RETRAUMATIZING
VICTIMS OF CHILD PORN
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
January 27, 2013
I
recommend today’s article on “The Price of a Stolen Childhood” by Emily Bazelon
in today’s New York Times magazine (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/magazine/how-much-can-restitution-help-victims-of-child-pornography.html?hpw&_r=0)
to any victims’ rights advocate who has not already seen it. Ms. Bazelon follows two women who by federal
law have been notified that they have been identified in years’ old video of
them performing scripted sex acts, from evidence used in child pornography
prosecutions—evidence that has already been shared with state and local law
enforcement. The law now also provides
that they get notified every time they appear in evidence used to convict
anyone anywhere; the article includes a pictures of boxes full of notifications
one victim has received. She has also
collected restitution from convicted owners of her pictures jointly and
severally as now provided by law for her benefit, too. In the process, contraband videos of her
paired with her adult identity have now become collectors’ items.
As a
consequence of all this vindication and legally ordered financial compensation,
her life has become a wreck. She doesn’t
know when anyone might be recognizing or stalking her—when she will next be
reminded that men are still getting pleasure from her torture and abject
degradation.
I have
been privileged to know survivors of horrific childhood ritual sadism who have
healed in part by telling their stories as they chose to tell them to whom they
wished when and where they wished. I
also consider open, honest sharing of information to be sacred. But in mediation as in all healing from
personal violence, it is essential for the sharing of private personal
information to be voluntary. It is
elemental among victims’ advocates that sexual violence strips victims of
control of their own closest most intimate lives, and therefore, that the
would-be supporter’s priority is to let victims take control of who knows and
who does what in response to offenses.
First order of business: victims
call the shots. As they find themselves
gaining control of their present relations, they can trust that what happened
to them in the past haunts their present.
One of the re-victims in this story tells of relief that her civil
lawyer volunteers that he has not looked at her “evidence” himself, says this
enables her to trust him.
I think
the law ought to provide that when a victim is first notified that law
enforcement has pictures of her or him, the primary holder of that evidence
refrain from further distribution to law enforcement until the victim has given
permission to do so. I propose victims
have the right to have the holder destroy the evidence and all records of their
identities forthwith, or to set conditions on access to it or official
use. Ms. Bazelon didn’t ask her
informants whether they would have just told all the agencies who first became
aware of who they were to burn the videos and delete their names from their
records. It seems pretty clear that
collecting large restitution sums has only made the life of one of them more
haunted, more frightened than ever.
Every time another law enforcement officer or prosecutor sees the videos
amounts under privacy law to republication.
Victims ought to be able to assure themselves that one official distributor
of the stuff has stopped, for any purpose whatsoever. That way there’s a good chance that they
would soon get over the fear that their adult selves would be identified by
anyone who had seen childhood pictures.
Let us
beware that the rights we give victims may in fact dis-empower them, and
incapacitate them from healing. We who
would support them need not further publish their degradation in order to show
them that we know what happened to them was awful. As children and as adults dealing with
childhood wounds, let our control of our own bodies and what is done to and
with them be respected. Love and
peace--hal
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