Child pornography | Stephen Kimber

Tag: Child pornography

2014: The year the conversation changed

I followed last week’s news stories about Dalhousie dental school with a mixture of oh-no shock and not-again recognition. The week began with revelations about a misnamed, misogynous Facebook group: “The Class of DDS 2015 Gentlemen.” Thirteen male graduating dental students had shared anti-women screeds, voted on which female classmate they’d most like to “hate […]

The boy who took the photo, the girl who was bullied to death and the sentence that can never satisfy

It is easy to understand the anger, the frustration. The boy, who is now a man, who took the picture of the girl who will now never become a woman (but who still can’t be named — and that is part of the frustration), will not go to jail. Instead, Judge Gregory Lenehan Thursday sentenced […]

Dress codes: days of future past

When I was in high school — in the days when tablets were not computers but the stone on which the Ten Commandments were etched, and before the discovery of trans, either fat or gender — we had a dress code. Boys were required to wear shirts buttoned to the collars, ties tied tight. No […]

The girl whose name we know but now can’t say…

I can’t tell you her name. You know it already. She’s the teenaged girl who committed suicide after an alleged sexual assault at a house party was photographed and posted online, triggering months of cyber-bullying but no criminal charges against those allegedly responsible. She is the girl whose bereaved parents went public with her story […]

Crime and the young… discuss

Crime and the young. It’s complicated, far more so than any tough-on-crime Tory politician could — or would probably want to — capture. Consider last week’s police blotter. In Cole Harbour, a 17-year-old boy faces charges of possessing and distributing child pornography. In London, Ontario, a 19-year-old computer science student is charged with electronically breaking […]

Rehtaeh Parsons, the media and social media: it's complicated

It’s complicated. The Canadian Psychiatric Society, among others, publishes guidelines for reporting on youth suicide. Don’t put the word “suicide” in the headline, it says. Don’t give such stories undue prominence. Don’t describe the method. Don’t glorify the victim. The guidelines are designed to reduce the very real risk of copycats. We know many media […]

Rehtaeh Parsons, cyberspace and "justice:" a cautionary tale

On April 19, 1989, a 39-year-old woman named Trisha Meili went for a jog in New York’s Central Park. She was raped and violently assaulted. Partly because of the attack’s brutality, partly because of news reports the perpetrators were a gang of “wilding” black youths and partly because of who the victim was—white, a Yale […]

Time for a public inquiry into the Fenwick MacIntosh case

One hopes Nova Scotia’s prosecution service will find compelling legal grounds to appeal last week’s Nova Scotia Court of Appeal decision overturning Fenwick MacIntosh’s conviction for sexually abusing children. The accusations are too serious and the legal issues too important not to appeal. But whatever the outcome of the legal process—and, indeed, without waiting for […]

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 […]