We knew it was bound to happen; in fact, we surprised it took so long. Last month, Prostasia was embroiled in an ugly spat on Twitter, beginning when we were called out by British conservative commentator Katie Hopkins, who took objection to our tweet suggesting that LGBTQ people, kinky people, and sex workers had roles to play in the prevention of child sexual abuse.

With all the nuance and careful reading that social media call-outs are known for, critics who had never heard of us before descended to make wild accusations such as that we were calling for children to be allowed as sex workers, or for BDSM practitioners to teach kinky sex in schools. We responded to this kerfuffle in a blog article that is excerpted in the "Latest blog posts" section below.

The immediate storm quickly blew over, but the sexual stigma that causes people to mistrust a prevention-focused approach remains. It perhaps helps to explain why the government refused to list Prostasia Foundation on its Child Welfare Information Gateway, and why the NCMEC (which the US Court of Appeals has ruled is also a government actor) had us ejected from a meeting of the INHOPE network of child protection hotlines.

On the other hand, we are gratified that so many people stood by us and defended us, explaining to detractors why a primary prevention approach that respects human rights and the diversity of human sexuality doesn't have to be incompatible with protecting children—indeed, that it is the only approach that we can take to tackling this problem without causing widespread harms.

We are still making this compelling case to charitable foundations, and hope to have some good news to share soon. But in the meantime, the volunteers who are helping us to fight this battle are stretched tight, and your further support would be greatly appreciated.

On June 13, 2019, Prostasia Foundation held the second event in our series A multi-stakeholder dialogue on Internet platforms, sexual content, & child protection, at the Internet and human rights conference RightsCon, which was held in Tunis, Tunisia.

Moderator Jeremy Malcolm opened the session by introducing the problem; that child abuse prevention is being used as pretext for the over-censorship of sexual content in ways that doesn’t actually help (but could harm) children, and does harm to other vulnerable populations. Some examples were given. He also introduced the process that Prostasia Foundation has convened to bring together Internet companies, experts and stakeholders to deliberate upon and address this problem. He referred participants to the background paper for the RightsCon meeting.

Jeremy then played a short video segment from some of the panelists at the first meeting in this series that Prostasia held in May in San Francisco, which included Dr Gilian Tenbergen from SUNY Oswego, Ian O’Brien from the Free Speech Coalition, Guy Hamilton-Smith from Mitchell Hamline School of Law, and lawyer Cathy Gellis.

Continuing, he also displayed this diagram (shown on page 7 of the background paper) and explained how child pornography is a category that, by definition, excludes protected speech—but that there may be protected speech that nevertheless falls into a broader category of child sexual exploitation material (CSEM) that platforms may also wish to restrict, at least in certain harmful contexts. They should do so, however, in a principled and human rights respecting way so that they do not over-restrict lawful speech. Jeremy went on to present a draft set of such principles, which is open for comment on Prostasia Foundation’s forum.

Next Heather Barr from Human Rights Watch spoke. She stated that the use of “think of the children” rhetoric to restrict human rights is not a new tactic, but an old one that has been used for many years in different ways. It has also seen the emergence of unholy alliances between child protection advocates and those who are hostile to the rights of minority groups. We cannot always assume good intentions on the side of those who promote child rights. Human rights are not subjective, she said, but the reinterpretation of human rights to allow their application in new contexts is a slow and contested process.

As an example, Heather said that the UN Special Rapporteur on the sale and sexual exploitation of children, with the support of church groups, has been proposing a near-complete ban on surrogacy, equating this to the sale of children, and that Human Rights Watch had been opposing this interpretation. Human Rights Watch also supports the decriminalization of sex work, and distinguishes this from the case of human trafficking. Finally, Heather mentioned the positive role that comprehensive sex education can have in reducing sexual violence, and how this depends on the free access to information about sex.

