sexual violence – Pike & Hurricane

The Other Pandemic

Oliver Ösmark — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 22:06:45 +0000

***Trigger warning: Contains explicit language on the subject of child sexual abuse***

At times one stands before a great abyss. A great expanse ordained by dark materials to which one has to decide to gaze into or turn away from. Why should we feel the urge to brand ourselves with the horrors emanating from worst of what is distressingly familiar: the human condition. “If you stare into the abyss long enough, the abyss stares back at you.” The slime dredged from the ugliest depths of human depravity invokes literal and spiritual trauma, and corrupts hope for redemption.

The doctrines of good versus evil are riddled with complacency and glib intellectuals would claim that the problem of evil is that we are inextricably bound by it. We are either bound to evil’s mast, driven momentarily insane by its song, or we shut it out, plug our ears and go about staying our course. But the problem of evil runs deeper.

Preachers provide no satisfactory answer for evil’s prevalence. Theodicies sideline evil’s sinister human face, yet ones that embed it chime like sermons of a sententious apologist. “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Yes, but the real and visceral evil disfigures the heart with a thousand cuts. It is the narcosis of which a deep spiritual disorientation follows. Some will never find their way out of its depths. Some don’t want to. Others belong there.

The Damned

Meet Benjamin Faulkner. Born in 1991 in North Bay, Ontario in Canada—approximately 350 kilometers north of Toronto. According to his parents, he was well-liked and not a “partier by any means” but more of a gamer and obsessed with computers. He worked as a lifeguard and swim instructor at the local YMCA and held a merit of distinction at his post—praised and appreciated by colleagues and the children he instructed alike. In his mid-twenties he’d shared an apartment with a roommate who described him as pleasant to live with. Not noisy and kept to himself. Mainly because he was on his laptop all the time. In 2016, he was arrested and charged with the rape of a four-year-old girl and for hosting the largest website on the darknet for child sexual abuse content: Childs play.

At Faulkner’s sentencing hearing he delivers a grand speech: “For the first time in my life I am speaking in front of the people that I love about the wrongs I’ve committed. Living with pedophilic disorder is a life of perpetual anxiety, fear, and debilitating depression. […] I know that people were hurt and I am sincerely sorry. I’m sorry for who I’ve hurt and I’m sorry for the lives I’ve altered. I’m sorry for how things turned out. If I could go back, things would be different.” The sentencing proceeds with rather benign testimonies from his parents attesting to the character—”patient and kind”—of Faulkner.

Later, a chief investigator is called on to lay out the facts. Faulkner had built and run Childs Play, administrated another major child exploitation site The GiftBox Exchange, as well as a site called Private Pedo Club with access reserved strictly for content creators with access to minors. He has been the “tech guy” for Peter Scully’s international child sexual abuse ring offering pay-per-view video streams of the most heinous content imaginable—content where minors are abused, tortured, and killed.

While the investigator reads out the list of Faulkner’s activities on the darknet, Faulkner’s hand is covering his face, his shoulders shaking… but he’s not crying. He’s chuckling. Laughing quietly to himself. The grin takes a while to fade from his face.

Faulkner ran what was most likely the largest online network of child abuse material in the world. Yet, at the time of the arrest, none of this got much attention in the media.

The Problem

The awful truth about child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, is that it covers everything. The abuse of babies, even newborn babies. Toddlers. Schoolchildren through to teenagers up to the age of 18. It includes children being raped by adults, or adults directing a child to be abused in another country. It also covers grooming—which involves an adult establishing an emotional connection with a child, sometimes the child’s family, to lower the child’s inhibitions with the objective of sexual abuse—and live streaming of abuse. About one-third of this material is so-called self-generated material, involving either children believing that they are sharing a private moment unaware that they are being recorded and that material being shared, or even children being frightened or coerced to perform sexual acts in front of a webcam.

The scale of CSAM online is enormous, and it appears to be growing. Approximately 132,000 webpages were removed in 2019 by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) which accounts for millions of images and videos. Of them around 95% were girls. And 47% were images of children aged under 10. 1%, a large amount in terms of absolute numbers, of children aged under two. Simon Bailey of the National Police Chief’s Council (NPCC) Lead for Child Protection and Abuse Investigations notes that the worse level of abuse happens the younger the child. “So naught to two is generally the worst level of abuse.”

