We've had some questions about our child sexual abuse perpetration prevalence survey, which found that one in ten Aust men have committed a child sex offence, and one in six men are attracted to children. humanrights.unsw.edu.au/sites/default/… We used 18 as the age of consent across all offences, although consent varies in Australia between 16 - 17. It is 18 for many child sex offences (ie child sexual abuse material, child sexual exploitation). Some have suggested that this inflated our findings.

At the moment, Australian CSAM victims are not acknowledged in policy as a victim category with unique and special needs.

I want to talk about what we owe to Australian children victimised in child sexual abuse material.

https://twitter.com/mike_salter/status/1686298330094276608

1. They should receive the assurance of the Aust govt that the distribution of their material is being monitored and disrupted via proactive detection and removal strategies.

A lot of child protection history gets memory-holed. People forget.

For instance, the push to criminalise "child pornography" came from a 1973 case where 27 boys were sexually exploited and murdered in the production of child sexual abuse material.

US Attorney General, 1986: This was just one of several cases where US authorities identified the industrial production of child sexual abuse material in the 1970s.

In light of the attention to the Balenciaga shoot, it's worth noting the 2020 article in Australian Feminist Studies defending a sexualised fashion shoot with prepubescent models from the mid-1990s. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10… The shoot has young girls in revealing, low cut dresses (exposed sternum and back) and provocative poses, including one lying flat over a table. One girl is posed next to a teddy bear that appears to be masturbating.

The Balenciaga campaign has girls holding BDSM teddy bears and includes photographs of the court decision that legalised some virtual child sexual abuse material in the US.

There is a long history of allusions to child sexual abuse within "high" culture, art and theory.

https://twitter.com/ChildRescueCo/status/1595071856419262465

Throughout the 20th century, sexual violence against children & women has been depicted in the fine arts, cinema and intellectual culture as a courageous unveiling of hidden truths ie the open tolerance of child sexual abuse by French novelists & intellectuals until #metooinceste

Make no mistake about it, there are well funded programs, clinicians and academics who want to "destigmatise" the desire to sexually abuse children. They believe that this will somehow (?) prevent child sexual abuse. They use the language of "public health" and "prevention" but they are forensic psychs/researchers with no public health or primary prevention training. They see stigma solely as a negative force that prevents paedophiles from accessing clinical treatment.

In the current furore over queer theory and child sexual abuse - a revealing moment in Pat Califia's second edition of "Public Sex", where he reflects on his previous writings that normalised child sexual abuse and defended the sale of child sexual abuse material. There's been lots of speculation about why people might use theory to trivialise/normalise child sexual abuse. I personally think that this is one of the most common reasons - as a defence against their own unresolved vulnerabilities and traumas.

How on earth did an academic who wrote papers on "cumming on or possibly even with a child" end up the trustee of a children's charity?

https://twitter.com/benjamincohen/status/1577308516779544577

Universities have incubated self-consciously transgressive, anti-normative writing about children's "desires" and "sexual agency" for decades, incentivising young academics in particular to take more extreme positions to carve out their own "shocking" niche in the marketplace.

Thought experiment -

I buy some land on a busy road and build a playhouse stocked with toys and games. I throw the doors open and anyone can come in for free. I make money by selling advertising space on the walls of the playhouse. Children love the playhouse and they are a lucrative market, so I encourage them in. I don't want to pay for staff to check ID at the door or supervise the playhouse. It's fairly common that men come in off the street to sexually abuse children in the playhouse.

The term "minor attracted" (instead of "paedophile") was coined on Boychat in the late 1990s. Boychat is a site for men who want to sexually abuse boys.

It was then picked up by a number of pro-paedophile groups in the 2000s (some anti-contact, some pro-contact). The (self-proclaimed) anti-contact "MAPS" received sympathy from some academics & psychs who began using the term in their own work over the last decade.

These researchers and practitioners are now arguing that "MAPS" are stigmatised by the assumption that they are abusers.

