Unforgivable

I dislike children intensely. I can't stand spending time around them, I hate talking to them, nothing they do or the nonsense they spout amuses me in the slightest. Toddlers are the most obnoxious animals ever to develop from the primordial ooze--gnats are a close second, mostly because they can get up your nose and mouth and eyes and ears without your permission, but you're allowed to swat those and kill them. You can't do that to toddlers. You have to pretend you like them even when they are exhibiting behaviour you would not accept in a dog. And frankly most dogs I know are better trained and have nicer manners than any toddler I have ever come across.

Babies repulse me, school-age children annoy the piss out of me. They don't become tolerable until adolescence, at which time I start to think of them as actual people and like them a lot more because they're starting to resemble grownups more than noisy bald pink things with eyes that throw whatever is too big to fit in their disgusting drooling mouths.

I just really, really don't like children.

Having said that, I will unhesitatingly destroy anyone who abuses them. I just dislike children--I would never in my most infuriated moods think of hurting one. I am the first and angriest person who gets upset over stories of child abuse, mostly because I understand a little of what it's like and child abuse by and large represents someone to whom the welfare of a child or children has been entrusted completely violating that trust and being criminally cruel or neglectful. Sexual abuse in particular makes me spill over with rage because sexual assault of any kind against anybody of any age is one of the worst things you can do. To violate someone in such a personal, private way is repulsive in ways that defy even my attempts at describing it.

I might not like children myself, but I'll be damned if I stay silent in the face of abuse.

So it's against this backdrop that we go back in time a few years. I was twenty and in my last semester at school before I dropped out. I met a guy through mutual acquaintances called 'Tom'. Tom was a few years older than me (I believe 24 or 25 at the time?) and didn't go to my school. He lived in another part of Maryland. But he was kind of fun to talk to and was just in general a standard-issue nice, shy, geeky guy. (Mostly because, in my experience, geeks are some of the nicest guys--unlike jocks and popular guys, they don't take female attention for granted and are on their best behaviour. Mostly. Some I've known have turned out to be total skeevebuckets because they assume that because I had two X-chromosomes and was talking with them, I totally wanted their boy-parts in my girl-parts.) Since we lived hours away from each other and only saw each other I think once or twice after our initial meeting, mostly our friendship progressed over IMs and phone calls. There was something just ever so slightly 'off' about Tom but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. At the time I thought maybe he might have had some very slight, minor, easily-managed mental disability or illness--like maybe ADD or something from the lightest end of the autism spectrum--but nothing that really put me off at all. It was just something I noticed but didn't mind.

He and I kept trying to arrange a meeting in DC to go poke around the Smithsonian's many museums around the National Mall (the Natural History and American History Museums are full of the most impressive array of randomness and most of the AHM is dedicated to pop culture relics like movie props), but either he had to work or I did or I had an exam or class or something would come up and we'd have to cancel our plans last-minute. But it was pretty clear early on that Tom was into me, and since I'm a naturally extremely flirtatious person (and was just growing into that part of my personality around that time), I flirted back. Truth told, he was sort of on the cute side and I did like him, and wouldn't have been opposed to some casual dating, but something, again, seemed slightly 'off' and the answer was always infuriatingly juuuust out of my reach.

Now. This was about the time Facebook was usurping Myspace as the primary method of social networking for young adults--the main difference being that Myspace profiles were set up by a screen name of your choosing, and Facebook operated under your real name. I didn't have a FB at the time but Tom did. So I knew Tom's real first and last name. Abruptly about eight months or so after our friendship began, he dropped off the face of the earth. Our mutual acquaintances didn't really know where he was and the phone number I had was disconnected. So I got curious. And I never do this, I really don't care about what the internet has to say about people, but... I took his first and last name and the state we were living in (to narrow down the search) and plugged it into Google.

The first result was a page from the Maryland State Sex Offender Registry.

