The figures are amazing and appalling, with huge implications for freedom of expression in the UK.

New data released following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request show that prosecutions for real “child sexual abuse images” in the UK  have fallen by more than half since 2017, even as cases involving purely fictional or AI-generated material have surged to nearly 40% of all image offences. The information is drawn from the CPS Case Management Information System.

Who is telling us? The new and ambitious California-based Center for Online Safety and Liberty (COSL). The revelations were announced this week at a webinar to launch a 62-page report called Drawing the Line: Watchlist 2025, which surveyed the law and current developments in 10 countries, from major Anglophone ones (Australia, Canada, UK, USA) to more linguistically and culturally diverse places (Costa Rica, Denmark, France, Iran, Japan, South Korea).

Heretic TOC was among the 30 or so participants who had a virtual presence at the event, as was Bly Rede, of Virtuous Pedophiles. Not that any other MAP engagement was discernible. COSL has a finger in many pies, describing itself as a “nonprofit acting as the parent entity for multiple independent projects aligned with our mission, to empower individuals and communities to thrive online by building safer spaces, fostering creativity, combating harm, and championing digital rights and freedom”.

If that sounds bland, bureaucratic, and vague, it could be because the organisation’s Chair, Jeremy Malcolm, is a savvy human rights lawyer branding himself as a respectable “trust and safety consultant” He doesn’t want to frighten the horses. Understandably so. His last venture, the Prostasia Foundation, was wound up in September after drawing too much flak from hostile forces, as reported by Strat and Prue in HTOC’s comments space.

There’s nothing bland about Watchlist 2025’s most striking finding, though, which would be a genuine scoop if the media were interested in anything beyond paedo-bashing.

In the Q&A chat space available during the presentation, I asked whether those involved with Drawing the Line have any idea why there is such a strong trend towards prosecutions for fictional sexual material (FSM, in the ever-expanding jargon) rather than images of real children. Had policing the internet been so  successful that such images have become much harder to access?

Malcolm answered, saying their hypothesis is that law enforcement resources are limited, in the UK and elsewhere, meaning there is always a backlog of images to be processed, “so virtual content displaces real content”. This could make sense if “processing” images of real children is much more time-consuming than processing FSM, but it is not obvious why this would be so. The main element of processing is inspecting the material and deciding whether it is illegal. In both cases the bar is set very low, making the police and prosecutor’s case relatively simple.

VirPed’s Ethan Edwards had a different explanation, one that I found somewhat more persuasive, when the headline figures were announced by Malcolm on Sexnet, along with the invitation to the webinar. Ethan wrote:

It isn’t news that if you give an agency money to address problem X but they can’t find a way to spend it to effectively combat X, they will look for a related Y and spend the money on that instead of leaving the money unspent. Michael Seto in “Internet Sex Offenders” implied this regarding child protection money (in Florida, I think) being spent to go online and impersonate young teen girls looking for sex with men.

So if the money spent to catch those with fictional material yields a higher rate of return (there’s likely some low-hanging fruit if it just recently became illegal), then it will be natural they will spend the money that way.

I also asked whether Drawing the Line was aware of any current research on the positive benefits of FSM, pointing out that plenty of research has been done in a number of countries, including Denmark, the Czech Republic and Japan, showing a strong association between the easy accessibility, not that long ago, of child porn and a reduction in sex offending against children. Those studies showed a clear, consistent correlation, but was there any work that might show a causal connection?

Malcolm replied that such research had indeed been considered but said it hits the buffers on ethical grounds. Why? Well, you’d need an experiment with say a thousand convicted hands-on sex offenders. You would exempt them from the porn laws, giving them unlimited access to child porn (as hard-core as they wanted) and compare them at the end of, say, a five-year period, with a thousand similar offenders who were not given this privilege. If the porn access group offend at a significantly lower rate than the non-access group in this period, and possible confounding factors are controlled for, then your hypothesis stands up and you have a valuable new finding.

I say, what’s not to like about that? But apparently research ethics boards might see some pettifogging downside that presently escapes me!

There’s plenty to ponder in Watchlist 2025, believe me. Heretics here can catch up on all this in more detail by downloading the full report or by listening to a recording of the webinar. There is also a background paper on the principles guiding Drawing the Line. The basics are captured in the infographics presented in the webinar, some of which are incorporated in this blog, including a set of recommendations aimed mainly at governments.

