Cambodia's Finest Export: Little Boys

Regular readers will recall that I recently posted a long, frothing rant about the media. Specifically, that they thought it was a great idea to air pictures of a sexually abused little girl until literally thousands of people called in to tell them that they thought they knew who she was.

I asked the non-obvious question of, “Wouldn’t it have made a lot more sense to look for the child rapist? Something about outing a preschooler as having been used as a sex toy to the entire U.S.A. sound a little, oh, demonic and unnecessary.”

And this omits the flipside of that coin. Recall that CNN reported that they got “thousands” of tips from people who replied to the request for an ID of the little girl (not the rapist). Since it is phenomenally unlikely that thousands of people were CORRECT about who the little girl was, that means that there are thousands of people in the U.S.A. (probably more, including those who were just too lazy to call in) who now incorrectly believe that their neighbor’s young daughter has been trained in the arts of the Kama Sutra. I’m sure that won’t cause any trouble for anyone down the road.

I concluded that the only reasonable explanation for these stories being constantly on the front pages of most newspapers -- starring the children, not the criminals -- is that most journalists secretly think pedophilia is the hottest kink fetish ever. I did not argue that I thought this was a good thing.

That brings us to today’s front page news article about pedophilia. (It’s been what, a week? We’re overdue.) Check this one out: http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/10/08/childsex.suspect/index.html

This article is fascinating for two reasons. First, apparently this guy was bright enough to blot out his face from the pictures he took of himself having sex with little boys. Since most articles like this imply (but do not show) that the pictures of the child abusers themselves are costume dramas in which the abusers put on cowboy hats and give grinning thumbs-up to the camera, we have to conclude that -- as far as pedophiles getting media attention are concerned -- this guy is a criminal mastermind. Note that I’m taking guesses here. Having never seen the media show me edited images featuring the rapists, I really can’t be sure. I can only tell you that the readily-available looks on the children’s faces don’t make them look like they’re enjoying the rodeo.

Second, the whole point of this article was to provide us with a picture of the guy having sex with the children, while giving hints to help find him (probably in Cambodia or Vietnam). Let’s take a look at one sentence in particular: “Interpol on Monday took the unprecendented [sic] step of making a global appeal for help to identify a man from digitally reconstructed photos…” Clearly the journalist was so upset at having to look at pictures of the rapist (instead of the little boys) that he or she forgot to run spell check. But doesn’t it seem a little odd that this move is being described as ‘unprecedented’? And this article is remarkably free of links to cropped images of child pornography. It’s almost as if the point of the article WASN’T to act as soft-core pornography for real pedophiles. Or perhaps the children were just too ethnic looking to seem interesting. Regardless of the reasons, I find this ‘unprecedented’ new technique refreshing.

Oh, but lest my pedophile readers get TOO worried, the article DOES make clear that, “[the full, original child porn images] have been on the the [sic] Internet for several years…” Maybe they’re just too easy to Google to bother with a full link. Please don’t read that as a suggestion to go find out for me. Rather than proofreading, I think the author of this article is finding out for us as I type.