First let me say, up until recently the Sex Offender Registry was--and for the most part, remains--an imperfect thing. Ostensibly it's a good idea, if there is a person in the area convicted of a serious sex crime you want to fucking know about it so you don't, I dunno, let him (or her, women can do that shit as well) be your DD or your babysitter or give them a key to your place 'just in case'. But the SOR in most places makes very little distinction between the level of crime committed--in some states, such as New York where I currently live, there are various 'levels' of sex offender, but back then there were no 'levels'. You were equally a sex offender if you raped toddlers, and if you accidentally peed on a stranger's car after a night of heavy drinking. (For this reason I suspect they began, by this time, to put the charges and convictions levied against the various people inhabiting the Sex Offender Registry.) I was completely, totally, 100% aware of all of this at the time and I jumped to no hasty conclusions.

Except that the charges against him were 'Possession/Distribution of Child Pornography'.

I can forgive quite a lot. But this was heading straight for Shit I Cannot Get Past. Even so, again, the law makes no distinctions here: child porn is child porn if it features sexually suggestive pictures of any child under the age of eighteen. It could well be a misunderstanding, he could have had pictures of a girl sixteen or seventeen years old that he wasn't aware was underage. While a little on the weird side, that would have been understandable. Sometimes it's really hard to tell. I made no conclusions until I could speak to him again.

When I finally got back in touch with Tom a couple of weeks later, I confronted him directly with what I had learned. He admitted--quite candidly, actually, thinking about it--that he was indeed in trouble. I told him I wasn't angry, not yet (the SOR page indicated he'd been arrested/charged at the time he completely disappeared so it's not like this was something he was keeping secret from me), but I had some questions. In his favour, he did answer them.

He was in trouble for purchasing/downloading child pornography in video and still formats and passing the material on to other 'fans' as part of I guess a kiddie porn community or something. He wasn't in jail because he'd agreed to witness for the prosecution against other more dangerous members of the wider community--in particular he referenced one man that he must have known through his 'porn community' that was making pornographic material starring his own grandchildren. He mentioned this guy specifically as a way to emphasize to me that he wasn't really a bad guy, not when there were guys doing shit like that.

Tom also tried to stress to me that his 'collection' wasn't 'that bad'--his words, not mine--and that it wasn't like he was looking at posed pictures of infants or something. Again I was kind of holding out hope that this person I had grown to think of as a friend wasn't some kind of scary horrifying beast and maybe he'd just been into older teens. I was still at the time myself into older teens, sixteen and up, and I still think some are quite attractive even now--although I would never in a million years have any kind of sexual encounter with any, nor would I knowingly view pornographic material featuring anybody I couldn't assure was over eighteen--so I asked him if that's what the situation was about. No, he said, it wasn't.

I really had no idea what to think. I was shocked and appalled and confused. I didn't know what I wanted to do about our friendship and told him I needed a little time to think about it. Then he did something that came as a shock at the time.

He tried to defend himself.

He was getting therapy, he told me, and he was dealing with his issues. He never touched a real child and never participated in the manufacture of any of the material. He simply enjoyed collecting it. He was not a bad person. He hadn't done anything really aggressively wrong, even though I pointed out to him that, even if he never touched a child, the fact that he contributed to the demand for child pornography at all was still extraordinarily bad--the fact is that people would not be, say, abusing their grandchildren in the production of such material were there not a demand for it in the first place.

Again, he kept defending himself--telling me that all his friends had forgiven him and accepted his apologies (which were really nothing more than excuses) and tried to move on. He wasn't in jail, he reminded me--if he was truly dangerous, a bad person, would the police and the FBI have let him remain free? Tom really had extraordinary powers of self-delusion. Better even than mine. He honestly, genuinely seemed to think that he was somehow not the bad guy just because he never touched a child--overlooking the fact that what he'd done was clearly disturbing to me and obviously a crime enough to have gotten the FBI involved. (For the record, it's the FBI's jurisdiction to investigate cyber-crime like online identity theft and child exploitation by prostitution or pornographers because such crimes generally involve many, many perpetrators in many, many areas and any crime committed or carried over state lines becomes their jurisdiction.) What Tom had done was bad enough, but the fact that he was trying to rationalize what he'd done and turn me into the bad guy and himself into the victim was what seriously struck the killing blow to our friendship.

