Friday, April 22, 2011

Good Friday

Early this morning, someone sent me a link to a publicly viewable photo album that somebody had posted to Facebook.  I wearily clicked on it and instantly wished I hadn't.  There were a number of young boys, some engaged in various sex acts with adult men.  All I could do was go to Cybertipline, fill out the report form, and clear my browser cache to make sure that the images were deleted.  Facebook will almost certainly shut down the account and file their own reports with law enforcement if the person who posted them appears to live in a country that will do something about it.  But there will always be more online predators.

Ironically, today is Good Friday, a Christian religious holiday commemorating Jesus's crucifixion and death.  Crucifixion was a horrible way to die, and I always wondered what kind of people would want to watch it.  There may be certain parallels between Jesus, who was publicly tortured and humiliated, and the victims of child pornography.  In Matthew 25, Jesus makes the point that whatever is done to the least of God's people is done to God.  Surely this would apply to the children in the photos and videos, whose abuse and humiliation are freely circulated online.


2 comments:

  1. what kind of people would want to watch such a horrible thing as a crucifixion? obviously catholics. i've never seen as much torture porn as i have just looking around the sanctuary of my former church. you want to talk about a group that seriously fetishizes something so terrible...

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  2. Yeah, Catholics can get more graphic than other religions. It's sort of odd that when I was growing up, there was so much control over what I read and watched on TV, yet some of the stories about saints contained detailed descriptions of torture and execution. Kind of ironic that this was considered OK reading for children but off-color jokes were a big problem.

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