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Mick Moran of Interpol and Pro-active Pedophile Policing
By Bernie Najarian
A hot summer evening in my teenaged years. I’m on the main street of my home town, standing out in the open air, cooling down. The only air conditioning in town is in the supermarket, and it’s blocks away. Other patrons of the Family Restaurant spill out onto the sidewalk. A well dressed woman brings her glass of white wine out with her. She talks to her friends; they form a knot in front of the restaurant.
Two uniformed police officers come down the sidewalk on a routine patrol. They show no sign of noticing the restaurant customers. Suddenly, one officer spikes his arm out and neatly flicks the woman’s wine glass out of her hand. It flies several feet away and smashes on the sidewalk. The officer keeps walking by, doesn’t stop to look. The woman is astonished, looking around with her mouth open, but she says nothing. No one says anything. The police walk on as if nothing had happened. After all, she’d been breaking the law. Liquor outside the permitted area. The police reaction wasn’t perfectly legal, but who was going to complain?
I think the person most impacted by this incident was me. It wasn’t just that I realized that police could step outside the law. I’d seen police brutality on the news. When I saw police violence with my own eyes, though, I was struck by the idea that in all police work, there are two contradictory goals involved. One is to uphold the law – that’s the theoretical, book-learnin’ reality of their situation. The other is to maintain control of a concept of public order. That’s the spontaneous, real-world bit – the part that demands some improvising. It may seem very practical, even necessary, when you’re working the streets – but it sometimes gets police officers into trouble.
Ever since a videotape showing the beating of Los Angeles construction worker Rodney King sparked deadly riots in 1993, after the officers involved were all acquitted of assault with a deadly weapon, police have had increasing difficulty maintaining order and deference by pushing across the legal line. Security cameras and cellphones are everywhere, and they can’t all be seized. Youtube contains hundreds of examples of police misbehavior. In almost all cases, the officers involved have been embarrassed by those visual records, and in some cases, they’ve been dismissed or jailed. Nonetheless, in police work, the temptation to use a little extra force to maintain order must be intense. The book of rules is fusty and full of potential loopholes, and criminals may live on the edge and laugh at the law. Personal policing convenience, as well as duty to the public, may seem at times to call for some application of freelance force.
These days, on the other hand, there is a concerted effort among police officers not to be thugs. They get college degrees. Many read policing journals that are academic in tone. This increasing sophistication, however, has a potential drawback for the public. It offers up some strong-arm opportunities that can’t be captured on Youtube. One of those came up in 2011 when some people who were obviously sexually interested in boys appeared to be pushing the legal envelope with an online company called Azov Films. The company sold videos and photographs – completely non-sexual in terms of content – featuring boys from 8 to 16 doing sports and recreation activities in the buff. Legal naturism, the website called the material. And indeed, the site had been raided by local authorities in Toronto, Canada – its home base – in 2005, and had been found to be legally in the clear. So there it was, brazenly selling naked boys to erotically interested parties and processing credit card numbers. Like the woman with the wine glass, it was enjoying itself a little too freely.
The name Azov Films will be familiar to many readers, but for those who don’t know the story, the company suddenly disappeared in May, 2011. Then, mostly between Sept. 2012 and Sept., 2013, hundreds of its customers were arrested, one by one, mostly in Canada, the U.S., Australia, Norway and Spain. The police operation involved was labeled Project Spade. How could this happen when ‘legal naturism,’ which had passed a raid and also been given the green light by lawyers, was the only product sold? It was simple – the police, in collaboration with prosecutors, used their sophistication to move the boundaries of the law in their respective nations. In Canada, where the Criminal Code allowed a judge to decide purely subjectively if nudist photography of children had a ‘sexual purpose’ that would make it criminal, they pitched the idea that this purpose was operating in the case of Azov Films. That was not unreasonable, and it was reinforced by the knowledge that Markus Roth, a Romania-based producer of a proportion of Azov’s wares, had been convicted in the past for a sex offense involving an underage boy in his native Germany. In the U.S., the law was much more on Azov’s side – several court cases had strongly protected ‘nudity only’ photographic content involving children, and successful prosecution for child pornography required demonstrating that there was ‘lascivious’ content.
Complaints had been coming in about Azov to websites where citizens are asked to report child pornography. Police in the US were not about to let Azov smirk at them behind the skirts of the law. The outraged citizens didn’t care about the ‘nudity only’ defence. So the police unit involved, the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), did a little freelance improvisation on behalf of social order. They simply reclassified the normal actions seen in sports as ‘lascivious.’ Whenever a boy playing a game happened to face the camera frontally, the affidavit said he was ‘displaying the genitals.’ If, in sporting, he bent over, the charges said he was ‘exposing the anus.’ The anus itself was never seen, as was clear from reading affidavits, but the phrasing alone was enough to make any bending seem like a sex act. So 76 Americans who had used their credit cards to buy legal naturism, safely circumscribed by the law, suddenly found the police tearing their homes apart, and the press tearing their reputations to shreds. And none of it, on Youtube, would have looked any different from a normal child pornography bust.
The hapless men, many of them professionals in late middle age who had never broken a significant law, would have been far safer to proxy onto the Dark Web and download hardcore child porn. For their adherence to legality, they received the beating of their lives – sitting in prison, professionally ruined, with their deviant sexualities exposed to all by the local press. They experienced the full force of ‘state-rape,’ as Kristofor Xavier has so poignantly called it – sexual mortification through violent exposure by the state. And the violation of their legal compliance was completely invisible to the press. Indeed, by publicizing the minority of cases where arrestees were found to possess conventional child pornography or to have committed contact or photographic offenses with children they knew, USPIS made sure that all the arrestees appeared to be perverted rogues who were justly being removed from their communities.
To cap off their venture into white-collar Rodney King policing, USPIS did something nearly unimaginable. As I, along with collaborators, have detailed with information that is easily independently verified in mainstream newpaper and Justice Department sources (see the article Pedophobe of the Year:Paul Krawczyk,Toronto Police), USPIS claimed that 330 children were rescued from sexual exploitation by the American arm of Project Spade – but they appear to have completely fabricated at least 200 of those children. Also, most of the remaining 130 ‘rescued’ children were never sexually contacted or otherwise made aware of being subjects of sexual interest. Instead, they were videotaped in full or partial nudity, without their knowledge, by one of two arrestees who had a penchant for hidden cameras. These two, one in Ohio and one in Georgia, were school employees who each made secret recordings of numerous students in school showers or in the washroom. The videos were not distributed, and the current or former children would never have known anything had happened, if not for the arrests. Ironically, their ‘rescue’ consisted of learning from police that they’d unknowingly been filmed – any psychological distress that ensued can surely be chalked up to police intervention. The number of children found in contact sexual situations that were ongoing on at the time of the arrests was no greater than six. The making up of hundreds of nonexistent victims greatly aided USPIS in portraying all their Project Spade arrestees as dangerous men. It was a lie, but it worked in terms of ninja policing, and none of the dirty work involved could be exposed on a video screen.
Now, let’s step back a moment. An accusation that a reputable police force deliberately fabricated public disinformation sounds extreme. How can it be true? Some readers may wonder if I am not being unfair to USPIS – tendentious, biased, even fanatical. Couldn’t there still be some way that the hundreds of proclaimed victims could be reconciled with the handful that are actually documented by the Justice Department? And moreover, don’t I have a vested interest? Aren’t I, like so many assertive members of minority groups, simply grinding an axe for my own perceived benefit?
