Online business Toolkit

Story: Encryption foils Internet child porn prosecutions

Posted by: Anonymous (Tuesday 22 February 2005, 4:26 AM)

As an émigré outside the UK/EU, so presumably beyond the jurisdiction of UK authority, I feel sufficiently emboldened to express opinion without feeling I will be subject to an unannounced visit from the UK Morals Police or a snap Inland Revenue inspection.
I can't help feeling that it's less than best use of police time and resources to pursue those that download child pornography. Reprehensible as viewing child pornography is, providing there is no hand-on abuse of minors, resources expended to arrest, convict, imprison and presumably rehabilitate these people seems out-of-proportion to their supposed threat to society. And keep in mind, that this character stain will render many unemployable, so less for the Inland Revenue to collect. The term “witch hunt” comes to mind. Authority should concentrate on bringing the real monsters to book, namely those that supply, sexually abuse and photograph minors for profit. But presumably these people are outside UK jurisdiction, so they take out their frustration on the mug punters.
The police must have worked out that if you can't catch criminals, then make criminals out of those you can catch. But it appears authority is losing enthusiasm for prosecuting child porn browsers. Firstly there’s the cost; forensic examination of a computer hard drive is some Stg.2,000. This is for openers, just to see if the case is worth pursuing. As anyone into porn browsing is likely to have an “Evidence Eliminator” programme, the UK Morals Police are likely to be on a hiding to nothing. Multiply this Stg.2,000 by number of suspects, and you are looking at an amount that would soak up regional police budgets for the foreseeable future. And as part of police budget comes out of Council Tax, I feel certain householders would prefer their local police concentrated on burglars, car thieves and muggers, rather than politically correct crime.
When blue collar workers are prosecuted for child porn browsing, the public are impressed; “the police are doing their job”, but when the trawl includes accountants, solicitors, judges, MP's, serving police officers, and medical doctors, Joe Public starts to lose confidence in his-called betters. It's becoming painfully obvious that a segment of the middle class is also heavily into this type of activity, possibly up to 500,000 adult males in the UK. With present prison capacity of 75,000 fully utilised, somebody, somewhere needs to get a little pragmatic. Also, when the police concentrate on essentially victimless crime, the level of police-public co-operation falls as a direct result.
Authority tries to prove that there is a direct link between child porn browsers and those guilty of physical, hand-on child sexual abuse. I question this supposed correlation. In the area of public morals, priorities need to be rearranged. Britain has the highest teen pregnancy rate in Europe, but when one 15-year-old impregnates another, there’s precious little societal retribution. Of course when DNA testing proves a 20-plus-year-old man has carnal knowledge of one of these jailbait minors, his feet won’t touch the ground on the way to the slammer.
Face it, Britain's criminal justice system is a stable that badly needs cleaning, and there are a lot higher priorities than pursuing sorry-assed losers with a self-dating life style.