Child Pornography - Home | National Rapporteur on Trafficking in ...

0 Foreword
The report before you is my first report on child pornography, or in other words, child abuse material.
It forms the outcome of my research into the nature and extent of child pornography, and into the
measures taken by the Dutch government to tackle it. The core message of my report is that children
are entitled to protection from all forms of sexual violence. <strong>Child</strong> pornography – in other words, the
capturing of sexual violence in images or on film – is just one type of sexual violence. In almost every
case of child pornography, sexual abuse is at the basis of its production. In order to adequately protect
the sexual safety of children, an integrated approach is required. In the Netherlands, an artificial distinction
seems to have existed until recently between the measures deployed to tackle child pornography
on the one hand and those used to combat violations of the sexual integrity of children on the other.
That distinction has stood in the way of a broad, integrated approach towards tackling sexual violence
against children. The Dutch government seems to have taken my message on board.
Through the years, children have been sexually abused, and the response to this has varied over time. In
the past, children were often not believed, sometimes simply because they were children, and at other
times because adults did not want to, or were not able to, believe such a thing. Preserving the good reputation
of institutions was sometimes regarded as more important than protecting the individual child.
Even today, signs of sexual abuse often remain unnoticed. In the Netherlands, a great deal of attention
is currently being devoted to the sexual abuse of children, partly as a result of the inquiries regarding
sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church, child welfare services and day-care centres. A number
of high-profile cases of sexual abuse have emerged over the past decades, resulting in retrospective investigations
into ‘how such a thing could happen.’ However, by that stage it is already too late. Protecting
children from sexual violence needs to be a constant concern for the government and not something
that is triggered by the occurrence of present-day incidents.
The fact that images of the sexual abuse exist and that those images are distributed by means of modern
technology does not mean that child pornography is essentially different from other types of sexual
violence. However, if images of the abuse exist, it is no longer a question of believing or not believing.
After all, the images provide proof that abuse has taken place, and that is precisely the aspect where
the integration of measures to tackle child pornography into the overall approach towards tackling
sexual violence against children can play an important role. For the victim, the existence of images
adds yet another dimension to the abuse. Once the images are on the Internet, they cannot actually be
removed. This means that attaining closure with regard to a traumatic experience cannot be achieved.
After all, the material will still exist on the Internet when the victims are adults. It is therefore necessary,
for the authorities providing assistance, to take account of this permanency in the assistance
they provide.