In fact, the item that makes this article different from its predecessors is that I have a top-level, publicly published personal statement, from a police officer admitting that the principals of Spade are his colleagues, that the law will be treated as incidental when it comes to controlling perceived pedophiles. Pedophiles who are ‘active’ even in the viewing of benign images, the officer says, must be controlled ‘regardless of illegality.’ Read on.
The confession I’m referring to was elicited by a contact, Kamil Beylant (not quite his real name), who maintains a Twitter account – I call him ‘the Turk who makes my Armenian life complete.’ He publicizes my articles, among other items of interest to the minor-attracted activist community. Last week, he reports, he searched in Twitter on ‘Project Spade,’ and to the half-dozen tweeters who had mentioned it in recent weeks, he sent a link to a mirror post of my article on Toronto Police officer Paul Krawczyk (linked above) and his role in the arrests. One of the recipients turned out to be a smart looking young-ish gentleman with the name Mick Moran. A glance at his Twitter header and some browsing revealed that he was INTERPOL's temporary acting assistant director of cybersecurity and crime, and head of the Human Trafficking & Child Exploitation unit. He responded vigorously to the tweet. The conversation below starts with his original tweet, a joke that cited Project Spade. I have added a small amount of punctuation to clarify the text. An interesting side-conversation has been edited out; we’ll come back to it later.
mickmoran @mickmoran Feb 16
#projectspade was on the boylover case. #NAMBLA will tell you all about them, but i prefer this version: http://beta.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s04e06-cartman-joins-nambla (Link to South Park television episode featuring comic version of NAMBLA- BN)
Kamil Beylant @Securityconcern Feb 19
@mickmoran For well researched background on the bizarre international politics of Project Spade, see http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message2481242/pg1
mickmoran @mickmoran Feb 19
Thank you @Securityconcern."MAPs" purchasing or making pictures of naked children is a form of child exploitation as the child is not aware. (MAPs are ‘minor attracted persons’ – BN)
mickmoran @mickmoran Feb 19
@Securityconcern In some jurisdictions it is illegal. but it demonstrates an escalation of activity by "map"'s that -- (Syntax suggests he meant to say ‘not illegal’ – BN)
mickmoran @mickmoran Feb 19
@Securityconcern … must be interpreted as an increased risk to children regardless of the illegality.
mickmoran @mickmoran Feb 19
@Securityconcern For the record - I am a colleague of all officers named in the slanted report you forwarded me.
mickmoran @mickmoran Feb 19
@Securityconcern If a "MAP" is living his life without acting out then they will never become subject of any attention, legal or otherwise--
mickmoran @mickmoran Feb 19
@Securityconcern …however, any acting out by a "MAP" has potential to harm a child and must result in action by public safety officials.
mickmoran @mickmoran Feb 19
@Securityconcern As for international politics referred to, I think you'll find it’s a state -v- local issue that is common to both AU and CA.
These tweets came in in a batch. Kamil responded when he came back online.
Kamil Beylant @Securityconcern
@mickmoran We have no objection to what was done to Roth under Romanian law, and concede that Canadian law gave fair warning. US law...
Kamil Beylant @Securityconcern
@mickmoran ... did not, in any reasonably clear way, ban the material; previous decisions had upheld the legality of 'nudity only.'
Kamil Beylant @Securityconcern
@mickmoran I expect people to follow the laws, whatever they are. But I object to them being trapped by trickery as was done in the US
Kamil Beylant @Securityconcern Feb 19
@mickmoran If the legal system decided to reinterpret 'nudity only' as exploitation material, a clear public statement should have been made
Responses soon followed.
mickmoran @mickmoran
@Securityconcern I am not going to get into a discussion with you about this case or any other. MAPs can be MAPs until the(y) act. --
mickmoran @mickmoran Feb 19
@Securityconcern When they act they are suspect. Illegal -vs- exploitation. Nude pictures may not be illegal but it is an acting out by a MAP
mickmoran @mickmoran Feb 19
@Securityconcern … and an acting-out MAP is a concern to society as a whole.
Kamil Beylant @Securityconcern Feb 19
@mickmoran You seem to have just said that even when nude pix are not illegal, you will treat the holder as a threat. That's vigilantism.
mickmoran @mickmoran Feb 19
@Securityconcern I would prefer not to talk to you further until you tell me who you are. You know who I am. Thanks.
Kamil Beylant @Securityconcern Feb 19
@mickmoran I see that the Socratic notion of the value of fair discussion of ideas doesn't pull much weight with you. You want personalities
mickmoran @mickmoran Feb 19
@Securityconcern . If you don't mind, Socrates, I'd prefer to know as we have a discussion in public. If not...
Kamil Beylant @Securityconcern Feb 19
@mickmoran I'd like to, but like everyone else, I have to do go to work, go to shops etc. I'm not in a position to be a shunned social pariah
Kamil Beylant @Securityconcern Feb 19
@mickmoran The point that many MAPs choose not to offend (or even to to be in any way impolite) is much too subtle for most people today
mickmoran @mickmoran Feb 19
@Securityconcern Who are you? you know who I am.
Kamil Beylant @Securityconcern Feb 19
@mickmoran The friendly gesture is appreciated, as is your time.
Kamil Beylant @Securityconcern Feb 19 (tweeted to all 20 of his followers, lol - BN)
What do you think? Is it within the mandate of law enforcement to act against those they are worried about "regardless of illegality?"
This didn’t sit well. By the time an answer was seen, though, Kamil and I had had a chance to discuss the situation.
mickmoran @mickmoran Feb 19
@Securityconcern I am not interested in being a conduit for your propaganda but nor am I interested in persecuting MAPs. I can be found.
Kamil Beylant @Securityconcern Feb 19
@mickmoran Despite our anonymity, if clinching evidence is published that Spade U.S. victim numbers were NOT faked, BN will fully retract
Kamil Beylant @Securityconcern Feb 19
@mickmoran I am surprised you confuse such well documented material for propaganda. Check out the facts as given. You'll find no deception
I stand by the penultimate comment. USPIS needs only to publish the number of ‘children rescued’ for each of the 19 arrestees whose offences have not yet been detailed in the press, and state whether the offenses involved sexual contact or nude photography (as per the definition of ‘children rescued’ given by Paul Krawczyk in the Voice of Russia interview linked in my article). If the missing 200+ rescues can be accounted for credibly, I will publish a complete retraction in the journal of record, namely, Boychat. Yes, it may be part of the wild, nasty, spontaneous internet, but it makes no attempt to suppress the truth when someone needs to publish it. Which puts it a cut above other news media.
As for Moran’s statements, I never thought I’d see the like in print. I told Kamil to make screenshots immediately in case they were deleted, but, days later, they remain in place. Am I easily shocked? Moran comes right out and says that any sign of ‘acting’ or ‘acting out’ by a minor-attracted person, whether or not illegal actions are involved, obliges police engagement. “If an "MAP" is living his life without acting out then (he) will never become subject of any attention, legal or otherwise; however, any acting out by an "MAP" has potential to harm a child and must result in action by public safety officials,” he says. What kind of action will be taken if nothing illegal is being done? In conventional policing, a warning might be issued. In the real world today, those suspected of pedophilic interest are not warned by the police – if they were, the Azov customers might have been just taken in for a chat. The alternative policing strategy is to adjust the boundaries of legality so that the MAP can be taken into custody.
