[no subject]

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 as 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 realize is how - by visiting their websites - we directly and 
effectively subsidize 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 buzz-word 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 reveal that 
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 validation 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, 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.
I mentioned my own internet experience to a few people close to me.  The 
trial of the man who had been in musical was on everyone's agenda.  It became 
clear very quickly that some people I spoke to were skeptical of me.  I think 
they thought that if I had searched using the right words, my exposure to 
that terrible image would not have occurred.
It might be strange to hear that I was glad I found it.  Until then, like my 
ostrich-like friends, I imagined that only those who communicated on the 
internet using secret codes, private chat-rooms and encrypted files would 
ever be exposed to this kind of porn.  But I learned through this accident 
that such images were 'freely' available through the machinery of common 
search engines and User-Groups, and openly available for sale through 
subscription via credit card.  I was then concerned that there would be those 
'providers' of paedophilic porn who felt the need to regularly 'refresh' 
their supply of images.  It is a chilling though isn't it?  Even so, I found 
myself wondering whether that thought brought fears for me that were, 
perhaps, quite out of proportion with reality: maybe I was stirring my own 
subconscious memories; maybe I was just being pompous.
Now my friend has joined a long line of suicides who were sexually abused as 
children, and I feel I must speak up.

Since 1997 I have been attempting to prepare some kind of document with 
respect to all this for wider publication.  My feeling is that if internet 
service providers (ISP's) can be enlisted by the police and other authorities 
to 'snoop' and provide information about customers downloading illegal 
pornography, they could just as easily filter search terms - or better yet, 
practice combinations of such search terms on a regular basis and then block 
specific site names.  Many ISPs do such work.  It is part of their regular 
housekeeping.  But the pornographers are rich, determined, and - in the area 
of under-age pornography - criminal.  Banned sites are replicated, renamed 
and replaced in days.
Why am I suddenly writing this today?  My friend who committed suicide was 
the victim of an active but secret ring of paedophiles.  They are still at 
large today.  Only those who knew my friend, and believed her story, feel any 
urge to speak up against her abusers.  But we have no proof.  It is 
frustrating, but for her, at least, the pain is over.  Meanwhile, on the 
internet, vigilante groups and individuals work tirelessly and obsessively 
both to trace and block certain porn sites and to offer - through 12 Step 
programmes for sex-addiction - probably the only way out for some ensnared by 
addiction to what the internet has to offer.
It has all gone public now.  The ISP I use allows access to User Groups by 
using the term 'alt' as a prefix.  In "Google" (a popular search engine) it 
is possible to reach a questionable array of offered sex sites with very few 
key-strokes, and without actually typing a single world.  The pathway to 
'free' paedophilic imagery is - as it were - laid out like a free line of 
cocaine at a decadent cocktail party: only the strong willed or terminally 
uncurious can resist.  Those vigilantes who research these pathways open 
themselves up to internet 'snoops'.  Many are willing to take the risk.  They 
believe the pathways themselves must be closed.  They must be totally and 
completely eradicated from the internet.  If that is not possible they must 
be openly policed by active and obstructive vigilantes - not just 'snooped' 
by government agencies and police.
I understand the police believe that snooping on the internet might lead them 
to active paedophiles - their philosophy being that it is the ones who are 
secret who do the damage.  In the case of my suicide friend I would have to 
agree.  However, in other countries children are not so precious.  Brazil, 
Russia and Thailand all have well-known and tragic orphanages and 
street-children problems, and these countries probably provide source 
material for many sites.
In my work fund-raising in the field of drug and alcohol rehabilitation I 
have come across hundreds of individuals from the UK and Europe whose 
problems have been triggered by childhood abuse.  Not always, but often, the 
abuse is sexual.  Sometimes it is quite minor, but even those cases - for 
some reason - spectacularly damaging.  Not all addicts and alcoholics are 
victims.  They are, perhaps, a minority.  But among those afflicted by 
addiction abuse is terribly common.  In some cases, what is so distressing is 
how little it takes.  For me, a few minor incidents seem to have created a 
dark side to my nature which thankfully emerges only in creative work like 
Tommy.  It is not statistically true that all abusers of children were once 
themselves abused.  That can happen, but often - as in the case of my suicide 
friend - abuse is part of a reward system of power conferred from one adult 
person to another.  But among pornographers only validation and cash matter.  
What is certain is that the internet has brought the sexual abuse of children 
into the open.  It is not 'respectable' or 'acceptable' at any level of 
society.  It is simply in the open.
Many returning from my friend's funeral had wanted to punch her father who 
was present.  But they restrained themselves.  Many present were recovering 
alcoholics.  They are not given to witch-hunts.  They are wary of hypocrisy.  
But given the chance, many of them would have told their own stories about 
what was done to them by abusers sodden with drink or numb with drugs, and 
possibly what they themselves did 'under the influence' that was equally 
reprehensible.  But if abusers and their accomplices are not necessarily 
victims of abuse, and not necessarily men, then they are also not necessarily 
drunk or drugged.  Booze and drugs are here to stay.  But it must be time to 
do something more concrete to stop the proliferation of questionable 
pornography that seems so readily and openly facilitated by the internet.
Another danger is this: I think it must be obvious that many children are 
becoming inured to pornography much too early and - as I have demonstrated - 
the internet provides a very short route indeed to some of the most evil and 
shocking images of rape and abuse.1