The Damage

Calling this abuse child pornography is misleading and conceals the scope of the crime being committed. Pornography is commonly associated with the adult industry where consent is given and the actors know what they are engaging in. In no way can that be applied in the case of a child. A child cannot consent to being raped. Nobody can consent to being raped. What you’re seeing in an image with a child is a child being sexually abused. Using the word “pornography” gives a sense of legitimacy to a criminal act. Child sexual abuse is a serious crime and it is important not to minimize the effect that this has on the child.

Because child sexual abuse is extremely harmful. Especially if you look at the long-term consequences. A survey by the Canadian Center for Child Protection shows that 70% of people whose abuse had been shared over the internet lived in constant fear of being recognized. For good reason. 30% of them had been recognized by someone who had seen images of their abuse. In addition to high rates of anxiety, depression, eating disorders, problems sleeping, relationship issues, 60% of respondents had attempted suicide.

The Abusers

Abusers come in kinds. The worst of these are the ones who don’t feel like there’s anything wrong with engaging in child sexual abuse. These people can be impossible to treat. According to Michael Bourke of the U.S. Marshals, the task with these people is to motivate them and get them to the place where they can at least recognize that what they’ve done was potentially harmful and had negative consequences. Most sex offenders that come in through the prison system are eventually going to leave—85-90% will eventually serve their sentences and return to communities.

Bourke likens the behavior to substance abuse. There’s no cure for alcoholism or opioid addiction. There’s no cure for sex offenders either. No way to change their fantasies. “We never take anything away in psychology without replacing it with something healthy. Their crimes are how offenders got their needs met. They were the means through which they coped with stress, sadness, anger, and all the other negative emotions. If you are to take away this coping mechanism—maladaptive and harmful as it is—what do we replace that with?” If there are no readily available ways to assuage the offender’s response when confronted with stressors, they will go back to their tried and true means of relief—the website, playground, water park, whatever it may be.

By conservative measures, about 1% of the adult population has some form of pedophilic attraction—representing mostly males. Against the total global male population that makes 35 million people. It may be that a small fraction of these are going to act against a real child, but even when excluding the non-participants, this encompasses an enormous amount of people across the world who might find pleasure in viewing child sexual abuse content. Arresting and consigning all these people to life behind bars is a naïve initiative if investments and labor are wholly delegated to essentially chasing the horizon. So, what can be done?

The Platforms

In 2018, tech companies reported over 45 million online photos and videos of children being sexually abused to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC)—more than double what they found the previous year. In 2019, it had reached 70 million, and for the first time there were more videos of abuse than photos. And this year, child abuse reports have spiked during COVID-19.

“For the last 10-20 years the industry has been saying that it’s been doing everything they can to combat the proliferation of CSAM online. They clearly aren’t. If tens of millions of pieces of content are going through your services every year, there’s clearly a problem with the way you are approaching this problem,” says Hany Farid, a professor of Electrical engineering and computer science at University of California in Berkley a leading expert in the analysis of digital images.

At Microsoft, Farid helped develop PhotoDNA which has been widely successful in combating CSAM made freely available for other tech companies. It is used to create a digital fingerprint of known images of CSA which is then used to find duplicates and stop them being shared. Google has also used analytics to introduce a ban on certain search terms—a list that is constantly changing in response to how offenders are trying to keep ahead. Facebook were one of the earliest adapters of PhotoDNA and they use it across all their platforms: Instagram, Facebook, and the unencrypted spaces of WhatsApp.

Yet, it is important to note that the tools described are effective in unencrypted space. The groundwork for encrypting online services—implementing so-called DNS over HTTPS (DoH)—has already been lain. The aim is to increase privacy and security by preventing eavesdropping and manipulation of data by encrypting that data. “There are really good reasons to have end-to-end encryption, but we have to acknowledge it comes with trade-offs,” says Farid. Some consequences of encryption are that things like parental controls and filters used by the IWF and other internet block lists that allow the means of companies to block millions of images from ever reaching the public eye would be bypassed. As a result, potentially millions of internet users would be exposed to CSAM.

Among imagery reported from tech companies Facebook overshadows the rest. In 2019, Messenger was responsible for over 80% of all reports made. The numbers are, however, a reflection of companies that have put more effort into finding and removing the material from their platforms. In 2018, the company was responsible for more than 90% of reports that year according to law enforcement officials. Nevertheless, many people have expressed concerns over Facebook’s plan to encrypt its Messenger service which will mean that many of the detecting tools which have been so successful in finding CSAM and getting it removed won’t work.

