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.

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.