hamster, he won't ever come across such an image.

By the way, the suggestive drawing on your site regarding those children surfing the web struck me. Two kids are looking at some soccer-site, one is looking at the Mona Lisa and a third is angrily looking at me, as if telling me the image on his screen is a forbidden one. What's on his screen? A picture of a naked child. What's wrong with the image of a naked child? Is nudity becoming a problem now? Is this an effort to obfuscate and exaggerate the child-porn issue? Nudity, eroticism, sexuality and sexual abuse, to me these are four different issues. I feel it would be very wrong to teach the public a nude child should be associated with child sexual abuse, as you seem to be suggesting.

Does the need exist to shield information from the child on-line? I feel a child has no need to access sexually explicit sites and should not enter them, just like a child has nothing to do with porn magazines, but I can imagine other people might have different views here -- who am I to impose my opinions and views upon them? But informational sites are quite something else. Bennett Haselton (Peacefire, you have a link setup to his site) can tell you more about this and about the censoring of sites by several blocking programs. Regarding child-love, I think children might be interested in this issue, especially the theoretical part: what does child-love really mean? An example: most child-lovers know they feel attracted to kids from the time they were about 12, 13 years old. Almost all of them didn't have any access to information regarding their odd feelings, except extremely negative ones. As a result, they will try to respond to the expectations his society sets: being a good heterosexual, pushing away their own emotions and feelings, wearing a mask and becoming a super-macho. It doesn't need any explanation that this could very easily lead to extreme frustration, and these persons could turn into very dangerous persons: one day they might explode, sexually abuse a boy or girl and afterwards realize what they have done and kill the kid, or, at least, scare the hell out of the kid. How different could this be if the person was able to learn about his feelings earlier, to have discovered he wasn't alone and to have managed to cope with his feelings without ever hurting a child, although living in a hostile society. Also, children who have a relationship with an adult might find important information, confirmation, warnings, and so on, on sites like these. This way decreases the chance something bad will happen. I'm really afraid the current hysterical hunt for child-lovers will turn out into something dramatic: many children will suffer, while this was exactly what the [Paedophile] hunters tried to prevent.

Maybe it helps to put all this into perspective by mentioning some other statistics: one in five people in the world lives in extreme poverty, has no chance to ever come across a computer, let alone surf the Internet. Every hour, 1400 children die from malnutrition and preventable childhood diseases. Sixty-five percent of all child deaths worldwide are caused by a) Acute Respiratory tract Infections (3.6 million children a year) b) Diarrheal diseases (3 million children a year) c) Immunisation preventable diseases: measles, tuberculosis, tetanus, diphtheria, polio, and pertussis (2.1 million children a year, of these, almost 1 million are attributed to measles). Who's causing this? Can anyone be accused of being the bogey man here? No. Is action being taken? Yes, there is; but apparently it's not enough, by far.

Now back to the issue of the almost non-existent child porn production and the almost non-existing danger of the on-line predator. Isn't the balance a bit weird? How many children's lives could have been saved just by the money spent for this conference alone?

During the past three years over 300,000 soldier-children were fighting in wars around the world. During the 1985-1995 decade, the number of child victims of war has been estimated at 2 million killed, 405 million disabled, 12 million left homeless, over a million orphaned or separated from their parents, and 10 million seriously psychologically traumatized. How can all this be compared with the issue of paedophilia and child-pornography? I don't want to play down the serious issue of child sexual abuse. But I do feel we need to keep things in balance and perspective, and if something has been lost in the last two decades, it's just that: perspective.

I wish you all an educationally productive conference,

Kind regards,

[….] (On-line activist, academically educated in the science of psychology and sexology)