Prime Minister John Howard’s decision to clamp down on porn and alcohol in aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory to combat high rates of child sexual assault has been overwhelmingly welcomed by the general public. Most Australians rightly believe it is about time that this national disgrace be dealt with, and dealt with quickly and decisively.
Of course the usual suspects objected, but they would, wouldn’t they? John Stanhope, the Labor leader of the ACT, called the plan “racist”! Democrat leader Lyn Allison said it was “an outrageous authoritarian crackdown”. And former PM Malcolm Fraser, who seems to hate everything John Howard says or does, said the plan was “a return to paternalism”.
The NT report, “Little Children Are Sacred,” released two weeks ago, simply confirmed what many people knew for quite some time. Porn is killing our communities, our kids, and our women. Thus it is absolutely essential that action be taken to protect indigenous children from the horrific sexual abuse that has been occurring for so long.
Indeed, this is what one nurse said from first-hand experience, in a letter to the Weekend Australian (June 23-24, 2007):
As a remote area nurse, I treated too many too often
“The outcry from the safe and comfortable about the Howard Government’s new stance on Aboriginal child sexual abuse is both sickening and infuriating.
As they talk of self-determination, children across the nation are being stripped of their self-worth in the violence of rape and its horrific sequel. Too long have I and many others treated and seen the victims of blatant sexual abuse in remote Aboriginal communities and outback towns. My many years as a remote area nurse saw me treat too many too often.
I ask the politically enlightened to give a 5-year-old boy painful penicillin injections for his anal sores caused by syphilis. Why don’t they come and change the colostomy bag on a 6-year-old girl so mutilated by her rape that her genitalia had to be reconstructed? Or let them help us convince an 11-year-old that her rape wasn’t her fault (whilst we are giving her antibiotics for the gonorrhoea she acquired). That’s what those at the coalface deal with on a distressingly regular basis.
Many people, over the decades, have been crying out in the wilderness for these kids. This is not a new issue and it’s not going to go away overnight. It’s a huge step forward that some people with political clout are finally acting. Grandmothers, nurses, teachers and Aboriginal health workers have been assaulted and threatened for speaking out for the abused. Children have died during or after sexual assaults. For the sake of these kids and the families caught up in the tragedy, we must act. Firmly, decisively and immediately.”
(Monica Brown, Hunter Valley, NSW)
But it needs also to be said that all children, not just aboriginal children, should be protected from the ugly effects of porn consumption. While the Prime Minister’s call to action is a great first step, it really needs to be applied across the board. Porn, in the form of X-rated videos and the like, should be restricted throughout Australia.
At the moment it cannot be produced or sold in Australian states, but it can be, and is, in the territories. Thus our nation’s political capital is also our nation’s porn capital. It will do little good to ban X-rated videos in the NT if it can simply be sent in from the ACT. What is really needed is a complete clampdown on this horrible stuff in the first place, and Fyshwick in the ACT is where the attention should be focused.
Yet the civil libertarians will argue, as they always do, that there is no connection whatsoever between porn and sexual assault. But there clearly is, as I have documented elsewhere. Yet the pornophiles will say that this is not so, and that as the availability of porn has increased over the years, rape rates have not always kept up with it. But this is often because of how rape has been redefined and re-legislated. Dr Judith Riesman, an expert in this area, explains:
“In 1950, 18 [US] states authorized the death penalty for rape; most others could impose a life sentence. Following Alfred Kinsey’s ‘scientific’ advice in 1948, many states redefined ‘rape’ so the crime could be plea-bargained down to a misdemeanor like ‘sexual misconduct.’ Missouri redefined rape to mean 11 different crimes for 11 different sentences, magically lowering ‘rape’ rates. Like all states that have trivialized rape, Missouri relied on the Kinsey-based 1955 American Law Institute Model Penal Code. ‘Rape’ was eliminated from New Jersey’s laws and replaced with a variety of terms during a 1978 penal law revision. For example, Dr. Linda Jeffrey notes that the charge to which child-molesting teacher Pamela Diehl-Moore pleaded guilty was reduced to a second-tier crime, ‘sexual assault’ – i.e., sexual contact with a victim under 13, or penetration where the ‘actor’ uses physical force or coercion, but the victim doesn’t suffer severe personal injury, or the victim is 16 or 17, with aggravating circumstances, or the victim is 13 to 15 and the ‘actor’ is at least four years older. (Whew!)”
She offers a small sampling of the evidence. She suggests that the pornophiles should “read reports such as ‘Sex-Related Homicide and Death Investigation’ (2003). Former Lt. Comdr. Vernon Geberth says today’s ‘sex-related cases … are more frequent, vicious and despicable’ than anything he experienced in decades as a homicide cop. In ‘Journey Into Darkness’ (1997), the FBI’s premier serial-rape profiler, John Douglas wrote, ‘[Serial-rape murders are commonly found] with a large pornography collection, either store-bought or homemade. … our [FBI] research does show that certain types of sadomasochistic and bondage-oriented material can fuel the fantasies of those already leaning in that direction’.”
She continues, “In ‘The Evil That Men Do’ (1998), FBI serial-rape-murderer-mutilator profiler Roy Hazelwood quotes one sex killer who tied his victims in ‘a variety of positions’ based on pictures he saw in sex magazines. ‘Thrill Killers, a Study of America’s Most Vicious Murders,’ by Charles Linedecker, reports that 81 percent of these killers rated pornography as their primary sexual interest. Dr. W.L. Marshall, in ‘Criminal Neglect, Why Sex Offenders Go Free’ (1990), says based on the evidence, pornography ‘feeds and legitimizes their deviant sexual tendencies.’ In one study of rapists, Gene Abel of the New York Psychiatric Institute cited, ‘One-third reported that they had used pornography immediately prior to at least one of their crimes.’ In 1984, the U.S. Attorney General’s Task Force on Family Violence reported, ‘Testimony indicates that an alarming number of rape and sexual assault offenders report that they were acting out behavior they had viewed in pornographic materials’.”
She concludes, “More pornography equals more rape of children and women. We need to ask whether Big Government is now selling out to Big Pornography as it did to Big Tobacco for half a century.” Exactly. Now that national attention is turned to the plight of aboriginal children, we need to remind ourselves that all children deserve protection from the ugly results of our porn culture.
http://www.drjudithreisman.com/archives/2006/09/pornographys_li.html
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