A Different Bomb
By
Pete Townshend
January 2002
For 'Cloud'
Part 1
This past week a friend of mine committed suicide. She was a forty-something actress, recovering from alcoholism. Although I am a recovering alcoholic myself I knew her best
through my work as a fund-raiser for treatment for those needing alcohol and drug rehabilitation. We first met about seven years ago. One day, in an open counselling session at which adult men and women of all ages were present, she suddenly revealed her central issue. From as early as she could remember, as an infant girl she had been sexually abused on a regular basis by her father, and in his presence by several of his friends.
At first, she referred to her father as a 'priest'. Later she revealed that these were members of some kind of religious cult. A charity with which I am involved paid for her to go for treatment for depression at The Priory last year. She was greatly improved when she came out. Partly I think because her story was believed. She had felt safe, and various innovative new therapeutic techniques promised to help her further. She became a day patient.
Within a few weeks she started to slide again, pleading to be allowed to go back in for further live-in treatment. There were no further funds available to pay for this. After a month or two, emotionally speaking she was back where she had started: at a rockbottom.
Her friends endured an oscillating love-loss relationship with her. She was funny, honest, energetic and smart. But she was often desperate for affection, attention and help.
As a result she could be exhausting. For all of us who helped her, including several women who themselves experienced similar sexual abuse as children, her suicide was both a tragedy and an act of brutal insanity. What pushed this woman to the brink was not self-obsession - though God knows she enjoyed her share, like any individual ensnared in alcohol or drug addiction - it was the fact that she discovered her father was in a new relationship and had access to some young children.
It seems then that the greatest terror for an adult who remembers sexual abuse is the thought that other children might suffer as they did.
In my writing in the past - especially Tommy - I have created unusually unmerciful worlds for any infant characters. I am often disturbed by what I see on the page when I write - never more so than when I draw on my own childhood. Some people who were abused in their childhood have written to me to say how much they identify with the
character of Tommy. But what is powerful in my own writing, and sometimes most difficult to control and model, is the unconscious material I draw on. It is what is unconscious in me that makes me scream for vengeance against my friend's abusers, rather than an adult understanding of what went wrong.
I remember no specific sexual abuse, though when I was young I was treated in an extremely controlling and aggressive way by my maternal grandmother. This is not
unusual. It might be described by some as insignificant. Almost everyone I know experienced similar stuff at some time or other - many friends experienced more extreme
'abuses' and have no obvious adult vices as a result.
On the issue of child-abuse, the climate in the press, the police, and in Government in the UK at the moment is one of a witch-hunt. This may well be the natural response triggered by cases like that of my friend who committed suicide. But I believe it is rather more a reaction to the 'freedoms' that are now available to us all to enter into the reality of a world that most of us would have to admit has hitherto been kept secret. The world of which I speak is that of the abusive paedophile. The window of 'freedom' of entry to that world is of course the internet.
There is hardly a man I know who uses computers who will not admit to surfing casually sometimes to find pornography. I have done it. Certainly, one expects only to
find what is available on the top shelf at the newsagents. I make no argument here for or against 'hard' or 'soft' pornography. What is certain is that providers of porn feel the need to constantly 'refresh' their supply. So new victims are drawn in every day. This is just as true on the internet as it is in the world of magazines and video.
However, what many people fail to realise is how - by visiting their websites - we directly and effectively
subsidise pornographers. This is true whether we do so unwittingly or deliberately, out of curiosity or a vigilante spirit. Vigilante campaigners I have contacted on the internet tell me that many porn sites that claim to feature underage subjects do not - in fact - do so.
Many that are 'genuine' do feature much the same content on the inside as they do on their free pop-up pages that litter search engines. So why do these pornographers bother
with us at all? They can't be getting rich. Why can't they remain secret?
As someone who runs a 'commercial' website of my own I am fully aware of how direct the avenue is between the provider and the user of any internet site. I am also
aware - as are most people today I think - of how easy it is to trigger the attention of an internet service provider (ISP) when certain 'buzz-words' are used in a search. These are, in effect, words - or combinations of words - that alert attention at the ISP.
This first came to my attention when in 1997 a man who had briefly worked for me was arrested in the UK for downloading paedophilic pornography. I was cautious of
openly condemning him. He had performed in one of my musicals and was a popular figure in the soft-pop pantomime of the UK music scene. When he went to trial, the buzzword
that the newspapers kept reprinting - that he had allegedly used in his regular internet searches - was 'lolita'. A few weeks into the trial The Guardian newspaper revealed that
http://www.uksearchterms.com listed 'lolita' high on the list of the most searched words in the UK ('sex' is often No.1). It seemed to me that there was some hypocrisy going on. Who were all these people typing 'lolita' into their browsers? They were surely not all paedophiles. They may have been vigilantes. I'm fairly certain that in most cases they were simply curious of what they might find.
The terrible part is that what they found on the internet will almost have certainly found them by return. It is not to suggest that every one of them was 'hooked' as soon as
they found a porn site professing to display underage subjects, it is to say that because their visit was undoubtedly recorded by the site or sites in question, the pornographers who run those sites would have found alidation and commercial promise for their activity. They would then have redoubled their efforts in that area.
Many porn sites use software triggers so that when you try to leave a site upon which you may have unwittingly stumbled, another similar - or worse - site immediately
pops up. When you try to shut that site, another pops up, then another, then another, the content getting more and more extreme until your browser is solid with pornography and eventually will seize up as though choking on some vapid manifestation of evil itself.
Thus it is that the pornographer's validation is spawned at the same time. One site opened triggers another dozen or more - all of which you have unwillingly 'visited'. All of which will have a record of your computer's unique address.
It was obvious to me (though obviously not to the rest of the country) while the man I knew was on trial, that 'lolita' is not a word to use carelessly when searching the internet - even if one happened to be studying Nabokov for a literature degree. So I had
my first encounter with internet paedophilia by accident.
Ethan Silverman, a film director friend, had made an extremely moving documentary about an American couple who adopted a Russian boy. As a charity fundraiser (and, I suppose, philanthropist to boot) I wanted to support the work of such orphanages and decided to see if I could - via the internet - find legitimate contacts to help. (I had tried many other methods and failed). The various words I used included 'Russia' and 'orphanages'. I used no words that could usually be taken to be sexual or lascivious, except - perhaps ill-advisedly - the word 'boys'. Within about ten minutes of entering my search words I was confronted with a 'free' image of a male infant of about two years old being buggered by an unseen man. The
blazer on the page claimed that sex with children is 'not illegal in Russia'. This was not smut. It was a depiction of a real rape. The victim, if the infant boy survived and my experience was anything to go by, would probably one day take his own life. The awful reality hit me of the self-propelling, self-spawning mechanism of the internet.
I reached for the phone, I intended to call the police and take them through the process I had stumbled upon - and bring the pornographers involved to book. Then I thought twice about it. With someone on trial who had once been connected with me - however loosely - I spoke off-the-record to a lawyer instead. He advised me to do nothing. He advised me that I most certainly should not download the image as 'evidence'. So I did as he advised. Nothing.
cont...............