Facebook says that it will provide better security and privacy for Facebook users. Antigone Davis, the Global Head of Safety at Facebook, says this, “One of the things that we really see on Facebook is that more people are using our services to have very personal and private conversations […] and one of the things that we want to do is to fundamentally ensure the data security and privacy for those kind of interactions. That’s where the market is headed and I think one thing to keep in mind is that 85% of the market—the messaging market—is already end-to-end encrypted.”

Fernando Ruiz Pérez, head of operations for cyber crimes at Europol, said Facebook was responsible for a “very high percentage” of reports to the European Union. He said that if Facebook moved to encrypt messaging, the “possibility to flag child sexual abuse content will disappear.”

Hany Farid argues that there are two options. “One such option is that we’re going to encrypt your messages so that we can’t see it, the government can’t see it, nobody can see it. The cost of that will be the hundreds of millions of pieces of sexual abuse of children, roughly from the age of two months old to 12 years old, can, without any possible chance of being caught, come through the services. Which one of those would you like?”

Encryption will create a blind spot. Baroness Joanna Shields, who served as the UK Minister for Internet Safety and Security and previously worked as EMEA VP & managing director at Facebook, says that she does not understand the decision to encrypt Messenger. “It doesn’t make any rational, logical, or business sense. The micro-targeting that is done on these platforms relies on information that people share and if you go to an encrypted message between two people then you can no longer leverage the business model of the companies. So, it makes you ask the question as to why? To me, the only answer […] is that the companies are [handling reports of child sexual abuse] and the problem is that once those are reported then it’s an acknowledgment that the problem is rampant on the platform. If you take away the ability to report it, then they can say that it’s increasing or decreasing and no one will know.”

The Way Forward

It seems as if the tech giants are each using their own services and not working together. Every company has its own engineering technology, business model, and intellectual property. There’s no one technical solution that you could build on that would work across every platform. Those are different technologies. You can set an outcome, a goal, for a company to remove or block the images we’re talking about but you can’t specify the technology that they should be using to deliver it because they are differently engineered companies. Part of that engineering is at the heart of that business model hence their business success. So, they can’t share the way they build their platform.

By insisting on total anonymity, we have created a platform through which total ideational anarchy thrives, and the taint this has wrought sometimes trickles through the cracks in society’s veneers. The rot runs deep and we are condemned to despair. This isn’t defeatist. In accepting despair, we resign ourselves to a promulgation of a welfare of antipathy. We must allow discourse that addresses the profusion of the worst crimes man can commit to enter the public sphere. The sewers are overflowing. How high will this pollution be allowed to rise before we save ourselves from drowning in it?

The internet is a technology. It doesn’t make people do anything. People do things. What the Internet contributed to was two things: One, it allowed pedophiles with an interest in sexual images of children to contact each other and find a sense of community which lets them normalize their behavior. It spurred them on, and emboldened them. Two, it made these images available with apparent anonymity. People who might in other cases never have bothered to try to find these images, all of a sudden, they’re readily available.

To achieve meaningful change, everyone has to play their part. Not just the tech industry. There are some things which there is no defense against and where privacy is not a kind of balancing factor. Child abuse is one of those things. We need to find a way where there is a mixture of technical standards and policy and legal work to make it very clear that as technology changes, we don’t accidentally undermine the sort of protection that has been put into place to try and protect children. Behind every report there are children crying for help and without those reports they go without help. They are out there on their own with no one to even know that they’re being harmed.

Engage:

Sign a petition to pressure social media companies to report the spread of CSAM on their platforms

Find out more:

CBC podcast Hunting Warhead

New York Times podcast The Daily – A Criminal Underworld of Child Abuse

IWF’s podcast – Pixels from a Crime Scene

Internet Watch Foundation’s website

WePROTECT Global Alliance’s website and Global Threat Assessment Report 2019

Photo credits:

When Kids Are Silent by Zhenya Oliinyk (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Child Sexual Exploitation by Alina Tauseef (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

The post The Other Pandemic appeared first on Pike & Hurricane.

On rape, stereotypes and victim-blaming

Merle Emrich — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 14:36:38 +0000

Trigger warning: rape, sexual violence, mention of suicide

In the age of #MeToo, awareness on sexual offences and consent is increasing, yet it is still fairly easy to get away with rape and sexual assault – the crime with the least report and conviction rates. From victim blaming based on stereotypes connected to rape, over police officers not believing rape survivors, to humiliating and misguided inquiries into the complainant’s private life or even charges of false allegations, the abuse of these women continues even after the act of rape itself.

