Child Pornographers Beware

In a press release Thursday, the Justice Department announced an ongoing effort to capture international child pornographers. 60 people have been arrested, with more arrests likely. 11 children have been rescued so far.

The program is called Operation Joint Hammer. Law enforcement agencies from the United States and Europe are working together to target child pornographers working to distribute content over the internet.

In one case, European law enforcement officials discovered that a father was raping his young daughters and offering a photographer across the continent an opportunity to photograph these sexual attacks. Identification of the father led to the discovery of a commercial Web site maintained by the photographer, which he used to sell the images of the sexual abuse of those children along with many other images of other children whose sexual exploitation he commissioned. Law enforcement has determined that the customers of the Web site were located in nearly 30 countries around the world, including the United States.

I applaud the efforts of the Justice Department. Although I do not share the viewpoint that all pornography is bad, like most pornography involving consenting adults for example, child pornography is pure evil. I find pastors who prey on children particularly abhorrent, but the people who produce child porn deserve to lose their freedom for a very long time.

I know a few people who defend child pornography as a market driven force. They are hard core libertarians with ideological positions I find untenable. The problem with political and religious ideology is that they include or exclude people and behavior based on a position with with little basis in reality. The test for good or evil is replace with a definition that supports and ideology. It’s one of the reasons the catholic church fights against the distribution of condom in the fight against AIDS. It one the reasons Christian fundamentalists exclude gays from basic human rights, like marriage. And it is one of the reasons some libertarians include protection for child pornographers in their rhetoric. I tend to regard all ideological positions with suspicion, even my own.

Hat Tip: PR Newswire

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