In addition to an admirably well-prepared and clear presentation on Watchlist 2025 by Jeremy Malcolm, the webinar included searching questions put to three guest speakers by his co-host Brandy Brightman, described at COSL as having a long involvement in online communities and a background in the tech sector.

The panellists included Emma Shapiro, editor-at-large with Don’t Delete Art, which tackles online art censorship. Shapiro is an artist herself, but my eye was taken by another name on the organisation’s team: Spencer Tunick. Regrettably, I don’t know much about contemporary artists, but this guy is someone I had certainly heard of. He is the very high-profile photographer who made a name for himself doing mass nude photoshoots in prominent public places, including one event when about 18,000 people posed for him naked in Mexico City’s  principal square, the Zócalo.

The other speakers were Ashley Remminga, a “scholar of transgender participation in fandom”, and Zora Rush, described as a “responsible” (i.e. ethical) AI expert – despite working for Microsoft, which is not everyone’s idea of an ethical company.

Nevertheless, of the three guest speakers, I felt that Rush, working as a linguistics specialist on the interpretation of human language by AI, was the most well placed to address where things are heading, at least as regards how Silicon Valley is thinking about such problems as heavy-handed algorithmic content moderation, American cultural bias over alleged unacceptable content, and so on. The answers were mildly encouraging if on the thin side, but I wouldn’t fault any of the speakers for the paucity of solutions: the online world is still in its infancy compared to printed communications, and everyone is struggling with the dizzying pace of tech developments and the awesome power of the big platforms’ billionaire bosses.

But the report, Watchlist 2025, is a richly informative document, a model of clarity, and a source of carefully considered, positive proposals,  reflecting the obvious fact that although COSL is a new venture, it appears to have inherited a great deal of expertise and projects in progress from Prostasia. It is not starting from Ground Zero. Far from being left only with smoking rubble when that organisation was nuked, there has been an impressively nimble, well-resourced rebuilding and rebranding.

Yet as I write, I can almost hear the cynical scoffing of the naysayers, prompted precisely by this seamless continuity from one organisation to the next. COSL, they will say, has learnt nothing. It is simply repeating Prostasia’s mistakes and is inevitably destined to suffer the same fate. Yes, COSL is less obviously MAP-adjacent, but it won’t take long before the haters out it as a MAP-front operation – although that would be wide of the mark because COSL seems to be more in bed with the “abuse” prevention people than with MAPs per se.

One of the naysayers, though, has an interestingly different critique. This is Kit, occasionally of this parish, who wrote on BoyChat after Prostasia put up the shutters:

The problem with Prostasia was not a “persistent wave of misinformation and smear campaigns”, but rather the contradictions and logical contortions of their own position.

Prostasia wanted to be “pro-sex” – an astonishingly vacuous posture – while also being “anti-abuse.” It wanted to be liberal and censorious, permissive and forbidding, libertarian and (as its own name suggests) paternalistic.

Prostasia was tripped up by its own muddle-headed ideology – its antithetical commitment both to sexual liberation and to abuse prevention – but it is hardly alone in this. Prostasia’s confusion is the confusion of the liberal sexual ethic in the West more generally.

Our culture is torn between the libidinous dream of an innocent sexual pornutopia on the one hand, and on the other the terrorising nightmare of vampiric male sexual aggression.

There is simply no way that perverts can negotiate their way into this contradiction. And I really wonder why any of us would ever want to.

Do I agree with this eloquent tirade? A bit. There is certainly a case to be answered. The key contradiction Kit identifies is right there in the name: the Center for Online Safety and Liberty. Are liberty and safety compatible? I would say there is an unavoidable tension between the two, but that is not the end of the story. Life is often about balancing pressures and finding the least uncomfortable way to live with the pros and cons of competing values. Or to use COSL’s own metaphor, lines must be drawn between the acceptable and the unacceptable.

As Kit rightly pointed out, the name Prostasia has paternalistic overtones. The name comes from the Greek word for “protection”, signifying, as the organisation candidly said, that “we are a child protection organization”. Nothing wrong with that. The protection of children from real harms, such as exploitative child labour, with exposure to long hours, dangerous machinery, etc., or to non-consensual sexual assault, is a worthy aim. To me, though, the name Prostasia suggested “pro the Stasi”, thanks to their seemingly uncritical support, along with the VirPeds, for an intrusive, surveillance-led, law-enforcement regime hell-bent on giving so-called “pro-contact” MAPs a hard time no matter how good their relationship with a child might be.