What is rape?

While the term sexual violence refers to all and any kinds of unwanted sexual activity, rape – at least according to English law – is defined as “penetration with a penis of the vagina, anus or mouth of another person without their consent”. Non-consentual sex without penetration carries the same sentence as rape but is called sexual assault. In 2018, Sweden changed its law so that sex without explicit consent (freely agreeing by choice when one is capable to do so, that is not when asleep, under the influence of drugs or a lot of alcohol, when being threatened, bullied or scared) can be considered rape. Thus, while previously decisive factors for rape convictions were the use of force, threats or taking advantage of someone in a vulnerable position, rape is legally considered as such also without the survivor having explicitly said “No!”.

While not all rape survivors are women, and not all rapists are men, statistics show a noticeable difference in this regard. In England and Wales 20 percent of women over 16 years are estimated to have been exposed to sexual assault, yet only 4 percent of men. In Sweden, 35.8 percent of women compared to 4.7% of men aged 20 to 24 have experience sexual violence, and on an EU level nine out of ten rapes and eight out of ten sexual assaults are committed against women whereas the persons convicted of these crimes are men. What is furthermore noticeable are the report and conviction rates for sexual violence which are far lower than for any other crime. Only about 15 percent of sexual violence cases are reported to the police and of these cases only about six percent in England and Wales and 17 percent in Sweden end with a conviction.

Women are not “asking for it”

The #MeToo movement has undoubtedly raised awareness on sexual violence and rape culture, yet we are still far from a social atmosphere and a justice system that is not based on stereotypes around rape and humiliating legal procedures for rape survivors. A major obstacle to the conviction of rapists, apart from the issue of presenting concrete evidence, is that those who make rape complaints are often not believed. Of the few reported cases of rape almost a third is considered as no crime by the police, and only those cases investigated that are likely to be won go to court.

The main issue in this regard are the stereotypes connected to rape; from the image of rape as a stranger dragging a woman into the bushes and taking advantage of her to considering it women’s responsibility to stay safe rather then men’s to not rape and consequently blaming the victim, especially when she was drunk, had condoms with her, or was wearing the “wrong” clothes. Alcohol consumption is considered as “asking for it”, clothes and make up are seen as “implying consent”, and at times the woman’s sex life is taken apart in court. When, in 2006, a teenager called the police because she had been gang raped in a park in London with the rapists filming her abuse, she was accused by the officers of being “mentally unsound” after stating that she had been raped previously. They did not even bother arresting the rapists and considered the video as evidence of the girl’s “consent”.

In dubio pro reo

Rape is not only the most under-reported crime, and the crime with the lowest conviction rate, but women are also often accused of making false allegations. And while there is widespread reporting on such false allegations, there are indeed not more false rape claims than there are false allegations for any other crime.

A month after the teenage girl’s rape, it was her, not the men who had raped her, who was arrested. She was accused of perverting the course of justice by lying about her rape. Fortunately for her the charges were dropped, yet, her rapists were never convicted. Other women had similar experiences. One of them is Lucy Green who was sued for slander. “All of a sudden I was in court as a defendant, not a victim of rape”, she said. “If he had won I would have been forced to make a public apology and pay him money for raping me.” Similarly, 23-year-old Eleanor de Freitas was sued for perverting the course of justice after reporting a case of sexual assault. Shortly before her trial she killed herself.

In dubio pro reo (“when in doubt, for the accused”) is a good and useful principle. But in the case of rape and sexual assault it all too often appears to be turned into “if possible, for the perpetrator”. Women are held responsible for the crime committed against them, especially when they have previously filed rape charges leading to women who are raped or assaulted more than once and report the crime being even less likely to get justice.

A society that blames women for being raped due to how they dress, how much they drink, who they sleep with and how often, police officers that are unable or unwilling to properly investigate potential cases of sexual violence and courts that are influenced by the same biases and stereotypes as police and society are preventing too large a number of rape survivors from obtaining justice, or even worse paint them as perpetrators of a crime themselves. In dubio pro reo can only be an effective principle to apply to charges of sexual violence when the complainants are taken seriously, and when the responsibility of women to “not get raped” is transformed into the responsibility of men to not rape.

by Merle Emrich

Photo Credits

Barbie violence, Isabella Quintana, pixabay [no attribution required]

#womensmarch2018 Philly Philadelphia #MeToo, Rob Kall, CC BY 2.0

The post On rape, stereotypes and victim-blaming appeared first on Pike & Hurricane.