Monday, November 26, 2007

Au Revoir

If you were one of the regular readers of this blog, I am sorry to say this is goodbye.
I have not been able to get into the blog myself for a while and apparently some of our readers had the same problem.
So until we can work out a better system - this is farewell.

But there are many other ECPAT related sites popping up now and as we draw closer to the next World Congress (Nov 2008) they should increase.

Plenty of good debate - as there should be.

As they say in this country - Kia Kaha! Stay strong!

Ron

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

A Russian Film

This week I went to the movies to see a remarkable new Russian film “The Italian”. It is the moving story about the system which allows young boys to be picked up from various parts of Russia and then held in an isolated orphanage until they can be on sold for adoption to wealthy parents from other parts of Europe. It pulls no punches. The poverty and depravity of Russian towns and country is vividly portrayed.
The story line is about one young boy who is to be sold to an Italian family (hence the title) But he manages to beat the system and find his way back to the city and find his own mother. It is a feel-good ending and helps to affirm the belief that there is still much goodness even in the worst of places.
What does come through as a very strong undercurrent is the extreme vulnerability of children when there is a situation of poverty. Sometimes there are mothers who feel able to sell their own children because of desperation and then suffer such guilt that they commit suicide. There is one sad episode of this in the film. More often it is the criminal networks who find ways to secure children through abduction or false promises.
This film is not about children sold into prostitution but it describes the same process. It is about a criminal network created in situations of poverty where children can be bought and sold and where unscrupulous people make excessive sums of money from the trafficking.
The emotions of the people in the film swing from time to time. A selfish prostitute takes risks to save the young boy. One of the traffickers gets caught in a nasty episode and it changes his behaviour. They are small signs of hope in a sad and despondent world.
The film has received many awards – rightly so.

Thursday, September 6, 2007

The Growth of Porn

Yesterday, police in Australia picked up a child pornographer who had a collection of 800,000 offensive images on his computer. Yes, that’s right 800,000 images - just short of one million. Can you imagine the time and effort which would go into collecting 1,000 different images and then repeating the process 800 to 1,000 times! What kind of obsessive behaviour would drive a man to such lengths and what sort of market is there in cyberspace that provides such a huge reservoir of illegal material.
Child pornography is monitored in USA by the United States Customs and they have estimated that at any one time there are over 100,000 web sites offering child pornography. These sites are constantly changing their names to elude prosecution and a large proportion of them are based in Russia or East European countries.
Equally astonishing is their estimate that child pornography generates 3 billion dollars annually.* Most countries now have law enforcement officers monitoring the trade and attempting to stop it. Every day in newspapers around the world there will be stories of arrests of pornographers but still the trade flourishes.
We have often said that behind every image there is an actual child being abused. This reality adds to our determination to find some more effective way to stop the growth in this terrible trade.

* Pornography as a whole is estimated to generate between $57 billion per annum though some have claimed the figure could be as high as 97 billion. The three largest markets are China, South Korea and Japan. The USA is 4th.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Kid's Photos

Taking photos of children might seem a harmless activity. Parents are doing it all the time with their own kids.
But we now know that there are people around the world who get a vicarious sexual thrill from taking such photos and videos. Seen in this light, taking photos can become a more serious activity. Lewis Carroll was apparently a fanatical photographer of children and the story goes that when he died (unmarried), his nearest relative was so embarrassed by the collection of photographs that he burned the lot.
Today we know more about the habits of child sex abusers and it seems clear that photos and videos play a large part in their obsessive behaviour. Surveys of paedophiles in the United States showed that their favourite TV viewing was the programmes which showed young girls in brief costumes doing gymnastics.

