In the list of horrors that emerged from the Indian Ocean tsunami the reports of child stealing held a particular repulsion. Unlike a giant wave, which can be understood through a common human vulnerability in the face of nature, this act is unequivocally of us. As Simon Cooper discusses in this issue, aside from the natural catastrophe, the effects of and responses to the tsunami have social and political aspects. The trafficking of children, on the other hand, is an all too human disaster. It is repellent exactly because it diminishes common human being by transforming a child into a commodity while, at the same time, implicating us in the human potential for atrocity.
As we are regularly reminded by media reports, it is not only in the extreme circumstance of a natural disaster that children are subjected to violence and exploitation. Last year, in the wake of Operation Auxin, New South Wales Police Commissioner Ken Moroney went as far to speculate that we are in the midst of an ‘epidemic of abuse’. Questions hover over the issue: is there a rise in violence against children or is it a case of increased detection or reportage? Commissioner Moroney has called for a national summit to clarify the degree and type of abuse. If such discussions were held it would be worth devoting some time to the question of how the image of the paedophile haunts us. To one side of the important question of the prevalence or increase in abuse is the need to consider the already established sense of its possible ubiquity. Whether there is in fact more abuse or not, the anxiety of its invisible presence is real enough. In this, the paedophile and the terrorist occupy similar places in the imagination. They are both shadow figures of violence; unknowable even by the state armed with increased powers of coercion and surveillance. Recent vigilante actions in Queensland show not only a ground-level confrontation with the other, but also a failure of faith in state power.
One of the sources of this compulsive fear might be traced not so much in the monstrous otherness of the paedophile as in their atrocious display of certain repressed aspects of our culture. The transformation of other humans into the means of achieving one’s desires is one of the few ancient forms of social relation that capitalism has not done away with. Rather, that type of relation has been undergoing a long process of apparent social evacuation. The explicit bond between exploited and exploiter is displaced by a more protean mediator, like money or technology. The relation becomes a matter between individuals, rather than a part of a system.
The paedophile’s diminution of a child’s human being is facilitated by technology that puts a distance between them and the suffering person. The readily available and apparently disembodied nature of exploitation in child pornography on the internet contributes to the fear of an ‘epidemic of abuse’. In a culture that has abandoned many of its assumptions about our collective human nature and is now seeing even liberalism’s sacred individual under attack, there would seem to be fewer constraints — and, more importantly, fewer ways of imagining social relations — set into the heart of the pornography surfer.
If children are being made consumable, then they are also being made over as consumers. The under-tens are a well-established target demographic for marketers, but not simply for toys and snack food. Image commodities, such as pop music, magazines and clothes, once aimed at teenagers now find a market in younger children. One result is that we see billboards at train stations and over freeways displaying pre-pubescent girls pouting in cowboy hats, Madonna-style. The socialising play of dressing-up is redirected, through spectacle and display, to make another tier of the adult fashion industry. To direct children into the cycles of consumption also requires their incorporation into the production of the image itself. As part of the broad trajectory of deindustrialisation in the global North, children are distanced from manual labour only to become producers of image commodities and to form themselves in consumption.
UNICEF estimates that as many as 1.2 million children are trafficked every year for labour and sexual exploitation. While the image of the paedophile can be understood as an unbearable aspect of a culture that allows the consumption of others, the fears of an ‘epidemic of abuse’ and responses to reports of child-stealing after the tsunami cannot be reduced to moral panic. They also are responding to the uses of children in the global market, North and South.