The trick in adjusting the boundaries of legality is to take the pedophiles by surprise. Old style policing confronted pedophiles who carried out clearly illegal acts. The perps knew they were taking risks. New style policing confronts them when they are participating in acts that any lawyer would tell them were legal. It then relies on judicial revulsion to rope them into a cell. Few judges will let a pedophile off the hook if the police assert that he’s dangerous.
For example, consider this Feb. 19, 2014 headline from Australia’s national 7 News: ‘Pedophile thought shirtless images legal.’ In this case, an 81-year-old man with a past criminal record involving contact and pornographic offenses diverged from collecting classical music on the internet and did some searches for ‘shirtless boys.’ He downloaded some apparently safe images. ‘Everyone knows,’ you might say, ‘that shirtless images of males can’t be pornographic even where nudity alone is sufficient to establish pornography.’ The ‘private parts’ of the male include the penis, the scrotum and the anus. Not the breasts, the back or the navel. This has been agreed in our societies for thousands of years. But that view, you see, relates to ‘objective pornography,’ which is part of old-style policing and jurisprudence. The new trend is for ‘contextual pornography,’ where police and prosecutors merely need to speculate that images had a pornographic effect on the arrestee in order to secure a conviction. Inferred pornography, or to borrow the applicable Freudian term, projection-pornography – this is the new surprise move. A shrewish squint at the arrestee’s probable mental contents completely replaces the images themselves in determining what is porn and what isn’t. What amounts to gossip has been enshrined as a means of jailing people.
The Rodney King move to watch out for here is the use of the word ‘context.’ Have a look in this Australian case.
- (Defense lawyer) Ralph Bleechmore described the offending as "borderline activity", submitting that a person could be titillated or mildly interested in images, falling well short of the legislation's definitions.
- But (Adelaide prosecutor Ms Carmen) Matteo said (arrestee Philip Corlett) Carey deliberately downloaded the material, looking for "safe images" and using search terms including `shirtless boys'.
- "It does not make them any less pornographic."
- The more benign images were given a context through the more provocative ones, she added.
We’ll see in a few minutes where that ‘context’ word came from.
In this case, none of the “more provocative” images was said to be conventionally pornographic or sexualized in any way. The arrestee appears to have collected random webfinds, not photos from collections of erotica. One suspects that the level of provocation in the images lay entirely in where the waistline hung on the shorts or trousers that bordered the bare upper torso.
Project Spade, like this pornographic torso case, was a transgressive surprise. It’s very likely that all the customers in the U.S. were sure they were on the right side of the law. A partial history of ‘nudity only’ case law was published on the Azov Films website, and remains visible there in web archives today.
The depiction of adults and children nude in the visual media has enjoyed constitutional protection in the United States since 1958, when the Supreme Court vacated a Court of Appeals finding that Sunshine & Health magazine could be obscene (Sunshine Book Co. v. Summerfield, Postmaster General, 355 U.S. 372). The right to depict adults and children in innocent nude poses has been upheld without a pause for more than 40 years. In case after case, the Supreme Court and lower courts have always upheld the constitutionality of "nudity without more," specifically referring to the nudist depiction as a fully constitutional form of expression.
The transgressive police surprise attack prior to Spade was the 2010 worldwide raid on the legal discussion website boylover.net. The elimination of this website of 70,000 members, followed by an unknown number of police raids, resulted, finally, in the arrests of 184 men for crimes they had committed in private channels not connected with the site at all. Yes, 184 men – that’s 0.0026% of the membership, or around 3 per 1000. You could undoubtedly find more pedophile crimes simply by arresting whole American neighborhoods and doing searches and interrogations. The website itself was pronounced completely legally clean by the Dutch government.
Have you noticed in recent years that successful attacks by Al Qaeda and allies, including the destruction of the World Trade Center, succeed because they always come as a surprise? The whole art of terrorism consists of coming up with deadly surprise moves that confound the conventions of the day. Police today are literally engaging in terrorism against legally compliant minor-attracted people. They may use prisons rather than explosives, but their object is to target people going about their legal daily lives, and to surprise them with an unprecedented legal twist that will destroy their comfortable existence forever. These legally compliant pedophiles are much easier to target than the encrypted, proxied hackers who exchange hardcore child pornography on the Dark Web. Legals are sitting ducks. The usual justification for nailing them is that real children will perhaps be protected, some of the time. Inevitably, statistically, that turns out to be true in a few cases, just as it would be if the entire neighborhoods mentioned above were subjected to the same type of screening.
There is a second operational justification for this transgressive policing that doesn’t involve real children – but before we get to it, we need to look at that side-conversation between Beylant and Moran.
mickmoran @mickmoran Feb 19
@Securityconcern This is an academic paper that talks about "context" for non-abusive material. Please read it. http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ethel_Quayle/publication/237641206_Typology_of_Paedophile_Picture_Collections/file/50463528a5f4a8b866.pdf (The link is to a pdf of ‘Typology of paedophile picture collections,’ the highly influential paper by Max Taylor, Gemma Holland and Ethel Quayle in The Police Journal, vol. 71, 2001, p. 97 – 107. This paper outlined the COPINE classification system for child images that was soon modified and enshrined in British prosecutorial guidelines).
Kamil Beylant @Securityconcern
@mickmoran Thanks for responding. A colleague has published an analysis of this paper that you might find insightful http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://www.boychat.org/messages/1362937.htm (‘Ethel Quayle's new Spirit of Child Pornography: as a menace to free speech in areas unrelated to porn’ by Kristofor Xavier – BN)
Kamil Beylant @Securityconcern Feb 19
@mickmoran Most people who quote Ethel Quayle, Max Taylor et al. do not realize that their viewpoint is based on beliefs resembling animism…
Kamil Beylant @Securityconcern
@mickmoran ... and that even a 'common sense' reinterpretation of their work is often based on the dubious 'opening the floodgates' position
mickmoran @mickmoran 24h
@Securityconcern Sorry. I can't agree with that. They are both respected academics who's (sic) work articulates what I see every day in mine.
In fact, Taylor et al.’s work ‘articulates’ what Moran ‘sees every day’ in his own because this paper is the bible of modern transgressive policing of the minor-attracted. Moran’s fundamental belief system is based on this paper. Within it, the transgression of the boundaries of the law begins early on. The second operational justification for transgressive policing – the point I promised I’d get back to – relates to concern over abuse involving legal images. Believe it or not. Let’s let Taylor et al. explain it.
...By emphasising a psychological approach to pictures attractive to adults with a sexual interest in children, rather than pictures legally defined as obscene, we can identify a range of discernibly different kinds of picture (Taylor, 1999) only some of which may be illegal. The kinds of picture that can be identified range from pictures of clothed children, through nakedness and explicit erotic posing to pictures of a sexual assault on the child photographed. This can be constructed to describe a continuum of increased deliberate sexual victimisation. Any particular example of a photograph attractive to an adult with a sexual interest in children, therefore, can be located along such a continuum of explicit or deliberate sexual victimisation.
… Whether a picture is accidental or deliberate, each time a picture is accessed for sexual purposes it victimises the individual concerned. In a sense, the function of picture collections for the offender is repeatedly to victimise the child concerned, and the victim status is exaggerated by continuing use. Relevant to this, an important purpose of child picture collections for the user is that it allows instant access to the child (or a child) as victim (Healy, 1997).
