Child porn as thought crime
Last week, David Scott Hammond and James Cory Hammond, 20-year-old twin brothers from New Glasgow—who were described in court as “fairly introverted” and “most un-streetwise”—were each sentenced to three months in jail for possessing child pornography.
What makes their case interesting—and troubling—is that the images the young men were accused of downloading onto their home computers were not photographs but drawings.
You can argue that someone who downloads photographic images of children in sexual poses is guilty of possessing child pornography even if that person didn’t actually take the photographs. That’s because it’s clear someone had to have exploited those children in order to produce the photos, and the person possessing the images indirectly contributes to their exploitation simply by creating a market for those peddling them.
But drawings don’t involve real children. They are works of imagination.
According to news reports from the trial, the seized images were “drawn in the Japanese style known as anime or manga.” While there are many variants of the style, the most popular highlight “exaggerated physical features such as large eyes, big hair and elongated limbs...”
Such images are not—and are not intended to be—realistic depictions of the human form.
We might not like what is going on in the heads of those who create—or view—such images, but is there any evidence any real children were exploited in their production? Or will be as a result of viewing them?
Crown Attorney Craig Botterill claimed as much. “Every one of these images involves the victimization of children… The victimization wouldn't happen in the first place if there weren't people there to look at this material.”
Plenty of researchers would beg to differ. Dr. Michael C. Seto, for example, a Canadian psychologist who teaches psychiatry at the Centre of Criminology at the University of Toronto, argues convincingly in a 2007 book on the subject that “not all sex offenders who target children are pedophiles, and not all pedophiles commit sexual offenses.”
Swiss researchers, who studied the criminal records of men charged with viewing child pornography on a US website, recently concluded that “the motivation for consuming child pornography (probably) differs from the motivation to physically assault minors.”
Which means we prosecuted these young New Glasgow men not necessarily for what they actually did—even indirectly—but for what they might have been thinking.
And that is a slippery civil liberties slope.
***
Addendum: Reader "Milton" is correct. While the news account of the case I'd read indicated that the two young men were convicted simply for possessing drawn images of children, the more detailed story of their trial in the New Glasgow News makes clear that, while "approximately 90 per cent of the images were of cartoon drawings," there were some photos and videos too. I apologize for the error.
That said, I continue to believe the criminal charges should have been restricted to the actual photos and videos they downloaded rather than images in which no harm was done to real children.
Time for Liberals to crawl out of the muck
Pity Stephen McNeil. The NDP wants to stop his Liberals from continuing to tap a tainted $2.37-million party trust fund to pay its bills.
“The motive… is political,” McNeil complained to reporters after the government introduced the bill this week, adding plaintively: “You’d have to ask them why they would specifically go after us.”
Uh… No, I don’t have to ask the government, Mr. McNeil.
I know why.
So do you.
And all I can say is, it’s about time.
For decades, Liberal and Tory governments would fatten their party coffers with money raised by a practice known as "tollgating." If you were a business and wanted to sell to the province, you had to fork over a kickback to the party-in-power’s bagman for the privilege. You paid so much for every case of booze sold to the liquor commission, every side of beef delivered to the regional hospital cafeteria, every pencil peddled to the local school board.
The parties raked in millions as a result. In the 1980s when the Mounties investigated the fundraising practices of Gerald Regan’s Liberal government, they discovered it had raised more than $4 million illegally during its eight years in office.
The Mounties filed influence-peddling charges against three senior Liberal bagmen, including one known as “Suitcase” Simpson for his suitcases of cash. One pleaded guilty. Two others were convicted at trial, though one appealed and his conviction was overturned on a technicality. He was later acquitted at a re-trial.
The Mounties tried to investigate the fundraising practices of provincial Tory governments too, but—as an investigator testified during the Liberals’ trial—Tory fundraisers had burned their records before the police could seize them. The Mounties found only one intact file, which indicated the same kickback pattern the Liberals had employed.
