The Young and the Pain of Porn

                                                       by Kenneth Bagnell

   Consider this: a year or so ago a Toronto police detective was assigned to do research on a collection of child pornography owned by a man, believed to be both making it and distributing it. For profit. Get ready: the undercover detective eventually downloaded roughly 250,000 photos, plus 10,000 videos of children in sexual activity with adults, which, in brief, resulted not just in very serious charges against the 43 year old business man — already in jail — who led in producing it all but the subsequent arrests of hundreds upon hundreds of men around the world. As a co-prosecutor at his trial commented a few weeks ago:  “I don’t think the images will ever leave me. Their faces haunt me. The effects on the children and the material that went out – – it was staggering.”  What ought to interest us most is the lasting harm visited on fully innocent children around much of the world, most not yet in teenage years. It all brought back to me a comment  made years ago, in my final year in a Halifax Theological College, then called Pine Hill Divinity Hall, by psychiatrist Dr. Fraser Nicholson, a professor at Dalhousie Medical School, who often gave us weekly lectures on matters that concerned him. “If any of you every come across child sexual abuse, act immediately. Immediately. The child may survive one incident. But more than that and that child is seriously wounded for life.” How many children have been ruined for life by this 43 year old man described in The Toronto Star as “Canada’s most prolific and infamous child pornographer”?

     The charges against the accused -– he was pronounced guilty on May 13 – will in all probability, result in a major lengthening of his current four year sentence. The tears will be few.  Moreover, his ambitions as a pornography merchant have led to 500 arrests of customers worldwide, a record for the history books. (Just over 100 were Canadians from virtually every province; taken in its entirety, the roster of those charged include numerous professional men: physicians, lawyers, teachers, and clergy. Given the expertise of today’s investigative technology it’s little wonder that almost 80 were charged in the US and 350 in Europe. Their court appearances will take time as usual and the sentences will vary as they usually do from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Almost as if on cue, news broke a few days ago that in England 1,400 men are now being investigated, almost 80 of whom are elected politicians. According to a May 21 report from London: “Many of them -– 261—have been identified as ‘people of public prominence’ from industries such as music, television, sports and politics. They include 76 politicians, 135 people from TV, film or radio, and 434 from the music industry.” It was no comfort when a  sophisticated theological magazine , Christianity Today,  published in the US, arrived today, May 22, with news, which if true, we deserve to know simply because we are citizens of democracy and should know of moral decay:  that pornography in general is on the rise. In unexpected places. An essay began: “Are we really supposed to buy into the idea that 68% of men in Church watch porn regularly? Could this be just sensational rhetoric? Not according to a national survey among churches. The survey conducted over the past five years revealed that 68 percent of Christian men and 50 percent of pastors view pornography regularly.” The magazine is quite professional as well as conservative but I can’t put my skepticism aside. (Full disclosure: the article advocates purchase of a study guide on this subject.)

      No matter what happens, deeply embedded questions linger around the ugly issue of child pornography and child sexual abuse. The primary question at least for me is this: “What warped human condition drives men to do this? What’s the dreadful motivation?  I searched over my adult years for straightforward explanations or possibilities but there weren’t any. The insights floated were few and as vague as the brief line which I recall appearing years ago in American Psychiatry’s “Directory of Disorders.” As I remember it, the first list I’d read became, almost the same for years: “Causes are unknown and therapeutic results are unfavorable.”

      That’s changed as psychiatric researchers compile the evidence from victims: post-traumatic stress disorder not just among victims and friends close to the victimization; depression, which, given vivid memory, can become lifelong; thoughts of suicide which are often acted upon; illicit drug use caused by the sexual intrusion no matter how passive. Finally the obvious: “Both men and women with a history of child sexual abuse demonstrate an increased risk of alcohol problems…”  

     Most of us have gone through life, without thinking of these realities simply because in past years, most victims kept very quiet. This accentuates the harm. For example, a doctoral study done by scholars Melissa and Joshua Hall, at The University of Arkansas, reports after many interviews that depression has been found to be the most frequent long term wound of sexual abuse victims:  “Childhood sexual abuse has been correlated with higher levels of depression, guilt, shame, eating disorders, somatic concerns, anxiety, repression, denial, sexual and relationship problems. Depression has been found to be the most common long-term symptom among survivors… survivors may have difficulty in externalizing the abuse, thereby thinking negatively about themselves…” They also make this entirely plausible and understandable observation: “It has been shown that survivors frequently take personal responsibility for the abuse. When the sexual abuse is done by an esteemed trusted adult it may be hard for the children to view the perpetrator in a negative light, thus leaving them incapable of seeing what happened as not their fault.”

      Just such an incident took place in or around 2013, in a rural area of southern Ontario, when an esteemed local physician was found guilty of indecent assault after fondling four youths. He was, according to The Toronto Star an active churchgoer and youth leader in one the town’s historic churches. He was out on bail when, a week or so ago, he died. The abused youths, (unlike the children mentioned above who felt self-blame) remain to this day deeply angry at what he did (apparently as a Scoutmaster) roughly a half century ago. In fact, when his church, of which he was a longtime member, prepared last week for his memorial service one of the abused youths, now middle aged, became quite angry, an indication of how deep the wounds of years ago remain.

      One spoke to The Toronto Star: “How are we going to live with peace when he’s getting what he wants, when he’s getting a full salute from the church on the way out?” It is indeed a sad situation but, as someone who, over the years, has done volunteer counselling in a prison, I agree with what an able United Church executive, David Allen, said of the Memorial: “As a church our faith calls us to treat with compassion even those who stand convicted by the courts.” He’s right. In the end who are we to decide and declare that those who break our laws are to be denied Christian burial? God is, we’ve often said, the ultimate judge.

All my past blogs are archived on my website: your comments are welcome there: www.kennethbagnell.com.