Child pornography and pedophilia graced the headlines of national newspapers last week following the conviction and sentencing of Michael Briere, the Parkdale man who confessed to last summer’s abduction, rape, and murder of 10-year-old Holly Jones. The outpouring of public grief that monopolized tabloid papers like the Toronto Sun returned full-force, and at its heels came a renewed push by the federal Conservative Party for new legislation that will “get tough” on child pornography and pedophilia. Child molesters across the nation should be quaking in their boots. Maybe the rest of us sexual deviants, as well.
Fighting child pornography is a no-brainer. It’s bad for kids, and it’s bad for society, right? Bolstering this assertion is Briere’s confession, in which he blames the kiddie porn that he regularly downloaded and traded via the Internet for “filling him with a longing” to go further. We might think that a statement like that would seal the deal. Kiddie porn will turn you into a hardened child-rapist and murderer, won’t it?
Statistically, Briere’s case is an anomaly. If we believe the kiddie porn numbers, we have to say that the majority of its consumers (and apparently there are many, many of them) aren’t out there hunting down our innocent children. Most of them are whacking off in their basement apartments, or molesting children that they already know, such as family members and the children of friends and neighbours; a scarier prospect, no doubt. But Briere says the porn made him do it. Police asked him if viewing child pornography on the internet drove him to commit his crimes, to which he responded, “With time, and I don’t know how it is for other people, but for myself, I would say yes, viewing the material does motivate you to do other things.” But really, how else was he going to answer? No officer, I did it because I wanted to be a rapist and murderer.
What also came out of Briere’s statement is the belief that this abnormal sexuality is innate, something he was born with, and could not control. Which, by most reports, fits in nicely with much of the research on sexual deviance. Pedophiles aren’t so much created; they just are. A sexual desire for prepubescents isn’t really so uncommon in human history (arranged marriages between 12-year-old virgins and dirty old men have existed throughout the ages). North American culture eroticizes youth in undeniable ways, and what’s more, humans exhibit a huge amount of neoteny, the retention of juvenile features into adulthood. Our heads are bigger, and our bodies less hairy, than our ancestors or our closest animal cousins. An evolutionary hypothesis that aims to explain that phenomenon suggests that our ancestors were a wee bit pedophilic too, since these neotenous characteristics seem to be desirable traits in our mates. Maybe the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
In law and psychiatry, there is much ado about the way in which sex criminals and other sexual deviants “normalize” their deviant behaviours. They began to experience their abnormal lustings as normal, and to some extent this allows them to normalize otherwise unthinkable acts, like kidnapping, rape, and murder. But aren’t they just becoming resigned to their own innate, if socially unacceptable, desires? Learning to love themselves for who they are? The private erotic fantasies of the majority are as varied as they come, whether they involve a pink teddy, white sport socks, scat, or what have you. But if those fantasies involve goats or prepubescent children (and up until not so long ago, consenting adult members of the same sex) then they’re deemed deviant. Once someone feels that they’ve been labeled a deviant, further deviance (like rape and murder) doesn’t seem so bad, because they’ve already been placed outside societal norms, and are already reviled. How much acceptance does a pedophile have to lose when he’s already on the hook for being what he (or she) is?
Which brings us to pornography, a hot-button topic to moralists (read the Conservative Party) across the nation. In March, 2002, John Robin Sharpe was found not guilty of possessing child pornography by a B.C. Supreme Court Judge, because the stories that he had written depicting underage characters in sexually explicit, violent, and sado-masochistic scenarios were deemed to have artistic merit, essentially creating what many social conservatives believe is a loophole in Canada’s ban on kiddie porn. A month later, a Canadian Alliance motion that advocated an outright ban to close the loophole was defeated in the House of Commons. With the sudden splash of front page coverage on the Briere case, and the public still grieving for young Holly Jones, the new Conservative party has dragged the cat back out of the bag, and Briere’s admission that the porn drove him to do it is being used as a rallying cry. Never mind that the bulk of research probing the link between pornography and violent crime has suggested the opposite (both Japan and the Netherlands, where extreme, violent pornography is widely available, have seen decreases in violent sex crimes since liberalizing porn legislation). Never mind that closing that loophole not only criminalizes non-exploitive child pornography (i.e. drawings, literature) for law-abiding pedophiles, but endangers the work of practising artists like renowned San Fransiscan underground comic book artist Phoebe Gloeckner, whose autobiographical comics and stories explore her own sexual abuse, at the hands of her stepfather, without casting moral judgment. Kiddie porn is bad stuff when it hurts kids, which is most of the time.
But is an outright ban really going to help root out the real bad guys, the makers and distributors of child pornography? It’s already illegal. Maybe we should spend more time looking for the real criminals, those who take pictures of their neighbours’ children, and less time trying to make a moral example of some sad introvert masturbating to some grainy JPEGs on his hard drive.