Despite the odour, the Liberals continued to use this dirty money, including to underwrite a secret salary for their leader. Eventually, when the stench got too bad, the party reluctantly agreed to audit the controversial funds and turn over any tainted money to the province.
But, thanks to the usual political jiggery-pokery, the audit wasn’t an audit. The party claimed only $1.3 million worth of the money was “proven or alleged to have been obtained” through kickbacks. They kept the rest. And still use it to give the party an unfair advantage over its rivals.
In opposition,the NDP filibustered a 2006 Tory-Liberal campaign finance reform bill because it failed to deal with this trust funds issue. So it’s no surprise the NDP is now using its majority to finally flush the system of these proceeds of crime.
The only surprise is that Stephen McNeil isn’t smart enough to simply say thank you and get on with rebuilding his party. Pity.
***
Online postscript: In the occasional way of the print-on-paper world, events overtook this column between the time it was written and published in Metro. On Thursday, October 22, the NDP’s new legislation unexpectedly and quickly passed through all its legislative hurdles without opposition or even discussion.
McNeil’s Liberals did not oppose it. "It was my direction and I take full responsibility that this issue needs to be behind us," McNeil explained to reporters after the vote. "It needs to be behind the party, and (let’s) get on with doing the business of bringing our Liberal values, Liberal views and engaging Nova Scotians about, not only how we hold the government accountable, but the things that matter to them and how we put together public policy."
So… while I can’t claim ex-post-facto credit for the fact McNeil so quickly saw the light on this issue, I can congratulate him for his wise decision. Time to move forward.
They say it’s your birthday
Earlier this month, she turned 19. She is now officially an adult. Not that she ever had a childhood.
I’d tell you her name, but I can’t. Besides, it wouldn’t mean anything to you.
This might.
In the fall of 2006, when she was just 16, she was, briefly, a media sensation when she landed in provincial youth court facing 32 criminal charges involving incidents that had occurred in and around group homes where she’d been living.
Her lawyer told Judge Pam Williams she was a “troubled” girl who needed daily psychiatric care. She wasn’t getting it, the lawyer said, because the province had failed to provide the necessary resources. Frustrated, Judge Williams ordered then-Community Services Minister Judy Streatch—the official legal guardian for all 2,000 kids her department had placed “in care”—to personally attend a case conference to discuss how to get the girl the help everyone agreed she needed.
And then, of course, all hell broke loose. A cabinet minister responsible for an individual child? It just wasn’t on. In the end, the judge rescinded her unprecedented order.
But it didn’t matter.
By then, the girl had disappeared. And no one seemed eager to find her.
I did. Ten months later. We met in a Subway restaurant. I was doing a story about “Lost Children” for The Coast and I wanted to know about her life in care, and what she remembered of life with her mother.
“I remember she used to buy me cats,” she told me. “And we fed the swans. We moved around a lot too. I remember that.”
She couldn’t remember how many foster families she’d lived with. She remembered none could cope with her. “I was frustrated,” she says. She missed her mother.
In 1999, when she was just nine years old, community services officials obtained court approval to remove her from her mother’s care because—they claimed—they could raise her better than her mother.
The girl’s mother wasn’t a perfect parent. She grew up in an abusive home herself, got shunted to foster care, became pregnant at 15. She had no idea how to be a mother. “If only they’d helped my parents be better parents,” she told me sadly. “If only they’d helped me…”
They didn’t. Instead, they took her daughter. By all accounts, they didn’t such a good job.
Now the girl is 19, an adult, on her own. The cycle continues.
Happy Birthday.
Raymond Lahey and the rush to judgment
I know it is correct—politically and otherwise—to be scandalized by news that child pornography was allegedly discovered on a laptop computer belonging to the now-suddenly former Roman Catholic Archbishop of Antigonish, Raymond Lahey.
I am. Up to a point.
If the material in question includes photographs of actual children, then someone exploited those children to create the images. The search warrant for his computer claims Lahey frequented well-known sex tourism destinations like Thailand. If Lahey, even indirectly, contributed to actual child exploitation, he should be held accountable.