Here, again, we enter the strange, strange mental world of Taylor and Quayle, outlined so vividly by Kristofor in his epic monograph on their psychological presuppositions. I am much indebted to him for discussions that have allowed me to research and write the remainder of this essay.
Just before I press on, I need to apologize in advance. I was trained to write vividly and clearly. In a few of the paragraphs that follow, I need to dive into some of the most convoluted academic language I have ever seen. I extend my apologies for any difficulty you may have in following along. Stay with me and we’ll resurface into clear text as soon as possible.
In the paragraph I quoted above from Taylor et al., it’s perfectly reasonable to imagine that there is some kind of continuum of intensity that links traditionally legal, attractive photographs of children and ever more explicitly sexualized material. What is distinctly odd is to describe the entire progression as “a continuum of increased deliberate sexual victimisation.” When someone is sexually attracted to children and looks at a photo of some shirtless boys playing baseball, in what sense is anyone ‘deliberately sexually victimised?’ The image has no connection to the actual children seen, other than the impression of their visual form, and they are not affected in the slightest by any erotic arousal the viewer may feel about them. But let’s not just take that last assertion as common sense. Let’s examine it in detail, taking the Taylor and Quayle perspective into account where appropriate.
First, though, let’s deal with one side issue. Taylor and Quayle – as Kristofor noted – work in a scientific field, applied psychology, but they do not function scientifically. Science is all about linking cause to effect, after classifying the various agents involved. The orthodox way to make sure that causes are correctly sorted out and linked to effects is to isolate single causal factors. This is done by means of comparisons called ‘controls.’ In this case, the cause is viewing images with sexual interest; the proposed effect to be linked is victimization. The Taylor et al. approach in this 2001 paper is a wholistic discourse, like a political essay or a religious tract – there is no consideration of possible ‘control’ situations whatsoever. So let’s add one in ourselves. Let’s, as a control, look at another group of people who mainly look at photographs of children to satisfy their erotic appetites – namely, tween girls who read fan magazine material about minor-aged singers, actors and dancers. Beliebers and their successors. Sputter, sputter, how outrageous, many people would say. But in fact the comparison is apt. Like the pedophiles, the girls mostly can’t have sex, and pictures and fantasy scenarios are all they have to make their heart valves flutter. Whether or not they actually masturbate is completely irrelevant – photographic victimisation as a mental process surely is not clicked on and off with the touch of a piece of flesh. Undoubtedly some do touch, but who can say what fraction? In any case, they have a sexual interest in the material. Anyone denying that is so badly out of touch with reality that he or she can only be classed as morally retarded. So let’s consider the girls’ ‘victimisation’ of the boys shown in the milder end of the image continuum at the same time as we look at the pedophiles’ interest – as is proper in a controlled study, even a theoretical one.
Now, how could victimization of the subjects in the images occur? I’m going to look into three major possibilities.
1. Symbolical victimization. Erotic contemplation of the boys playing baseball or singing onstage may not have any direct effect on the boys, but it disrespects them symbolically. They were not asked to consent to being erotically contemplated in image, and they were legally unable to consent to it anyways. Their inferred wishes and well-being have been taken lightly by anyone becoming aroused over their images without their permission. It may seem a little creepy to just get worked up about them when they can’t do anything about it because they’re only images of themselves. Also, arousal towards their photographs – a situation which feminist author Andrea Dworkin vehemently believed made the viewee symbolically subject to the power of the viewer – may desensitize the aroused one towards boys in more compromised photographic situations, or towards boys encountered in real life. Many vicious cycles could be imagined to spring from this callous arousal by images that can no longer be controlled by the people shown.
As we consider these ideas, though, we can see that they seem to fit more comfortably with our test subjects, pedophiles, than they do with our control subjects, tween girls. Why is that? It isn’t that the tween girls are permitted or encouraged, in real life, to have sex with the sorts of boys they are contemplating, making the implied end of their huggy, kissy fantasies socially legitimate. Parentally and/or legally, they’re not allowed to act that way. Nor is it really that they are being encouraged to imagine erotic intimacies with the photographed boys as a stage in their growth towards mature relationships. That would seem rather promiscuous (‘slutty’) of them, even in fantasy, since they can’t actually marry the boys. In any case, the exact nature of their intentions wouldn’t change any symbolic effect their erotic viewing might have on the subjects of the photos. The boy subjects might still get the shivers, in an uncomfortable way, if they vividly thought of the millions of girls, pretty and plain, thin and heavy, ‘normal’ and ‘challenged,’ becoming erotically aroused by their photos – especially since some of the tween girls’ same-age gay boy schoolmates would undoubtedly be going through the same arousal. (I had a fabulous relationship with an early Michael Jackson photo when I was a tween). The fundamental difference between the attentions of the girls and the attentions of the pedophiles is, as Kristofor points out to me, that the girls are presumed to be benign, responsive and sympathetic in intention towards the boys in the images, or towards similar boys in the neighborhood, while the pedophiles are presumed to be alienated, exploitative, manipulative, and unsympathetic or defectively sympathetic.
The reason the pedophiles are presumed to be unsympathetic, creepy and predatory is not just because of selective sampling by the criminal justice system, in which only those who commit illegal acts are brought to scrutiny. There is also a fundamental piece of human psychology involved. As Kristofor explains it in an appendix to my Paul Krawczyk article,
Krawczyk’s statement that “(possession of erotica) shows a sexual interest in children. How can that not be dangerous?” grows from a related generality: anyone interested in deviant sex lacks empathy, social cohesion and self-control. This was the argument used to ensure that homosexuals were perennially seen, for over a hundred years, as frivolous, out-of-control, sex-crazed people who were too narcissistic to form meaningful loving relationships.
The proposition about deviants lacking social responsiveness is simply superstition. It has no basis whatsoever. It relates to the basic idea in Victorian …empire-building militarism that anyone with social responsiveness would conform to the … ‘norms’ of society. Anyone with a non-conformity that couldn’t be convincingly explained as a unique contribution to social military power could only be anti-social. The person’s anti-social nature appeared to reflect disdain for society’s ideals of moral control, ergo, he must be intrinsically out-of-control.
In Krawczyk’s Victorianism, the idea that a person who had a deviant sexual interest in children could be completely held in check by empathy – a strong respect for children’s true wishes and optimal situations – is completely ruled out as impossible. Have a deviant interest in children, and you can only be out-of-control and lacking in fellow-feeling, hence dangerous.
The same dreads about symbolic predation and disdain being associated with erotic viewing are found in all discussions of pornography. As Kristofor says to me in correspondence,
Researchers have conducted almost uncountable numbers of studies to determine if viewing pornography incites callousness of one kind or another towards real people. They hope to find that viewing porn causes or does not cause a degradation of respect towards women – a consideration that doesn’t seem to have any plausible counterpart in discussions of gay male pornography. Sometimes these studies take a comical turn, as when Simon Louis Lajeunesse of the University of Montreal found that he couldn’t find a single 20-something male heterosexual university student who could serve as a negative control in a study of the effects of porn viewing. The student population all used porn, and many had looked at it since the age of 10. Lajeunesse said this in summary:
“All test subjects said they supported gender equality and felt victimized by rhetoric demonizing pornography.
“‘Pornography hasn't changed their perception of women or their relationship, which they all want as harmonious and fulfilling as possible.’