The subconscious mind is deeply damaged and indelibly scarred by the sight of 
such images.  I can assure everyone reading this that if they go off in 
pursuit if images of paedophilic rape they will find them.  I urge them not 
to try.  I pray too that they don't happen upon such images as did I, by 
accident.  If they do they may like me become so enraged and disturbed that 
their dreams are forever haunted.
1 Software to filter out and block porn at home is often too complex and 
sweeping to do the job, or too feeble.  At the moment, it's all we have.  I 
recommend CyberPatrol - www.cyberpatrol.com - it isn't easy to set up, but it 
is powerful.  Once it is running it begins to make the internet feel a much 
friendlier and safer place for our children
Posted 8 August 2002
A Different Bomb - revisited 
By Pete Townshend
I read this week in The British Daily Mail that the FBI have sent to the UK 
police the names and addresses of 7,000 UK citizens who provided credit card 
information to a U.S. sex site which - they say - portrayed illegal, underage 
subjects. I'm not sure about the differences between UK and US law on 
internet porn, but I feel that I should repost my article from January this 
year written when a friend of mine who had suffered childhood sexual abuse 
committed suicide. I withdrew it when my site closed in the Spring and 
decided not to repost it when we reopened for The Who tour. I am preparing 
another piece about my 'Future Fear' (as contained in the darker side of the 
Lifehouse story) that the internet absolutely MUST be restrained by those who 
provide access to it long before more complex forms of sexual entertainments 
start to be offered via Broadband and 'Virtual Reality' systems. Imagine a 
world where young women, young men and children from 'Third World' countries 
are used as characters in sexually enticing internet plays of some kind. 
These will be aimed at those sex-addicts with money in the 'First World', the 
profit collected by credit card of course. At the moment, that is what is 
happening on the internet alongside more 'normal' pornography sites. There is 
no point at all, in my opinion, locking up internet porn addicts. Children 
will continue to get hurt. It is what we call the 'E-Com' route from 'First 
World' to 'Third World' that needs to be interrupted. If people wish to 
distribute unacceptable material freely via the internet we cannot stop them. 
The very nature of the internet is to allow free, borderless exchange of 
uncensored information, opinion and media. But the very nature of 'E-Com' is 
to collect money via credit card. That is expressly a 'First World' business 
run predominantly by Western banks and with profits commissioned by Western 
Internet Service Providers. There is no reason I can see that this should be 
allowed to go on where sex-sites are operating outside the laws and accepted 
moral criteria of the West. Am I wrong?"


Posted late Summer/early Fall of 2002: 
"A Different Bomb revisited" 
By Pete Townshend
This week I spoke to someone at Scotland Yard who told me that User Group 
areas run by companies like Google and Yahoo have literally billions of 
entries; millions of new entries every day on the sex-related Groups. There 
is no way they could ever be moderated or controlled. Later, I will be 
talking to someone at a large children's charity here in the UK about 
creating some safe User Group forum for the rehabilitation of those who, 
addicted to internet porn, begin to be enticed into unacceptable stuff. I 
know that 'Just Say No' never worked with heroin, I didn't expect it to. But 
internet pornography depends on addiction for its massive profits. The 
article below was first posted early this year. I came here today to take it 
down at last, but I just heard that another young woman who Double-O had put 
into treatment for depression and anxiety related to sexual abuse at the age 
of 8, had started drinking again. Sometimes this all feels so bloody futile. 
But I am determined to do my bit. I made a lot of money out of that poor 
little sap in Tommy. Now I understand how easily he could be recreated as a 
real child in our present society. I feel driven to try to change things.