So what do we do now about Jack McClellan. A self-confessed American paedophile who has no convictions against his name but is obsessed with taking photos of young children. He even has a website listing the best public areas to view little girls.
His behaviour brought a huge public response last month when he turned up at a performance of the popular children’s programme Wiggles but ignored the actors and instead took masses of photos of the young spectators. Irate parents chased him off the set and the Wiggles producers expressed their deep concern at such activities. How can this be stopped they asked? McClennan’s actions were distasteful and offensive but he did not break any laws.
Well, when there are no laws you have to make them. Los Angeles County Superior Court judge Melvin Sandvig made a landmark decision when he placed a restraining order on Jack McClellan which makes it almost impossible for the 45-year-old American to continue to live in California. It is now illegal for McClellan to go within 10 yards of a child in California.
This is no final solution but if it is not effective the legal system will have to find a better way to protect children’s right to privacy.

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Strange Cults

Sometimes you think the world is full of weird cults. Ambitious individuals with a big ego latch on to an ideology or religious belief and promote it through some form of unusual activity until it gains a cult following. History is littered with the wreckage of such movements. Nor do we learn from experience or from the record of such experiences.

Two deaths in the past week made me reflect on this strange phenomena.

In Australia the controversial Ken Dyers took his own life rather than face a barrage of criminal charges brought against him by girls who had been child victims of his sexual attacks while members of his Kenja Communications organisation. 25 years ago Dyers founded a movement which used a form of meditation which he called “energy conversion”. It was well-promoted and hundreds of people parted with thousands of dollars to attend these sessions which allegedly sometimes included one-on-one nude sessions with women and children.
Many wealthy supporters gave public support to Dyers but in the end the inevitability of his conviction for child sex abuse drove him to shoot himself in the head ten days ago.

A second death last week, that of Tammy Faye Bakker will hopefully spell the end of one of those strange “christian” movements so popular in the United States. Known as PTL (Praise the Lord) and based on saturation TV it had a cult following and was the creation of the ambitious couple Jim and Tammy Bakker. Their network programme was so popular that at its peak in the 1980’s it reached 13 million households. Every session included a hard sell call for financial donations. Hugely wealthy the Bakkers did everything with extravagance. Tammy had a drug problem and Jim enjoyed sex with young people. When he drugged and raped a young girl called Jessica Hahn he tried to bribe her with a gift of over US$250,000. It didin't work and he ended up in prison where he died a broken man. Tammy divorced him and re-built the PTL empire. She died last week of a debilitating cancer.

There are dozens of stories similar to these two.
Why should we care about such gossipy nonsense?
We care because cult and cult-like movements leave a trail of victims behind.
In many such organisations the practice of child sex abuse is quite common. It represents a form of power and control which is often the dominant drive of cult leaders and helps to reinforce their rule. Of course all people have the right to form new organisations and explore new frontiers. But when such developments are controlled by autocratic rulers without proper checks and balances we do well to examine the movement with suspicion.

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Sex Offenders On-line

The news from America today reveals that US government authorities have begun searching networking sites and discovered that on MySpace alone there are more than 29,000 convicted sex offenders who have their profiles listed and who actively trawl the web. This figure is at least four times greater than the authorities had previously estimated.
Probably no other country has done this kind of analysis. In Australia where I am writing this blog there is no system for doing the cross-reference required. The email address of child sex abusers is not recorded anywhere and the government is not prepared to update its records to make such a search possible. In New Zealand it is even worse because they do not even have a paedophile register.
What both countries do know is that child sex abusers increasingly use network sites to meet and groom potential abuse victims. Just yesterday two more Australians were arrested in Sydney and Perth for trying to groom children on the net.
The American survey is a wake-up call. Trying to educate parents and children on the dangers of the net is only part of the solution. Something has to be done inside the net itself.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

When Money is not the Answer

The amount of money being paid by the Roman Catholic Church to the victims of child sex abuse continues to make headlines. The wealthy churches of California have this week agreed to pay $660,000,000 to around 500 of its members which works out at about $1.3 million for each person. It has also been stated that this is not the end of all the possible payments. Similar large sums have already been paid in Boston and other American states. The Irish Catholic church faces a similar crisis and has paid out €.5.5 million already this year to claimants.
Reading the responses in American papers it is striking that a number of the recipients see the gift of money as almost irrelevant. What most of them are seeking is a genuine apology and some proof that the situation has changed. Having suffered themselves their greatest anxiety now comes from seeing other children suffer in the same way.
And regrettably cases still continue and many more payments will have to be made. Within the church the debate against priestly celibacy and male domination continues. Perhaps some of these recent events will be the precursor to change.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Is it Racism?