I co-edited this special issue of the Journal of Trauma and Dissociation with Ruth Blizard on the science and politics of false memories. Now published: tandfonline.com/toc/wjtd20/23/2 It begins with our editorial tracing the emergence of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation in the 1990s out of the anti-child protection movements of the 1980s, and the impact of false memory logics in the media and courts. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

We have to start talking about child sexual abuse as a pattern of control comparable to domestic violence, rather than just a sequence of sexual acts.

Otherwise we miss the fundamental dynamics of abuse between victim and perpetrator, and the subsequent impacts on the victim. In this Australian study, being choked or smothered during child sexual abuse increased the risk of clinical levels of dissociation by a factor of 106. Dissociation is of course linked to amnesia and non-disclosure. tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…

Now we have @TurnbullVanessa and @CrippsKyllie on "Implications of Intergenerational Trauma and Systemic Abuse for Australia’s First Nations: Considering the Role of Activism in Healing". Truly honoured to have them with us today. @ISSTD .@TurnbullVanessa: First Law teaches us about our interdependence with Country, to care about things beyond what is simply human, and to create justice for all @ISSTD

Hi folks - I'm live tweeting the @ISSTD Asia-Pacific Virtual Conference today.

Up first - Rick Hohfeler and Kathleen Adams on "States of Abject Shame and Self-Loathing: Compartmentalization, Dissociation and Enactments" Kathleen Adams - Shame and humiliation are now becoming primary focus points for understanding the aetiology of dissociation, and the experience of being abused in childhood @ISSTD

You can't "de-stigmatise" the compulsion to sexually abuse children without normalising the sexual abuse of children.

This is a distinction without a difference, advanced by paedophiles and their allies, and by appallingly naive theoretical hair-splitters. If you experience the urge to do something anti-social - abuse children or animals, murder people, etc - you should be ashamed and seek help. And as a society, we should provide you with support not to act on those urges.

Why should proactive detection for child sexual abuse material generate so much backlash in the tech industry, when it is no more/less invasive than proactive detection for viruses, spam, malware or copyrighted material - all of which are wholly uncontroversial? A sympathetic explanation is that CSAM prevention represents a thin-edge-of-the-wedge for content regulation as a whole, which cuts against the basic business model of Web 2.0.

It's becoming clear that tech companies and privacy zealots will try to deflect pressure to screen for child sexual abuse material (or compromise on encryption) by pointing to improved "reporting" options.

https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1437567617405833216

One of the most highly shared tweet threads in response to Apple's proposed measures suggested that the problem could be solved by implementing a user reporting function on iMessage. Now, WhatsApp points to its reporting feature as a CSAM solution.

In 1984, Gayle Rubin published one of the foundational texts of queer theory, in which she defends "boylovers" and criticises the criminalisation of child sexual abuse material.

In 2011, she published a reflection on that essay, and she does not resile from these positions. These were her words in 1984: "Boylovers" are the victims of a "savage and undeserved witch hunt".

While her extremely mild qualification in 2011 is that she doesn't support the sexual abuse of "prepubescents".

But at no point does she abjure her original sentiments.

Forthcoming in Deviant Behavior - my paper comparing the content of pre-internet child sexual abuse material to contemporary CSAM, using @CdnChildProtect data. academia.edu/50810988/A_Com… This is the first study of the content of CSAM prior to the internet. Our findings challenge the sceptical view of CSAM allegations evident in the sociological literature in the 80s & 90s, and emphasise the plight of a significant & neglected group of adult CSAM survivors.

Let’s revisit a key moment in Australian history that also involved accusations of “recovered memories". In 1998, the IPA attacked the credibility of testimony of survivors of the Stolen Generation, suggesting they were suffering from “false memories”. ipa.org.au/wp-content/upl… In fact, the logic of "false memories" became central to conservative media backlash against the findings of the Bringing Them Home report. press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/pres…

I think one of the reasons that the "recovered memory" trope is so popular with some journalists is that it simplifies very complex circumstances. Our legal systems were not established to adjudicate delayed allegations of sexual violence, although delays are common. Frequently, a delayed complaint falls outside the legal process in various ways, and then we – as citizens – are left with the ambiguity of a serious but unproven claim. I can see how it might be appealing to circumvent that ambiguity altogether.