Jillian York spoke next, and agreed with Heather that we can’t always assume good intentions when it comes to actions putatively taken to protect children, and she extended this to the case of policies made by Internet companies. She pointed out that LGBTQ+ people are those who are most impacted by restrictions on sexual speech online, and that these restrictions predominantly concern women’s bodies.

Jillian also mentioned the role of the press, returning to the example Jeremy had given of a 13 year old’s non-sexual ASMR videos that had been removed by YouTube after pressure from a press article. She also mentioned some absurd cases of censorship such as Bing Safe Search which was enabled by default in certain Arab countries, and censored searches for “chicken breasts” and “breast cancer”. Finally she mentioned how Instagram had been removing paintings of vulvas.

Part of the problem is that content moderators aren’t well trained, and that decisions are arbitrary. A trans women on Tumblr posted a series of photos of her transition under the title “Do I have breasts yet?” to test the point at which censorship would kick in. Another example was the trans prosthetics company, Transthetics, which was shut down on YouTube. FOSTA has been a factor in the increasing censorship of sexual speech, however we should also not minimize the effect of the decisions of male executives.

Jac sm Kee then took the floor, describing the state of affairs as one in which bodily autonomy and sexual expression are over-regulated, while sexual violence is under-regulated. She spoke about her work with APC’s Women’s Rights program, and the first conversations at the Internet Governance Forum about the Internet and sex. Many of the ways in which these issues were framed did not resonate with the global South, and most of the people talking about child pornography were white men. As a result, the conversation was centered on the distribution of these images, rather than the power structures and access that facilitate the abuse.

The Internet is the nexus that allows women to push boundaries and exercise agency. Jac described APC’s 2008 research on the value of the Internet for sexual rights, which at that time was focused on different issues such as Internet filtering at public libraries, which found that the impacts of this were felt mainly by disadvantaged groups who were dependent upon public services for Internet access.

Jac also spoke about the contested definition of the word “child,” noting that children are not asexual and that the age of majority worldwide covers a large range of ages from about 12-21, covering very different developmental stages. The regulation of the sexual expression of these young people is an exercise of power.

Finally Mariel Garcia-Montez began from the proposition that LGBTQ+ rights are human rights. She said that we all want to act well for children, but that too often this involves sacrificing the rights of other groups in the process. The lenses that we use to view sexual speech regulation ultimately harm children, undermining their rights by erasing their autonomy and agency. In doing this we forget that in addition to their future as adults, children have rights today—and that not all children are harmed equally, but especially those who are marginalized.

Mariel gave the example of sexting. The dissemination of sexting images can infringe the human right to privacy of youth, and we can protect this through design features that enable them to safeguard their images, rather than by viewing their speech through the lens of criminal law. By engaging youth in a process of co-design, we find that the messaging around sexually abusive images changes—focusing on why you shoudn’t share others’ nudes, rather than a victim-blaming mentality that criminalizes youth from taking nudes.

She closed by reasserting that the political structures and judicial outcomes that we use to address child sexual exploitation have had a disproportionate impact on women.

During question time, one member of the audience introduced herself as having worked for ten years in law enforcement, then at an Internet company, and now as an independent researcher, and a member of the board of a child abuse prevention charity. She explained that this charity works not only with offenders, but also with those who self-identify as being at risk of offending, and endeavors to steer them away from doing so. She suggested that Prostasia Foundation’s work needs to be internationalized to use terminology that is more widely accepted worldwide, as opposed to terms such as child pornography and exploitation material that are most common in the United States. She agreed that sexting between under 18s should be decriminalized, and that attention should be focused on reducing grooming and solicitation of self-generated material on Internet platforms (the “lover-boy” phenomenon). Children whose images are distributed are in crisis, and some attempt suicide. She said that the extension of the definition of child sexual abuse material to include fake images can be justified by the need to include photoshopped images of minors.