New Zealand Maori Member of Parliament, Hone Harawira caused a ruction when he called Australia's Prime Minister Howard a "racist bastard"for his new policy to invade the Aboriginal communities and change their behavioural patterns. He was called to task by his own Maori party for the personal attack, but they also noted their belief there is deep-seated racism in Australia's general attitude to their Aboriginal population.
This would be hard to deny because the Aboriginal people have suffered serious injustice ever since the first colonialists arrived. From 1910 to 1970 an estimated one-third of all Aboriginal children were forcibly taken from their family and forced to live in a European community in an effort to 'civilize' them. In the eyes of the government at that time Aboriginal's did not even exist and were not included in the census until 1967.
The policy over recent years has been segregation and separate development. It is a policy which did not work in the United States or Canada and is not working in Australia. Living on reservations does not contribute to human development but to despair. Look no further for the high rate of alcoholism and suicide in the Aboriginal population.
It is good to know that Australia is at least attempting to do something to protect the Aboriginal children from abuse, however misguided the methods used. But let us hope that this is not the end and that it will lead to a more sympathetic policy toward the whoe Aboriginal population

Monday, July 2, 2007

Howard's Heavy Hand

Sign in a Supermarket in Alice Springs:
"Spend $60 in the liquor store and get 20cents off a litre of petrol"

It is getting close to election time in Australia and Prime Minister John Howard has just discovered that the indigenous Aboriginal people are in trouble. Mr Howard, it should be added, is a slow learner. Most thinking Australians have been telling him that for decades.
The report that moved the Prime Minister to action was called Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle which translates into – “Little Children are Sacred". It details the sad and often appalling stories of child sex abuse on the reservations of Northern Territory. This is not news. When I was in Australia speaking at an international conference eight years ago I was approached by two Aboriginal elders from Western Australia who sought help in trying to prevent the sexual abuse of their children. They recognised that some of this was caused by the actions of their own people but they were equally concerned at the abuse of children by white Australians some of whom were officials and others who regularly visited the reservations to find children. They had approached the police and social agencies but had received no support from any quarter.
Whatever support they wanted, I am sure it was not the kind of thing the Prime Minister is proposing. Using his power to make political decisions in the Northern Territory (It is not a State and therefore under federal control), the Howard solution will be to send in the troops and enforce the locals to give up the booze and live a better life. They will also be forced to learn English.
It is Iraq thinking and will not succeed. The desperate plight of the Aboriginals is the consequence of years of neglect and external abuse. Historically they often been treated like children and sometimes like animals and not as responsible humans. It is only in recent years that they received the right to vote.
Yes it is time the government acted but not in a way which further strips the Aboriginal people of their dignity.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

€nd Child $ex

The title of our blog has two curious inclusions – the Euro € and the Dollar $. They are there for a purpose. They serve to remind you that in our generation children have become commodities which can be purchased, used and sold. It is the first time in history that children have been used in such a widespread and callous fashion.

Children growing up in poor communities of the world can now be sold to criminal groups and trafficked to a foreign country where they are kept in slavery and used as sexual objects for as long as possible. Then they are discarded.

In some countries of the world children have a monetary value which enables them to be purchased, hired and sold in much the same fashion as any other commodity at the supermarket. You have to go far back in history to see children used for slavery in such a callous fashion, and never has it been on the scale we see today.

In many ways tourism and the globalised world have created much of this situation. In Thailand during the 1990’s we found that It was the coming of foreign paedophiles willing to pay big money for child sex who created the opportunity for criminals to begin trafficking children. Still today there are well-organised criminal rings trafficking children within Asia, Central America and Eastern Europe.