What was my problem, he wanted to know--why couldn't I just move past this? I was making a bigger deal out of it than it really was. As if he'd been caught shoplifting or running a red light or vandalizing billboards. He defended himself and villainized me for quite some time over the course of the day I pretty much sacrificed to try and sort this entire business out to my own satisfaction--it all went in circles and what it came down to was him just rewording his insistence that he wasn't that bad a guy and other people make porn and he just watched it and that I was making a big deal out of nothing. He even mentioned his therapist helping him not blame himself, which I don't to this day know how true it was--if it was true, I really hope he started seeing a different one and if the shrink was court-appointed as I suspected he or she was, I hope they lost that position.

The relationship's death knell came in the form of Tom--clearly under some kind of incredible, mind-bogglingly effective delusion of hopeful optimism--told me that he still wanted a chance with me. That he hoped this wouldn't stop me from wanting to go out with him.

I told him point-blank that I no longer felt comfortable with him. I wasn't afraid of him or worried he might harm me in some way, but that didn't make what he'd done somehow okay. I don't want to be friends with Neo Nazis, either, or Klansmen, even though as a white chick of Christian descent I would not be the target of either group's hate. I just cannot justify friendly discourse with people who do or say or think horrible, horrible things.

After that I never heard from Tom again. Interestingly, he refused to tell me just what age group his 'not so bad collection' of child porn featured. I was curious, again, because it's slightly, marginally defensible if he were attracted to older teens who might be physically close to adulthood. There's actually a separate term for this to distinguish it from pedophilia, which is a sexual attraction to young children who are still unmistakably and visibly still children--the term is 'ephebophilia' and refers to an attraction to, well, older teens. But Tom never told me and danced around the subject. I know it's hardly a case, but his evasiveness doesn't really do much to dispel the suspicion that his 'collection' featured children who were immediately apparent as children. Since he was grasping at any straws he could to defend himself, it seems unlikely he'd let a fact like that slip through his fingers. I have no proof, of course, but I think he was into very young children indeed.

It put me off of dating for a while and struck a bit of a blow to my already shitty self-esteem. I know realistically it was a silly thing to worry about, but I was very concerned with the fact that something about me, some trait or other I had, was appealing to a man who enjoyed child pornography. Obviously the fact that he was into it at all doesn't automatically mean that he was attracted to similar traits in me--though I always have appeared considerably younger than I really am and, at twenty, didn't look like I could be out of high school yet. I still don't look like I could be more than about eighteen or so.

This all happened some years ago. I remembered Tom's name, just because the whole business was something that you don't forget easily, and today out of nowhere and for no real reason other than my own curiosity, I went to the Maryland SOR page and looked him up. I was surprisingly, well, surprised to discover that his residence status showed him currently in prison. It doesn't say when he was arrested so I don't know whether his incarceration was due to those charges, new ones, or something else all together--maybe he violated his SOR obligations or something. I also noticed that the list of charges had changed. Instead of simply saying 'Possession/Distribution of Child Pornography', it also included 'Manufacture Of'. Again, I know no details so I can't say if this reflects a change in Maryland's child pornography laws, putting all three crimes under the same heading, or represents a separate charge. Either way, it sends chills up the neck.

I can't honestly say I'm sorry for Tom. Prison is notoriously hostile to people who commit crimes against children, particularly those who commit sexual crimes against children. Other prisoners in a maximum-security prison are so disgusted by these actions that such perpetrators are sometimes kept in solitary confinement as a way to protect them from being attacked or killed by other inmates.

I don't know, and will probably never learn, the extent to which Tom was involved in the seedy world of child pornography. But whatever he did, and however 'harmless' he may feel he is, he is still dangerous. Because he can rationalize it. In his mind, he can turn it into a defensible act. Anybody who can delude themselves into believing themselves to be the victims when they're caught contributing to the abuse of children...

...is dangerous.