By Kieran McCartan, Ph.D., David Prescott, LICSW, &
Kasia Uzieblo, Ph.D.
This has been a frustrating week for writing. With respect
to developments in our field, it seemed as though the goalposts kept moving; the blog could have been on anything and nothing. As the week started, we were
looking at recent reports (The
Sun; Complex; New
York Times) about the reality of Pornhub was, despite their
protestations, all is not happiness, smiles, sanitized sex, and sexuality;
instead, there is a dark side. It wasn’t long before Pornhub took
remedial action; we will have to wait to see the results.
Next, the blog was going to examine the unintended impact of
new encrypted messaging policies and practices that can put children at risk for
grooming and abuse (The
Guardian; The
Children’s Commissioner for England). This promised much to discuss. However,
that debate has been moved down the agenda, in the UK at least, with increased
discussions around Brexit and COVID-19. important messages and conversations are
getting overshadowed. Stimied again! However, this is a topic that we will return
to in the new year, as it highlights the balancing act between risk and safety
in child protection with an evolving frame of online protection.
The third and final, blog that we were going to write is
about the balancing act between internet filters and prevention messaging after Kieran attended a meeting that discussed whether the cost of implementing
such tools was an appropriate and relevant investment. Interestingly, this
meeting went round in circles and it was decided that more research and
evidence was needed. All of this highlights and focuses the challenge of
prevention: do we prevent and try to stop what might happen or do we respond to
what is happening? This, in turn, feeds into larger debates and reflects previous
blogs on this site, so it felt like retracing old ground.
Another day brought headlines reporting the
first people in the UK–first in the world – outside of clinical trials to be vaccinated
against COVID-19 with the Pfizer jab, which was great news! Interestingly, the
news coverage throughout the day and ensuing discussions about evidence,
effectiveness, patient safety, and rollout highlighted the lynchpin that
brought all these potential blogs together. The real issue is not necessarily
the vaccine itself, but the mechanism through which the vaccine is delivered. The
biggest challenge is changing public minds, education, prevention, engagement, inclusion,
and community building. All these same challenges confront us in the field of
sexual abuse.
Like COVID-19, preventing sexual abuse means understanding
and responding to it directly (and does not involve behaving as though it does
not exist or will go away on its own). Also, like COVID-19, sexual abuse can be
overwhelming, omnipresent, and presents challenges for individuals, communities,
and society. This means (again like COVID-19) our response is often divided –
even divisive – and results from a spectrum of belief and acceptance. Beneath
this are considerations of people’s knowledge, understanding, trust in the
system, belief in science, and hopes for the future. In many circumstances, we find
ourselves at a stalemate: in recent years, the field of addressing sexual abuse
has tried new approaches to tackle the issue, including prevention, reframing
messages, groups of people reaching out to the public, and listening systematically
to who people who have abused – and those who have been abused – have to say.
Each of these efforts has worked to a greater or lesser
degree. We can see the same pattern, the same approaches, and the same
frustration in these debates as we do in the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine.
The question then becomes, what now? Do we all need radical overhauls in our approaches?
Is the answer to preventing sexual harm in doubling down on our current
approaches and seeking out more evidence and opinion? Or is it a return to
control and regulation? These are difficult questions with no obvious answers.
The one common element that arises in both the challenges
around sexual abuse and COVID-19 – the element that ties together the threads
of Pornhub, encryption, and filtering software is the community. Our
communities. Sexual abuse is a community issue and therefore communities need
to understand it better to respond to it more effectively and prevent its
spread. Punishment and restriction do not stop sexual abuse. While such
sanctions can help in some cases, awareness and support can do much more.
We are all members of our communities and society beyond,
and together we shape the debates and actions that move us forward. Our
greatest successes come when we work together, and our greatest failures happen
when we resist new information and cooperative efforts. This is true across the
board, from child protection to immunization. In many ways, especially in the
political arena, our community is more fractured than ever before. While
advances in accessing knowledge and resources have brought so much of the world
together, they have also happened at the very times that many of us have become
increasingly entrenched in our own echo chambers. If services to prevent abuse
and rehabilitate those who have abused are the primary issues, then how do we
respond? It seems safe to say that we need a new delivery mechanism and new
ways to think about moving forward.
The challenge as we move in 2021 is how do we immunize
ourselves against sexual abuse, the way that we are immunizing ourselves
against COVID-19? And how do we immunize ourselves against both the panic and
apathy that violence and the pandemic can bring? How do we get the “cure” out
there (in COVID’s case, that means the Pfizer jab, and in sexual abuse, it is
the education, knowledge, and understanding we need) in a more effective way? It
is a challenge, but as a community, we can work together to solve it!
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