Children are subjects not objects. They need to be respected as subjects of affection and not objects used for monetary gain or sexual pleasure.

Ron O'Grady

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Breaking the Paedophile Rings

This week yet another ring of child sex abusers was uncovered. A particularly nasty group of 700 members located in 35 countries has been exposed. Not only did the participants collect large numbers of images of child pornography many of them were also linked together for live broadcasts of an actual abuse.
The British police uncovered the central character in this ring and after that began to uncover many other members of the ring. Through forensic investigation they were also able to identify 30 of the abused children and rescue them from the cruelty of their situation.
Of course we are delighted that the abusers have been caught but t is a very small victory in a very large battle. It is evident that there are many organisations of this kind operating around the world and their methods of ensuring secrecy have become increasingly sophisticated. Many of them evade discovery by using servers or anonymous remailers in Russia or one of the other former Eastern bloc countries.
Law enforcement officers play a cat and mouse game in trying to break these paedophile circles of abuse. No sooner do they find a way to monitor one form of information transfer than another IT method brings new problems of identification. And despite the serious nature of this crime against children it is still not regarded as a priority in some quarters. One of the ring members in Britain involved in the broadcast abuses had around 5000 child pornographic images on his computer and 392 child sex movies. Even if he is found guilty by the court he could still be released from prison in 19 months.

Saturday, June 16, 2007

Catholic Priests

A senior Catholic spokesman, Cardinal McCarrick, formerly Archbishop of Washington popped into New Zealand last month and spoke to the newspapers about paedophile priests. It was, he said, a reflection of the 60’s “when anything goes….and the sexual mores went down and down.”.
Asked how widespread the abuse was he made the comment: “When all is said and done, you are still talking about less than one out of 25 priests over a period of 60 years.”
It was a surprising admission. Critics in America have been saying for some time that the rate of priests offending is at least 4% of the total but this is the first time I have heard a senior Catholic churchman admitting that this figure could be accurate.
Think for a moment of the implications. Since 1984 there have been about 60,000 active priests in the United States and on these figures the church has been harbouring around 2,400 paedophile priests over the past 20 years. This is a very high number and proportionally much higher than equivalent figures in the total population.
Why is this so? Critics have argued that forced celibacy is a key reason for priestly offending but the Cardinal denied that claim saying that other churches which have married clergy have the same rates of offending. A claim which he did not substantiate and one which is, in the absence of any evidence, debateable to say the least.
One of the saddest aspects to this situation is that Rome still retains a directive issued by the present Pope when he was Cardinal Ratzinger and head of the Vatican Office for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Office of the Inquisitor General). The directive orders that whenever there is even a hint of child abuse by clergy the local church must set up a tribunal to investigate the case and report to Rome and this entire process is to be covered by church secrecy. According to Reuters, the directive was sent to Bishops confidentially and asked them not to divulge the information contained in the letter to the media.
We can only hope that the frankness of the Cardinal is a signal of a new openness in the church so that attempts to cover up criminal actions by the priests will no longer be permitted.

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Virtual Sex

Monday, June 4, 2007

No Room in the Cells

It seems most countries are having a building boom in prisons. About nine million people fill the world’s prisons at any one time with the United States leading the field. These numbers continue to grow everywhere and there are never enough cells.

In Britain it has created such a difficult situation that the Home Secretary recently took the unusual step of writing directly to the country’s judges warning them that the prisons were getting too full and would they kindly try to reduce the number of criminals being sentenced to prison. While the intention was good, the result was disastrous. As a consequence many judges have become more lenient with their sentences and guess which criminals gained the benefit? No prizes for guessing that it was the child sex offenders.