That said, the portrait that emerges from the rush to rummage through his life and closets is of complex, complicated man seemingly in continuing conflict with himself.
According to Shane Earle—a survivor of abuse at the infamous Mount Cashel orphanage in Newfoundland—Father Lahey, then a parish priest just outside St. John’s, provided refuge for many of the boys abused at the orphanage. “He was all these idealistic things you want in a father,” Earle told the Globe and Mail.
But during one of his visits to Lahey’s home in the mid-1980s, Earle says he discovered “graphic pictures of aroused teenage boys” in Lahey’s bedroom.
To be clear, Earle does not suggest Lahey ever physically or sexually assaulted him. Neither, to this point at least, does anyone else.
And, whatever his own private fantasies, Father Lahey never publicly condoned actual abuse.
Ironically, just before his arrest, he even helped negotiate a landmark $15-million settlement of sexual abuse claims against priests in Antigonish, the diocese he had gone on to head.
Shane Earle wasn’t surprised. “I remembered as a child how concerned he was about child abuse,” he told the National Post, “so I knew there was a side of him that could be an asset to this whole process.”
There’s much we don’t know about Lahey’s case. It is early to rush to judgment. But it is possible—probable—that, even if the allegations are true, Lahey is not the only villain.
Based on what we already know from way too many other proven cases, the real villain is a Roman Catholic church whose unhealthy, unholy demands on those who serve it created a sexual pressure cooker primed to explode. And it has. Too often. It is time to deal with that.
IWK book to launch October 8
Th
e IWK Health Centre and Nimbus Publishing
are celebrating the launch of
IWK: A Century of Caring for Families
a new book by Stephen Kimber
Where:
The Gallery of the
Richard B. Goldbloom Pavilion,
IWK Health Centre
5850/5980 University Ave.
When: Thursday, October 8, 11:00am
Scotia Surgery deal cosmetic
This week’s revelation that our on-its-way-out-turn-on-the-taps Tory government renewed a controversial contract with Scotia Surgery in early June—just six days before voters shoved it onto the political trash heap—was… well, interesting. But not surprising.
More intriguing—and perhaps more telling—was Health Minister Maureen MacDonald’s shrug response. “They’re entitled to sign contracts right up to the day they’re no longer the government,” she blandly told reporters this week, adding with Zen-like detachment: “Things that have already happened, I have to learn to accept and move on, and focus on what it is I need to do.”
You could almost smell the relief in her words.
In March 2008, then-Conservative Health Minister Chris d’Entremont announced a one-year, $1-million “demonstration” project to reduce then-18-24 month wait times for orthopedic surgery. Under the arrangement, privately-owned Scotia Surgery was to perform more than 500 minor procedures at its Dartmouth clinic in order to free time and space in Capital Health operating rooms for more complex cases like hip and knee replacements.
Harrumphed then-Opposition leader Darrell Dexter: “This is being billed as innovative reform, but in fact there's nothing new and nothing innovative about this whatsoever.” He called it “a million-dollar quick-fix… taking money out of the public system and putting it into a private facility,” and added: “This is really about the larger question of public policy, and is it the direction that we want health care in this province to go in?”
Pre-Premier Dexter was right.
But the problem for Now-Premier Dexter is that—at least as quick fix—this one appears to be working.
For starters, Scotia Surgery, unlike many private clinics, operates in concert with the public system. No one gets to jump the queue simply because they can afford to pay. And the clinic’s patients, concedes NDP Health Minister MacDonald, are satisfied with the service.
Given those realities, it would have been tricky for the new NDP government to have simply canceled the contract after they took office in June. The Tories took them off that hook.
But Dexter’s larger questions remains: Will this quick-fix work for the long term? What are the pluses—and minuses—of using private clinics to deliver public services? And is this really the direction in which we want public health care system to go?
Before Scotia Surgery’s oh-so-convenient contract extension comes up for renewal seven months from now, our new government will need to answer those questions.
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and eight non-fiction books.