Whether on balance we feel COSL, and more specifically the Drawing the Line: Watchlist 2025, is doing a good job, should be seen, I believe, in the light of its work rather than its title, or questionable elements of its mission statement. With that in mind I will leave you with a key paragraph from the report itself, in the Executive Summary of Watchlist 2025. Ask yourselves whether this finding is an important one, worth the effort of establishing its reality? I suggest it is hugely important, but you will make up your own minds. Here goes:

The core finding of the Watchlist is the identification of a dangerous legislative trend: the blurring of the essential legal distinction between content that records or causes concrete harm to real children, and content that is purely fictional, artistic, or imaginative. By treating fictional works — such as drawings or stories that evoke taboo themes — the same as evidence of real abuse under the single umbrella term of CSAM, the global response is expanding state power and sacrificing core liberties.

HONOURING THE LATE GREAT KENNEDY

No, not the assassinated US president but the distinguished American mathematician, biographer, translator, and pioneer gay activist Hubert Kennedy, who died last month aged 94.

My personal reason for honouring his memory is that he contributed a glowing review of my book Paedophilia: The Radical Case in The Advocate and also wrote a four-page foreword for the paperback edition in 1982 in which he dared to agree with my main controversial arguments, notably saying he thought I was at my best on consent, and that I made a “convincing case that the powerful side in a paedophilic relation is not automatically, or generally, the adult”.

MAPs can also thank him for his translations of boy-love novels by the German anarchist writer John Henry Mackay, and gays more widely are in his debt for his biography of the German jurist and pioneering gay liberationist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs.

Even his day job as a professor of mathematics turns out to include something of interest for those of us who might be triggered by trigonometry and terrified of topology. Kennedy appears to have been the first western scholar to have studied the mathematical manuscripts of Karl Marx, after their first publication in the Soviet Union in 1968.

Maths? By the author of The Communist Manifesto and Capital? Who knew? But it’s a fact, folks. The old revolutionary left a thousand pages, no less, of mathematical notes aimed at establishing the foundations of calculus. Kennedy concluded that Marx’s work in this field was less earth-shattering than his contributions to revolutionary politics, but he did make some “independent discoveries” and anticipated some 20th century developments in maths.

Kennedy also worked on theoretical genetics and provided a mathematical proof of the impossibility of an organism that requires more than two sexes in order to reproduce – but queer theorists might not thank him for this one!

I might just add that Kennedy’s death came to my attention thanks to a couple of projects I have been involved with lately for new editions of Paedophilia: The Radical Case. These are an edition in German and an audio version. Neither was my own idea. Both were initiated by MAP activists. Delighted by their proposal of such useful projects, and their commitment to putting time and thought into the practicalities, I had no hesitation in deciding to help where I could.

On the audio front, tests have already been run using my voice and some AI ones as the basis for the narration of the book. I was hugely impressed by one of the AI voices on offer – not only a beautiful timbre but a good variation of pace and tone that matched the meaning very well, making the whole thing clear, pleasant to  the ear, and easy to understand. My own reading, by unflattering contrast, included an element of slurring and stumbling, despite my best and most sober efforts.

Our provisional conclusion  is that I should be the reader for the Preface, just for a sense of authenticity: some readers may wish to find out what the actual author sounds like. The rest of the book, however, is likely to be in a splendidly sonorous AI voice, which I suppose has been trained on readings by top quality professional actors.

As for the German edition – well, for both editions really – I will be writing a new introduction, or foreword, of some sort. My first thoughts along these lines naturally took me back to Hubert Kennedy’s foreword, which led me google him and discover he is no longer with us.

I was also reminded of an afterword to the paperback edition written by Dan Franklin. Dan had been the commissioning editor of the hardback two years earlier, in 1980. He had written to me out of the blue at the time when PIE, and my leadership of the organisation, were very much in the news. Working as an editor with Peter Owen Publishers, London, he invited me to write a book on paedophilia as one of the company’s titles. And lo, it came to pass.

What I did not know at first  was how lucky I was to have Dan as my editor, but I soon discovered he was a great guy, easy to get on with, and with lots of good advice on the writing. He was a young man then, in the early days of his publishing career. It was no surprise to me that he would do well in the business, but even with my insider knowledge I could not have known just how well.

Dan rose to become one of the most influential figures in British publishing. Described in The Guardian as “the publishing colossus behind Britain’s superstar authors”, as publishing director with Jonathan Cape Ltd he brought out the novels of prize-winning, best-selling writers including Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan. He also secured the rights to Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk and published Thomas Harris’s blockbuster, The Silence of the Lambs.