“'Those who could not live out their fantasy in real life with their partner simply set aside the fantasy. The fantasy is broken in the real world and men don't want their partner to look like a porn star.'”
In any case, the attempt to identify porn viewing as the cause of any particular type of attitude is fundamentally misguided. That is, it can be ruled out by anyone who believes in the principle of free will that underlies our legal system. The free-willed decision involved in viewing pornography relates to whether or not the viewer empathetically ‘makes faith’ with the subject – wishes him or her well, would treat him or her well in person, hopes that being depicted has done no harm, wouldn’t do any harm to any person to obtain similar pictures, wouldn’t sanction pictures harmfully obtained, and so on. The philosophical problem of the half-full vs. half-empty glass always pertains in a situation where a person may or may not establish subjective complicity or sympathy with another person. Nothing can force or effectively cause a person to make an empathetic or unempathetic decision – apart from being sociopathically mentally disturbed and thus biologically unable to establish empathy. Traditionally, deviants are attributed the half-empty glass: whether, at a given period in history, they are Jews, or gays, or culturally distinct blacks, or pedophiles, they are deemed unable to make faith with others, with the general population. Popular superstition states that their very difference is based in their inability to conform to norms, to sympathize with their community. They are different and anomalous because they are stubborn, self-willed and oblivious, says the belief. But the reality is that, despite any annoyance these so-conceived deviants may feel at being the objects of prejudice from the majority, they remain perfectly able to choose the half-full glass, to make faith, to empathize. And they do. Any pornography or erotica viewing they do has full potential for nuanced appreciation of the human worth of those shown.
Ethel Quayle, I believe, unthinkingly transmits the popular superstition that the people shown in images are in some way cursed by being ‘perved on’ in erotic contemplation. The ancient superstition of the ‘evil eye’ lives on in the shudder we are raised to feel when we think of an imaginary malevolent person becoming erotic about our images – whether in photographs or in the deviant’s imagination. The idea that the deviant is ipso facto malevolent is fundamental to this primitive cultural trope.
On the symbolic plane, then, the victimization of the minors viewed in attractive, objectively non-pornographic images is purely a phantasm derived from old-fashioned prejudice. In reality, it doesn’t matter whether pedophiles or tween girls are doing the viewing of the images in question. Any of these viewers may, as far as is possible with a mere image, truly intend love or amity to the person shown. And that love may include everything we normally recognize as respect, including full respect of the person’s sexual and personal privacy in real life. So we could dismiss Taylor et al.’s “continuum of increased deliberate sexual victimisation” as a primitive misattribution of the half-empty empathetic glass to deviants, if we could be sure that these authors were speaking at this level of symbolism. Some of their other writings, however, suggest that they are not merely speaking about symbolic victimization, but rather about something beyond that. We’ll look into that in point 3, below.
2. Recirculatory victimization. One of the ways in which objectively non-pornographic but attractive photos of children may be felt to allow pedophiles to victimize those children is that the images may be circulated around in pedophile circles, on websites and in internet relay chats. Eventually, the subjects may see signs of this and become aware that they are the objects of pedophilic eros. Taylor et al. do not discuss this idea; it does not form an explicit part of the paper that so deeply influences Moran and his colleagues. Nonetheless, there is a remote chance that it might actually happen. A boy might come across a non-pornographic pedophile image board and see his shirtless image there as an illustrative attractive youth. Does that victimize him to any greater extent than Justin Bieber is victimized by seeing many of his on-stage moves and candid off-stage moments posted in teen-girl fan sites, with comments about how cute he is and how the viewers all want him to “marry me” (which, yes, implies the honeymoon)? Certainly, any boy inculcated with the Victorian ideas mentioned above – that any deviant is a scheming, manipulative creep who means him ill – might feel oppressed by the gaze of pedophiles – but then again, looking at the control situation, he might be a gay boy who would shudder deeply at exciting the erotic attentions of girls. He might be a heterosexual boy with a girlfriend, and might find the eroto-romantic gushings of other girls nauseating and excessive – eventually becoming so upset that he punches out the paparazzi taking the photographs they look at. Objectively, the fact that someone finds your image (when it was not invasively recorded) attractive or erotic is just a happenstance. No one can harm you by finding you attractive, unless the person breaks boundaries in your personal life or with your copyrighted material. Your attribution of creepy motives or a creepy personality to the person who cleaves to your image may be dead wrong, and even inexcusably prejudiced. I find it hard to believe that Taylor et al.’s “continuum of victimization” is based on any unstated notion that children might be distressed to find out, in real life, that someone was turned on by their non-pornographic photo.
3. Direct victimization.
To understand the viewpoint of Taylor and Quayle, and especially of the latter, the reader needs to go beyond the watered-down and practical-looking material that these authors publish in law enforcement journals. In more academic settings, some unusual notions are brought forth in Quayle’s writings.
These writings in general are esoteric and convoluted, and are full of quotes interchanged among the small group of authors who support Quayle’s ideas. Anyone wishing to get a detailed grasp of this esoterica will have to read Kristofor’s paper on it. His analysis is mainly based on a 2008 paper called Child Pornography and Sexual Exploitation of Children Online by Ethel Quayle, Lars Loof, and Tink Palmer.
Here, I can only partially illustrate the eccentric philosophy that Quayle lays out in that paper. For example, she suggests that when child-pornographic cartoons are viewed, a phantom called the ‘virtual child’ is abused. This abuse of the virtual cartoon child, she believes, has the same criminal weight as the sexual assault of a real human child. Moreover, she believes that an abstract entity labelled ‘the essence of childhood’ is also abused in such situations.
Most authorities who oppose cartooned child pornography do so based on the Victorian idea that viewing such stuff would contagiously excite pedophiles to lose their moral constrictions against hands-on sexual assault. Quayle, according to her own text, finds this argument far less important than the abuse of the spirit-child in the image itself. Below, in her writings in Child Pornography and Sexual Exploitation of Children Online, she begins with a quote from her colleague David Oswell. I have filled in needed context to make the text semi-understandable.
“…the primary concern [with child-pornographic cartoons – BN] is not one of the effects of the image on others [i.e., not the possibility of exciting some men to commit real-life offenses – BN] or one of the relations of power encoded in the image [that is, not related to demeaning children in an objectifying way – BN], but one of the virtual evidentiality of the image (ie, of the image’s capacity to refer to an objective reality that is both internal and external to the image). The ethical intensity [moral significance – BN] of the virtual image lies precisely in its capacity to refer to a scene beyond itself” (Oswell p. 258 (pdf). Oswell (2006) goes on to state that the crime of possession, making or distribution of child pornography (whether virtual or not) is a crime not only against a particular child, but against all children. “It is a crime against childhood as a universal” (p. 252).
We argue that the crime of possession, and making or distribution of child pornography, whether virtual or not, are (sic) crimes not only against a particular child, but against all children…
In this paper the term ‘sexual exploitation’ refers to activities that may include sexual abuse of children but may also refer to activities where no such abuse has taken place but where the very nature of the activities violates the very essence of childhood.