Another member of the audience said that she recommended the consistent use of the word “minor” rather than “child” when discussing sexual exploitation of minors, because this is the legal term and because many of the young people being described as children are no longer in their childhood. The use of the terminology of childhood can lead to a more paternalistic approach being taken towards their autonomy online. We also have to acknowledge the existence of the “sexually knowing child,” a concept that carries a lot of political baggage. Too often, she said, legitimate sexual expression is put into a different bucket which is not defended when other speech is defended from censorship.

A third participant spoke about a recent change in Korean law, which criminalized artistic sexual renderings of minors, saying that this had led to an increase in the number of convictions for “virtual” child pornography possession among those who were fans of Japanese anime and manga. The law has since been slightly narrowed to include only images of those who are “obviously” minors, but he said that the Japanese manga art style represents characters using physical features such as large eyes that make them appear younger than they are. A court challenge to this law has been unsuccessful. He agreed that some of the imagery concerned may be obscene, but said that in obscenity prosecutions we should recognize that it is a different class of conduct than the abuse of actual children, and that treating them with the same stigma is disproportionate.

Reviewed by Meagan Ingerman and Jeremy Malcolm 

This issue we review two very different books about pedophilia and sexual offending, both written by female authors. The first, Stolen Kisses, Broken Child, was submitted to us for review by first-time novelist Angela Wallace. It’s hard to pin down the subject of this novel as it changes a few times and covers some pretty wide ground in it’s just under 300 pages. Very basically, the book centers on an inappropriate relationship and the fallout and recovery process involved for both victim and perpetrator. 

While Wallace’s work takes some brave swings and tries to cover some really complicated subject matter with logic and, in the end, compassion, a lack of strong research is evident in some of the claims made in the book, which falls back on stereotypes on subjects such as recidivism among minor-attracted people who have offended, and about the effects of sexual trauma. Such stereotypes, along with typographical errors, mar what is a brave attempt at addressing a taboo subject. 

Without giving away everything in case curiosity gets the better of you and you end up reading the book, the story basically spans a lot of teenage angst, adult justifications and grooming, then it jumps the shark and comes back with a soap opera twist. It is not until somewhere in the last 60-45 pages that the story really comes together and you begin to understand why exactly you’ve been on this journey. 

Bizarrely, the author herself shows up briefly as a character in the story, although not as herself. In the end, she is one of three characters who try to give the story a moral. Unfortunately, this is done with long, preachy monologues, that do not read as natural exchanges between real characters. 

It’s quite a choice of topic for a first novel, but I can’t imagine that the average person will make it very far into this book. I am better versed than the average person in the subjects covered in this book and even I found it distasteful enough at some points that I had to walk away and come back to the book later. The first three-quarters of the book reads like a manual on and justification for grooming, glorifying trauma, and ignoring the advice of trained professionals. Although the views expressed by the novel’s characters cannot be attributed to the author, but they do make the book hard reading at times.

The second book, Past the Dark Field, by Sheila van den Heuvel-Collins, seems to have been more extensively researched, although it too is likely to be difficult and perplexing reading for those who cannot personally relate to the protagonists’ stories. The book is written as a series of character vignettes interspersed with chat logs. The same technique is also used in Stolen Kisses, but Heuvel-Collins, who is a more experienced writer and editor, pulls it off better, and her engaging style makes the book an easier read once you get past the confronting subject matter.

Past the Dark Field relates the very different stories of eleven characters fighting their own personal battles to live with sexual attractions that they each know they cannot ever act upon. There are few easy answers to be found in these stories, but for readers who can persevere and set their distaste aside, it is impossible not to be touched by the humanity of these characters.

Reading this book may require you to dive deep into what is probably an unfamiliar and unsettling world—though a glossary at the beginning will make the journey a little easier. The reward for doing so may be the ability to feel greater empathy for real individuals who are placed in similar situations, most of whose stories will always remain unknown.

Sheila has generously set aside a share of the proceeds of sales of Past the Dark Field to benefit Prostasia Foundation, and she has also published a shorter companion book that contains an additional selection of stories centered on teenage characters.