One persistent Welsh sex offender who had been caught with a large number of obscene images of child sex abuse was released with a suspended sentence instead of the expected prison sentence. Leaving the court the abuser told the press that he had been rather lucky. Such decisions reflect the attitude shown by judges in many countries. Faced each day with murder, theft and horrific crimes there appears to be a feeling that a known sex abuser with a large collection of appalling images of violent child sex abuse is actually committing a lesser crime than burglars and thieves.

There are two compelling reasons why this attitude has to stop. The first is that sex offenders are a continuing threat to the most vulnerable members of society. Society must protect its children from abusers in their midst and regrettably prison appears to be the only effective way this can be done.

The second reason is that prison forces the abuser to face some of the consequences of his crime and gives a chance to change some of his patterns of behaviour. While prison rehabilitation courses have often been less successful than desired at least they have enabled some offenders to control their drive to abuse and that has to be a plus.

Prison reform is needed – but not by increased tolerance of child sex abuse.

Friday, May 4, 2007

UN "Peacekeepers" in Trouble

What is it with the United Nations peacekeeping forces? Once again last month a number of their soldiers were sent home this time for the sexual abuse of children in Sudan. So frequently has this kind of action happened that newspapers don’t even report all the cases.
Soldiers sent to foreign countries as peacekeepers are meant to reduce the violence but instead some of them use their position of power to commit repeated sex acts of violence against women and children. In 1990 serious cases of abuse in Cambodia received public attention. Since then, UN peacekeepers in countries as diverse as, Burundi, Haiti, Liberia, Congo and Timor and a number of other countries have been sent home for abusive activities. With about 80,000 military personnel currently serving in 17 countries the UN now appears to have an impossible task in trying to maintain some kind of discipline.

UNICEF and other children’s agencies (including ECPAT national groups) are not geared to monitor the actions of soldiers, but nevertheless their work with children has often lead to them exposing the exploitative acts of some of the peacekeepers. The UN has no mechanism for court martial so when sex abuse incidents become public the only punishment for the offending soldier or soldiers will be a return ticket home where proceedings are rarely brought against offenders.
The UN “army” has little cohesion. It is a multinational and multicultural mix of soldiers with no common language or culture. Such an organisation has little chance of maintaining effective discipline and provides only minimum accountability for soldier’s actions. Whether the governments sending troops will be willing to give more disciplinary powers to the UN is doubtful but this would be the only long-term solution. Until then all we can ask is that the UN forces try to develop three immediate qualities: increased accountability, greater discipline and more transparency.

Sunday, April 29, 2007

The Living Dead

Fifteen years ago in a European city I was contacted by a quite famous man who will have to remain anonymous. I assumed he wanted to talk about my work with children so our conversation began with some neutral talk. Before long he broke down and began to sob.
Gradually his story came together. As a young man he had been expected to go to church every Sunday and, with his mother's encouragment, had become an altar boy. The priest took a special interest in him and slowly initiated the boy into some sexual behaviour. Somewhet shocked by what was happening he eventually had the courage to tell his mother what the priest was doing.
Her reaction was to slap him across the face and say "don't you ever again tell such stories about a man of god." Trapped in this situation the boy had to endure the priest's sexual demands until he was old enough to leave town for university.
He tried to forget what had happened, but he said that not a day had passed without the memory of that experience. His first marriage had been a disaster, but fortunately now that he was just past middle age, he had met a sympathetic woman who was helping him to face his earlier history and to some extent overcome it.
Meanwhile. the priest who had abused him had become a Bishop and eventually rose to become a Cardinal in the church.
The man never considered going to the police but many times struggled with himself about meeting with the Cardinal to face him with what he had done. Such was the shame that had been forced on him as a teen he never did have the courage to have that confrontation.
One month before he and I met, the papers announced the death of the Cardinal.

It was an encounter which is still fresh in my thinking. Soon after that I stated in a newspaper interview that I consider the violent sexual abuse of children to be a crime similar to murder, except that murder is an instant death, but child sex abuse lasts a lifetime.

In this blog I hope we will consider some of the ways in which children can be better protected from those who wish to abuse them.

Ron