Oswell, recapitulating Quayle’s ideas in his own words, says frankly, “each time a (cartoon or other artistic, non-photographic –BN) image is used, the virtual child is victimised.” He produces an extended analogy based on the optical phenomenon of refractive displacement of an image, making an almost unintelligibly dense case for viewing the ‘virtual child’ seen in a cartoon as the exact moral equivalent of a real child who is being sexually assaulted. “It is not a question of possibility (that a hands-on offense might be committed or might have been committed earlier – BN). This (viewing of a pornographic cartoon – BN) is a crime that has occurred in a virtual space…. there is no dispute about the original and the counterfeit; both are defined through the criterion of the virtual image, of the simulacra.”
Clearly, if a virtual child – a representative of all children and of the essence of childhood – can be criminally sexually victimized in the viewing of a cartoon, then a photograph showing a real child fully dressed, involved only in daily activities, can be just as realistically used to sexually victimize the child image it shows. Not the child who was photographed! – the actual image in the photograph itself. Once you grasp this weird shamanistic construct, the subtle mysteries of the text in Taylor et al.’s Police Journal paper are easy to understand.
The kinds of picture that can be identified range from pictures of clothed children, through nakedness and explicit erotic posing to pictures of a sexual assault on the child photographed. This can be constructed to describe a continuum of increased deliberate sexual victimisation. Any particular example of a photograph attractive to an adult with a sexual interest in children, therefore, can be located along such a continuum of explicit or deliberate sexual victimisation.
The mystery of how a child who is photographed clothed or in swimwear can be ‘deliberately sexually victimised’ to any extent when a pedophile later finds the photo sexually attractive is resolved by knowing that he or she cannot. That would be nonsensical – the photo was taken long ago and no sex was ever involved. Later erotic viewing cannot insert sexual contact into the child’s life where it never occurred. Also, recirculation of the image back to the child’s attention, or to the attention of the adult he or she has grown into, is not under consideration. Instead, Taylor et al.’s philosophy holds that the image itself is victimized directly by the pedophile. Erotic contemplation of the image doesn’t just symbolically represent child abuse – it IS child abuse, abuse of a ‘virtual child.’ It is an offense to ‘the essence of childhood’ – which, as Kristofor points out, appears, in the text of Quayle and colleagues, to be an entity analogous to the Deer Spirit or Bear Spirit in traditional native North American religions. These so-called academics actually, literally believe that people who have erotically gazed at a cartoon should be jailed for sexually abusing an ‘essence.’
This is not science. It’s witchcraft. Given the Celtic and British roots of the authors, it’s Druidism. How embarrassing for the police of the world that they have taken up Taylor and Quayle as guides in their search to combat the evils of child sexual exploitation. The only thing that saves them from rapid public mortification is that they, and most people who evaluate their performance, are unable to read and understand the esoteric bafflegab that Quayle uses in her more academically targeted publications. They have no idea she’s a flake.
Now that we know what kind of thought underlies the Taylor et al. bible that Moran and his colleagues are reading from, let’s look at some more of what it says.
Typology of paedophile picture collections. Level 1. “Indicative:” Non-erotic and non-sexualised pictures showing children in their underwear, swimming costumes, etc. from either commercial sources or family albums; pictures of children playing in normal settings, in which the context or organisation of pictures by the collector indicates inappropriateness.
(A later comment on this:)
Most families have extensive and entirely appropriate pictures of their children, and such pictures are not, in these terms, indicative of adult sexual interest in children unless they are in some sense inappropriately held. Furthermore, in the same context, depictions of children in their underwear or naked may well be entirely appropriate. They can, however, be used inappropriately by adults with a sexual interest in children. Within that inappropriate context, essentially innocent pictures can fall within the category of indicative (level 1). Level 1 may include most common pictures of children, either commercially taken or from family albums. The reasons for inclusion of these kinds of photograph within the material related to adult sexual interest in children, as noted earlier, is that the extent to which a photograph may be sexualised and fantasised over lies not so much in its objective content, but in the use to which the picture might be put. In his review of 11 case studies of paedophilic sex offenders, Howitt (1995) draws attention to the significance of this kind of relatively innocent photograph in promoting and sustaining sexual fantasy. It is the context rather than the explicit content of such photographs, therefore, that is significant, and the emphasis on context in understanding child pornography cannot be over-stressed. This is also relevant to considerations of the portrayal of children and child nudity in artistic settings.
These two passages don’t seem to contain much voodoo, and Taylor et al. even cite a paper by Dennis Howitt that voices a conventional Victorian “weakening of the moral threshold” (usually rephrased these days as ‘promoting cognitive distortion’) argument against pedophiles’ viewing of banal images of children. It’s only when you know, from reading the rest of the paper, that the ‘inappropriate’ use of the family-style photos by pedophiles is thought to represent ‘explicit sexual victimisation’ that the creepy undertone begins to come out. This seems to move the ‘inappropriateness’ out of the ‘oh naughty, naughty’ range of reproof, conventional to mere inappropriateness, into a much more urgent need for some sort of restraining action. Sexual victimization is being carried out, after all.
And here we have the context for Mick Moran’s extremely constricted idea of what a pedophile could do to avoid the intervention of ‘public safety officials.’
(Viewing of legal child photographs) demonstrates an escalation of activity by "MAP"'s that must be interpreted as an increased risk to children regardless of the illegality. If an "MAP" is living his life without acting out then he will never become the subject of any attention, legal or otherwise. However, any acting out by a "MAP" has potential to harm a child and must result in action by public safety officials. When they act, they are suspect. Illegal -vs- exploitation. Nude pictures may not be illegal but it is an acting out by an MAP and an acting-out MAP is a concern to society as a whole.
When I look at this passage, it reminds me of stories I’ve been told by people who grew up with raging, violent alcoholic fathers. They would huddle up in their bedroom, trying to be unnoticed, trying to shrink into the wall, knowing that any act they were perceived to make might bring on the father’s rage and a severe beating. This is the existence Moran wants pedophiles to lead in order to be unmolested by the legal authorities.
They may go to work, they may do their dishes, but even the slightest sign – the slightest context - showing that they are experiencing an erotic attraction will bring on the full force of the law. The mere possession of legal photographs, arranged in a way that suggests eros, is sufficient to press the social panic button. As deviants, they cannot be expected to have empathy. They can’t be expected to be beneficent, well-adjusted, responsible and valuable members of the community. That would be unthinkable. Any erotic move they make is a tingle of predatory interest, the flicking of the snake’s tongue. Fail to suppress it, and the snake will soon glide out. Already, in his den, he is deliberately victimizing children, according to Taylor et al., by viewing their images. In deeper Quayle literature, he is already raping the virtual child and the essence of childhood. "Any acting out by an "MAP" has potential to harm a child and must result in action by public safety officials… regardless of illegality."
Taylor and Quayle’s academically disguised Druidism, which sees horrible spiritual violation inherent in erotic interest in banal images, has licensed the police worldwide to beat up deviants. The police don’t really care whether the deviants are doing anything illegal or not. That sounds harsh, but, no matter how many times one re-reads Moran’s text, that’s exactly what he says. He, Taylor and Quayle are one. And, far across the water in Canada, his Toronto Police collaborator Det. Paul Krawczyk says the same thing: “It’s terrible. (It shows) a sexual interest in children. How can that not be dangerous?” For a growing consensus of internationally collaborating police officers, ANY erotic ‘acting’ done by an MAP, alone, in his own home, with heretofore legal materials, must be suppressed by police action. This is a level of mental suppression that has only otherwise ever been seen in religious inquisitions. And indeed, it is religious in nature. This demonization of non-offending pedophiles is not secular. It’s an expression of animistic dread – voodoo abhorrence.
