child pornography and sexual exploitation of children online

therapies – according to the age, stage of development and the needs of the child victim.
Children are helped to make sense of what has happened to them through understanding
their thoughts, feelings and actions. Therapists address the child’s perception of safety,
enable them to express their feelings and become empowered, help them develop
assertiveness and communication skills and to disentangle their mixed feelings of guilt,
trust and ambivalence. Such issues are also pertinent to children made the subjects of
abusive images. However, there is a need to gain a greater understanding of how best
to address the four significant impacts on such victims as listed previously. Söderström
draws out a number of additional practices called for when assisting children recovering
from sexual exploitation through image production: he points to the importance for the
child to decipher the exploiter’s manoeuvring; the need to empower the child and assist in
retrieving agency in being the active part in the disclosure process; and taking care not to
overemphasise what is in the images but allowing the child to set the focus, among other
things (Söderström 2008). In particular, because of the nature of the silencing of children
made the subjects of abusive images, we need thus to be mindful of the fact that disclosure
will be a spasmodic process and one that should be at the child’s pace and not at a pace
that suits, for example, the criminal justice system. One of the most taxing issues facing
therapists is how to assist child victims with the non-resolution of their abuse bearing in
mind the reality that the images will be available in perpetuity. The empowerment process
during therapy can assist victims in ‘living with’ this reality. One 14-year-old adolescent,
when her therapy sessions were coming to a close, reported to one of the authors, “I’m not
worried anymore about what people might think of me, nor about the images that are out
there, because the people who look for images of me have got the problem, not me”. We
must never underestimate the resilience of young people to overcome adversity. However,
for some, the fact that the images are ‘out there’ remains a recurring nightmare and one
that we must give further thought to. One approach to this problem may be the use of
interventions which can be used for victims who have regular ‘flashbacks’ to their abuse
or some traumatic event in their lives. The transfer of this approach to victims of abuse
images, though in its infancy, is proving to have some success.
In this section we examine the ethical issues involved in telling children that their images
have been disseminated on the Internet or by mobile phone and question whether the
need to secure a conviction of the offender should always be prioritised over the needs of
the child who has been abused and exploited. This has considerable implications for the
criminal justice system.
52|Child Pornography and Sexual Exploitation of Children Online