Surviving is hard...

Society has a problem which is as old as society and yet after millennia of trying to deal with this issue we still haven't figured it out. It is my belief that the reason for this is that we are not being honest about the problem and until we are honest we will never solve it.

To call it child sexual abuse would seem to infer that there is perhaps some legitimate means to use a child for sexual gratification - for something to be abusive generally means there is a controlled or non-abusive means of doing the same thing. What this does is diminish the reality of what happens when a child is raped - and let's be clear, it is rape and we need to recognise it as rape before we will ever start to understand and fix this terrible problem.

I, along with 10s of millions of other people across the world, was raped. I along with 10s of millions of other people across the world have to live with having been raped, every single day and it is hard.

What society needs to understand is that every single day we fight to live - we do not have normal lives, we do not have sanctuary, we do not have freedom - we are always just one bad day away from no longer being here. Some of us manage to keep pushing that day back until some other fate takes us - many of us are not so lucky - surviving is hard.

For the second time in my life I find my academic work has led me down the path of introspection - the dark avenues of my mind and soul, in an attempt to either understand or make this pain mean something. In 1997 I wrote my college dissertation on issues surrounding the dissemination of child rape media online - I wrote about global laws and how without global consensus on what child rape is, it impossible to legislate effectively and as a result we end up with an ineffective mesh of laws which only deal with the consequences of these violent acts - leaving children forever vulnerable to their predators.

Now, 25 years later I find myself addressing the same issues as I did then as I write my thesis on the European Commission's proposal for detection of child rape media - only this time I am viewing the issue through the lens of privacy and the harm which will inevitably be caused by the total surveillance of all online communications.

What saddens me most is that no lessons have been learned in those 25 years - we are in exactly the same place now as we were then and we continue to shy away from talking honestly about the issues and trying to find solutions, instead opting to bury our heads in the sand and hope it will go away if we throw enough magic technology at the problem - but it won't.

You can't solve a problem if you don't understand it and you can't solve a problem if you don't have the right tools - when it comes to child rape, we neither understand it nor do we have the right tools.

Our politicians don't want to talk about it - and I mean this literally - they will not talk about the problem, it scares them, they don't understand how it might make them look to their voters or donors if they challenge the Commission's proposal (even if those challenges are legitimate).

Our politicians don't want to fund research into the causes - they throw money at the consequences and on silver bullets which turn out to be nothing more than blanks; but they still don't recognise the need to research the causes of this violence, with the result that every single day countless more children join those 10s of millions of us fighting to make it through the next bad day, fighting to hide our tears, fighting to hide our shame, fighting to hide our feelings of guilt, fighting the fear of living, fighting for every breath we take.

Our popular media continues to normalise sexualisation of children in film, music, advertising and fashion - blissfully living in denial that what they are doing is making the problem worse. When I wrote that first paper 25 years ago, my research into why child rapists re-offend (and the re-offending rates are staggeringly high) discovered that most child rapists do not consider what they are doing is wrong - they consider this normal. Society encourages them through popular media - yet we still see very little done at the societal level to prevent this, and as stated above we still have a woeful lack of funding to research these issues and their impact.

I never know when my day might come - it has visited me a couple of times already over the years and it was purely through the actions of others that I am still here - but I know it is there, waiting for its chance to swallow me. I am no different to 10s of millions of others who are stalked by that same darkness just waiting for its chance to claim another survivor.

So please - if you are a politician, philanthropist or anyone else who might have the power and means to have an impact - start funding research, start dealing with the cause rather than the consequences because that and that alone will save lives. You can't save the life of a survivor, you can't save the life of a victim - even if you think detection can do this, you are wrong. You are wrong because detection is after the fact and that is too late, our lives were already stolen, we are already dead even if you can't see it.

Survival is hard... and it never gets easier - please let us live.