Mick Moran is a man to be reckoned with. He is most famous as the officer who led the international team to identify and capture Christopher Paul Neil, the child pornographer whose algorithmically swirled and unswirled face were seen in every newspaper in the world. He is a leader in implementing computer technologies such as PhotoDNA to identify known pornographic images instantly and automatically by means of robust ‘digital signatures.’ Irish crime reporter Michael O’Toole said this about him:
- This is one of his favourite quotes: "There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter." Hemingway wrote that. It sums up perfectly Mick's job.
The Irish newspaper The Independent proudly elaborated his Irish background:
- Det Sgt Mick Moran is a former garda who was closely involved in the investigation into the murder of former Sunday Independent journalist Veronica Guerin, giving pivotal evidence against the Gilligan gang.
- Mr Moran grew up in Ashbourne, County Meath, and was based at Ballymun and Crumlin stations, and later at Harcourt Square.
- He is married to a French woman and now lives in Lyon, where he is based with the global policing agency, Interpol.
- Since joining Interpol, Mr Moran has risen through the ranks to the position of assistant director, heading up the fight against some of the world's worst paedophiles and child traffickers.
Moran is particularly adept at spotting regionally specific articles in photographs – distinctive dolls, shirt logos, electrical outlet types, and so on – and using them in tracking the locations where the photographs were made.
I have no doubt I’m going out on a limb by writing about him, since my apparent defense of gazing at non-pornographic images appears to encourage pedophiles to ‘act out’ in this manner. That being so, I want to ensure that we have an understanding of where we stand. He, for his part, says “nor am I interested in persecuting MAPs” and I, for my part, am not interested in persecuting him. He can go about his business in actually enforcing the law in peace, as far as I’m concerned. My only issue is that I believe he shows that he and his fellow officers are currently being affected by the superstition that deviants are highly likely to be out-of-control, to be unempathetic or creepily pseudo-empathetic, and to be far more potentially dangerous than potentially beneficent. I believe he and his fellow officers share the intuition that any pedophile looking at a non-pornographic photo with sexual attraction is in some way psychically cursing the child in the image, rather than psychically blessing him or her, the way a pop-star-loving tween girl would be inferred to do with the same image. I know that he doesn’t share or even take seriously the Quayle viewpoint that the image contains a virtual child who can be abused independently of the person who was photographed. Yet, in some way, I suspect he feels, intuitively, that the pedophile’s gaze at the attractive, non-pornographic photograph is like a chill wind, bringing on ill. Whereas actually, as all rationalists know, it is completely causally unlinked to anything other than, perhaps, the pedophile’s relief from the pressure of horniness. Which might be a good thing.
In stating my own position as an acting MA (assuming I am being truthful about this here in pseudonymous internet world), I wish to take issue with one assertion made by Moran, in the tweets above, that ties in with some assertions made by Taylor et al.
Moran says “MAPs purchasing or making pictures of naked children is a form of child exploitation as the child is not aware.”
Taylor et al. also speak to the ethics of MAPs contemplating depictions of naked children.
They say, “It is the context rather than the explicit content of such photographs … that is significant, and the emphasis on context in understanding child pornography cannot be over-stressed. This is also relevant to considerations of the portrayal of children and child nudity in artistic settings.”
Taylor et al. also say, “Most families have extensive and entirely appropriate pictures of their children, and such pictures are not, in these terms, indicative of adult sexual interest in children unless they are in some sense inappropriately held. Furthermore, in the same context, depictions of children in their underwear or naked may well be entirely appropriate.”
Here we can see the same dichotomy coming into play as we saw in the case of the clothed images. Families, when taking naked photographs, have a blessing gaze, and thus their photographs are contextually OK. A pedophile taking exactly the same photographs would have a self-interested, cursing gaze and thus exploit the children, regardless of how protective and respectful he actually felt about them. The same principle, say Taylor et al., also applies in art. This is interesting. We know Michaelangelo Caravaggio was sexually interested in the street boys he painted in famous studies like his ‘Amor Vincit Omnia.’ Some may even have been his lovers. These paintings are thus arguably records of crime scenes, and the Louvre glorifies Caravaggio’s sexual exploitation every day it opens up. Finns will have to rethink their attitude to their beloved Magnus Enckell, whose many paintings of naked boys are described as “openly erotic and sensual” in Wikipedia. Say goodbye to a whole room in the Ateneum art museum in downtown Helsinki. There are dozens more examples like this. In case this connection of Moran and colleagues to questions about art seems far-fetched, consider the case of Spade arrestee Joe Wilson, who was pilloried by the Justice Department and the press for his legal possession of “a large portrait of a young, naked boy” – in fact, as the Justice Department was too cowardly to mention, a painting by the world-famous Otto Lohmüller. The threat to the art world from the Moran axis of policing is very real indeed.
I suppose any defense of Azov Films arrestees inevitably poses the question of whether the defender condones what was done to the subjects of the films. On the surface of it, many of the movies hardly differ in content from hundreds of naturist films that have long been considered innocent, many of them derived from naturist organizations that are firmly socially conservative. There are also picture books featuring normally naked Amazonian native nations that include many children. Moran seems to let these films and books off the hook unless MAPs buy them, or unless they were produced by MAPs: “MAPs purchasing or making pictures of naked children is a form of child exploitation as the child is not aware.” Is not aware of what, by the way? The nature of erotic interest? The spiritually injurious nature of the werewolf eyes of thousands of pedophiles worldwide? Is being photographed naked so vulnerable a matter that questions similar to those encountered about consent to sex come into play? Certainly, no one asks if parental photographs of their naked children may require sex-like levels of consensual understanding. To what extent does this informed consent consideration apply when a pedophile, perhaps a relative of the child, may view the same image later?
The matter of photographed children being unaware of their situation comes up poignantly in the case of Azov Films. Filmmaker Markus Roth admits he deceived the boys involved in his wrestling videos. In a Toronto Star story by Robert Cribb, one of Roth’s boy stars, Michel, says that when he agreed to act in the films, “I didn’t know he was selling them. He told me the movies went to his sister in Germany because she likes to watch them.” Parents, also, were not informed. After Roth’s release from a short sentence in a Romanian prison for making the films (Romania, unlike the US, does not sanction naturist photography), he wrote a pathetically self-excusing letter of apology to his video subjects; this letter was translated into English and published in the Star. This strikes me as a very clear-cut case of inexcusably deceptive behavior, and, yes, I would call it exploitative on that basis. I don’t believe that the unknowing customers purchasing the innocent-looking videos share any culpability in this, but I would judge that Moran’s qualm about exploitation through cultivated unawareness is well applied to the filmmaker in this case.
The other major producer of Azov Films who has been extensively written about in the press – but only the Russian-language press – is Igor Rusanov, from Sebastopol, Ukraine. Obtaining verified, accurate, journalistic information about Rusanov is not easy, and he has been completely ignored, for unexplained reasons, in police propaganda and its tame mainstream journalism emanating from Project Spade. Getting meaningful results from searches on Rusanov are difficult even for those who read Russian: speculations published by vigilantes come up strongly, while key 2011 articles in the main legitimate news source, crimea24.info, seem to have been deleted (However, we have copies of most of them). After much puzzling over the material, Kristofor and I have reached the conclusion that Rusanov’s situation was much different from Roth’s. Under his pseudonym Zverozub, he had publicly visible websites promoting naturism in beautiful Crimea, and was also highly active as a lecturer on the same topic. The boys he filmed were shown on the website, sometimes tastefully nude, for all to see. There is no doubt that the boys and their parents all knew that the boys were stars in naturist videos that were selling well – which explains the frustration of vigilantes as parents and sons circled the wagons and refused to make any complaints after Rusanov was arrested in 2011. The question of whether the boys involved in the Crimean films were sufficiently informed or not by Rusanov really boils down to whether or not children can be sufficiently informed about the possible ramifications of appearing nude in materials made available to the public.
