The Children
In any society children hold a special place. They are ourselves at our most promising, our purest, holding out the potential for achievement that their parents wish for them. Society at large holds the children within their cultures as the promise for the future. Adults have a responsibility to usher children into their futures with safety and security, as emotionally stable, responsive and responsible individuals.Children have the ability to discern right from wrong, an inborn sense of justice. Safety, security and the opportunity to achieve happiness and satisfaction in life is what we owe to them. When we allow them to be exploited in the most base and vile manner, we violate their trust just as their abusers violate their bodies and their minds.
Children require a firm, loving and guiding hand to advance their interests, to enhance their need for emotional security, to help them to find their careful footing within their emerging place in the larger world. Adults universally cherish the very thought of the children in their midst, and most will go out of their way to assist a child in distress, otherwise personally unknown to them.
From infancy to childhood to emerging independence children represent our enduring well-being as a society. They are an expression of nature's dictum with which we have been genetically endowed - to survive as a species.
We have a collective need to look after their interests simply on the basis that they are so vulnerable in so many unforeseen ways. Their innocence and trust in the world leave them open to experiences not of their making, but which have the potential to hurt and even destroy them, from inadvertent traffic accidents to child abandonment, to kidnapping by heinously unscrupulous psychopaths.
That there are individuals whose orientation toward children as objects of sexual desire and fulfilment, people whose empathy is absent for the plight of small children who have been abducted by criminal psychopaths is an undeniable fact of life. Witnessing the pain and betrayal of childhood left unprotected, and whose futures are fraught with danger leaves pedophiles and child molesters complicit in the sharing of child pornography.
Finally, it would appear that international law enforcement agencies and private charitable groups are combining forces to share tracking expertise and training in the detection and identification of these unspeakable abusers of children. In Toronto there exists a private Canadian foundation which offers off-grid training and assistance, operating independently of traditional government and law enforcement bureaucracies.
Visiting investigators, whose countries are now beginning to fathom the depth and extent of child pornography available on the Internet, and who seek to hunt down predators have their travel and accommodation costs paid for by private donors. The training organized by a number of former Toronto police officers with related expertise. The University of Ontario Institute of Technology donates training space, while Microsoft provides the free specialized software.
The program goes by the name of Kids' Internet Safety Alliance (KINSA) whose principals were motivated by their exposure to online child abuse images and data compiled on suspected abusers. Microsoft's Child Exploitation Tracking System (CETS), now an integral part of the entire programme, allows officers to store, sort and share masses of information through its high-level intelligence database.
While training groups of international investigators and prosecutors, along with police, the full intent of the programme is to create a global network of linked investigators capable of assembling data and sharing it with their international counterparts. The incidence of criminal child abuse appears to be growing exponentially, thanks to the ease of use of the Internet and the growing audience of psychopaths whose targets are children.
It's questionable whether the actual incidence of abuse is itself on an upward trajectory, or whether it is the increase in detection, not occurrence, that renders higher statistics of incidents. With the growing public realization that such crimes exist almost everywhere, people are also becoming more vigilant and the public itself is becoming a source of assistance in detecting these gross social maledictions targeting children.
In many instances, in many countries, particularly in the far east, abused children also become child prostitutes, submitting themselves to the dangers of street sex trade - often enough as the only way they can conceive of to maintain themselves in an atmosphere of endemic poverty and homelessness. Nor are the more wealthy and developed parts of the world free from the scourge of child prostitution rings.
Yet when observing child abuse statistics throughout the world, it's startling to realize that of a percentage-share of known activities within the United States the numbers went from 40% in 2004 to 55% in 2006. To complete the picture, the world share for Russia went from 31% in 2004 to 28% in 2006, while numbers for Europe were expressed as 13% in 2004 dropping to 8% in 2006.
Asia represented 12% in 2004, also dropping to 7% two years on, and in the "other" category - clearly the rest of the world - the percentage share went from 3% to 2%. Leaving one to wonder why it is that a vast population like that of the United States, a wealthy and powerful country known for the dominance of religious adherents within the nation demonstrates such an incredibly large share of child abuse.
The data could very well be attributed to a more aware, vigilant and reactive law enforcement situation within the country leading to a greater share of identified molesters. Whereas the awareness level within other countries is conceivably still on the rise, with identification of child predators on the catch-up. But that this is a hugely intractable problem within society generally is without doubt.
Children are too often losing their right to their future. Childhood lost to tragic and mind-numbing abuse. Many survive with broken spirits as lost souls destined to live out a sad and destitute, short-lived drug-fuelled existence as examples of societal failure to protect its most precious resources.
Helpless rage.
Labels: Social-Cultural Deviations
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, December 09, 2007
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