Bringing a ‘control’ study to bear on the question, courtesy of Taylor et al., we can see that the same concern applies to any boy posing for a painting by Otto Lohmüller (who is perhaps capable of an MAP erotic gaze), or the 12-year-old neighbor boy who posed for Charles Ray (generally thought not to have an MAP gaze) when he produced the colossal white metallic sculpture Boy with Frog. This sculpture stood buck naked on Venice’s Punta della Dogana for well over a year. I confess that I once visually victimized the piece for over 20 minutes myself, on a cool Venice night. To what extent should Ray have warned the boy that his blazing white and oversized, but otherwise highly realistic image, would have been eroto-esthetically appreciated by an aging perv and his friends, even as women posed for photographs in front of it and a uniformed guard kept his watchful eye on the ever-so souvenir-worthy penis (a perpetual problem for naked male sculptures in Europe)?
Common sense has to kick in at some point. Are you kidding?
Nakedness is not sex. Depending on which culture we come from, and which subculture our parents belong to within that culture, we may feel greater or lesser urges to keep our natural body form private. The United States and several other countries, in their democratic generosity, have decided to let families decide for themselves whether naturist collectivism is shameful or liberating; we are not legally obliged to regard our private body parts as unrevealable displays of sex. All we need to do is keep them private in public places where a people with a mixture of beliefs need to get along with one another. Nudist families may go to nudist resorts and take their nudist family photographs, and even nudist friends can photograph multi-family picnics and gatherings, at least under the house rules of some naturist associations. America, Australia, Canada, the European countries and the Central and South American countries have no shortage of officially tolerated nude beaches, to which parents and children may go at will. Friends and I always joked that Justin Bieber could have permanently eliminated the association of simple nudity with child pornography laws simply by spending one day at a nude beach at age 17 and allowing the photographers to click at will. He would have been on 80% of the world’s mobile phones within a week, criminalizing the majority of the electronically connected population of the earth. Alas, it never happened, but such thought-experiments are never pointless. To try to equate nudity to sex, and to lumber nudity with sex-like rules of informed consent, is unrealistic, impractical, even laughable – even though dealing with the nudity of any individual person one knows or encounters requires the utmost discretion, politeness, respect of their feelings, and deference to their wishes. Kristofor comments that for him, the idea of making nudity a lower echelon of sex for legal purposes is an expression of the lingering Victorian neurosis that biological information about the genitalia will sap people of moral vigor – an attitude he finds offensive and sociologically disappointing. In terms of procedure, I believe that anyone contemplating making a nude photograph of a child should obtain the clear, unambiguous, free assent of the child and a responsible parent or guardian first, and the same goes for creating a representational nude artwork. The extent and type of planned distribution, if any, should also be fully disclosed – but I don’t believe that the possibility one or more pervs may someday gaze at the art work is a germane consideration. Having said that, I acknowledge that I’ve never made such a photograph myself and wouldn’t remotely consider doing so. I’m not an artist, I’m a writer. Here’s the written equivalent: “sixteen-year-old Justin Bieber, naked, well trimmed.” Damage him with your imaginations as you will.
In the discussions that followed the Project Spade arrests, commenters on Boychat and similar venues noted that they didn’t find the films erotic. That, to me, raises one more issue that needs to be considered in this context. Apart from pure erotic interest in a representation of an attractive boy (or girl), there’s also the esthetic interest that comes from finding a certain sort of person beautiful to the eye. It’s a very common observation that nude art works are usually of little or no interest as masturbation material, even when the people depicted are attractive, and vividly rendered. This was always a mystery to me, especially since sketchy cartoons can be quite stimulating, but Kristofor explains it handily: “Sexuality contains an urge to find consummate completeness by becoming unified with the endless complexity of another human being. Whenever anyone appreciates excellent art, that level of psychological completeness is already so thoroughly attained by viewing the art that there’s nothing left for sexuality to work with. Its goal has already been met.”
Even when the art one sees is not at a level of greatness that supersedes the sex drive, people who look at attractive individuals in paintings, films, photographs and sculptures may appreciate them more for their beauty than for their excitation of the urge to orgasm. I’m very pleased to own a DVD of a movie that stars the beautiful young English actor Freddie Highmore, but I’ve never once given Freddie a truly erotic thought. I wonder how much disapproval Moran and friends would levy against those who ‘act out’ by appreciating ‘eye candy’ that never actually sends any impulses down to the groin, even as it flatters the pleasure centers elsewhere in the pervert brain. I strongly suspect that the mild, unerotic Azov Films were merely ‘eye candy’ to some of those who bought them, even some who bought multiple titles. The amount of ‘deliberate sexual victimization’ involved in appreciating beauty that is latently, but not actively, erotically contemplated, is something that Taylor et al. would find themselves forced to deal with if they were honest and clear-thinking people.
And in that barb lies my last point. Police officers, like those of us who are journalists, are not academics – we are journeymen. It’s all very well to take advice from the university people, but we need to keep our common sense and skepticism intact, and not become deferential just because someone is respected in their field. The health professions, in particular, have hosted perfectly well respected academics who have conducted the most appalling and disgusting experiments imaginable – for example, the Tuskegee syphilis trials, and the secret MKUltra LSD experiments. How well equipped is Moran, or Krawczyk, to detect the vile undertones of the academic theories they’re being exposed to?
When Moran reads that a pedophile looking excitedly at web-found family photos is embedded in “a continuum of increased deliberate sexual victimisation,” how likely is he to perceive that there’s something weird and phoney going on in that statement? I suspect he simply thinks, ‘sounds firmly anti-pedophile, good enough for me. Yes, when they collect mild images, they probably want less mild images, too, so let’s nip the trend in the bud.’ That’s not what the text is saying at all. What would impel Moran to get into the deeper literature where he would see that the same ‘continuum of sexual victimisation’ includes the viewing of cartoons where “each time an image is used the virtual child is victimised” and where it can be said that “‘sexual exploitation’ refers to activities that may include sexual abuse of children but may also refer to activities where no such abuse has taken place but where the very nature of the activities [i.e., looking at erotic cartoons depicting children – BN] violates the very essence of childhood.” If you asked him, “does Ethel Quayle think that contemplating an erotic cartoon-child has exactly the same moral significance as sexually abusing a real child?” he might well be inclined to assure you that this was a silly idea. In reality, it is the core of Quayle’s belief system about pornography. In many ways, Moran would be much better off out on the streets, beating up defiant loudmouths with his fists, than he would be basing his sophisticated strategic objectives on the law-transgressing advice of these serpentine theorists.
And now, Det. Sgt. Moran, having said all that, I’m going to go to bed, to lie there and blissfully think of – nothing whatsoever. Coincidentally, just what you would wish me to do.
I wasn’t doin’ nuthin, officer. I hope this constitutional free speech thing actually works.
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