Strikingly, though, Dan is all too aware that publishers these days are finding it much tougher to take risks by publishing controversial books such as Lolita (and of course mine!) Emily Mortimer spoke to him for an article in The New York Times on cancel culture. She said:

It wasn’t just me concerning myself with the question of whether Lolita would find a publisher today. Dan Franklin, who published Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie at Jonathan Cape, has speculated on the subject too: “I wouldn’t publish Lolita. What’s different today is #MeToo and social media – you can organise outrage at the drop of a hat. If Lolita was offered to me today, I’d never be able to get it past the acquisition team – a committee of 30-year-olds, who’d say, ‘If you publish this book we will all resign.’”

THE HORROR, THE HORROR

Kurtz’s  dying words, familiar from Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now and the novel that inspired it, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, evoke real horror, truly horrible horror. Not that we need fiction to tell us what real horror is when Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan remind us daily.

By comparison, some of the alleged abuse horrors we are now hearing about would seem comically benign if it were not for the genuinely awful and undeserved fate that tends to befall the alleged abusers.

We’ve had a classic example this month in the case of nursery worker Vincent Chan, who filmed himself in sexual acts with children. The word “horrific” appears in the Yahoo News version of the story no fewer than four times to describe what happened, which appears to have been no more than touching and mild penetration of some sort – by a tongue, perhaps. He was not charged with rape or attempted rape, as he surely would have been if he had been at all forceful or unpleasant with these little kids. Also, backing my interpretation, he had worked at the nursery for nearly seven years without any suggestion that any child had complained about him, or that he was anything but well liked.

Yet his behaviour was described as “horrific” – and also “callous”, “cruel”, “predatory”, “sickening”, “despicable”, “appalling”, “devastating”, “a violation”, and “a betrayal”.

What brought about his downfall, bizarrely, was when a member of the nursery staff reported that “he had callously filmed a child falling asleep in their food and set it to music, before showing the clip to a colleague”.

Callously? Isn’t this the sort of clip most people would think was cute if they saw it on TikTok or YouTube? Chan seems to have expected, not unreasonably, that his fellow nursery worker would be amused, not horrified. Others might have seen the funny side, but the poor guy had the bad luck to show it to someone without a sense of humour.

Or perhaps someone who had long had their suspicions about Chan but had nothing else to go on. If so, it was a hunch the police shared, because their investigations took them to his incriminating photos and videos. We can only speculate as to what these images depicted, but we can be sure of one thing: when Chan’s case comes up for sentencing, scheduled for January, the outcome for him will be truly horrific.

SALLY MANN’S LAWYER DAUGHTER

Sally Mann, the American artist whose photos of her own children sparked a huge controversy in the early 1990s when they were published in a book called Immediate Family, turned up recently as the guest on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs (DID).

Many heretics here will remember the fuss, and may have bought the book. No fewer than eight images in it that she had chosen for a travelling exhibition “could subject her to arrest” according to a federal prosecutor, because they showed the kids in varying degrees of nakedness. But she dodged the bullet. No arrest, no legal trouble. The attempt to brand her a pornographer failed. Instead, it propelled her into instant fame and fortune, and her reputation as a photographer has only grown over time, although as recently as this year her photos were “cancelled” – removed from an art gallery exhibition in Texas.

Those who saw the book will remember the setting, I’m sure. The three kids appeared to be enjoying a beautifully free, feral childhood on a sprawling farm with wide acres of land to explore in rural Virginia in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and no one nagging them to keep their clothes clean or stop them climbing trees or skinny dipping in the river – certainly not Sally, their “mountain mama”!

It all looked very hillbilly, from the beat-up pickup truck to the wooden farmstead to the wildlife – the kids with squirrels, weasels, dogs, and even a just-hunted deer with its throat cut. There’s lazy living in the heat of the summer, the kids lounging naked on a scruffy, ramshackle veranda where we wouldn’t be surprised to see a good old boy in dungarees with a banjo on his knee and “the misty taste of moonshine” on his lips.

But appearances can be deceptive. This is no dirt-poor hick family eking out a left-behind, no-hope existence. Sally’s father was a country doctor. Both her parents were artistic intellectuals. These kids grew up with the benefits of bourgeois resources combined with bohemian freedom and culture.

Accused of being a bad mother, blighting her children’s future lives and prospects, she can be proud that her two daughters are doing very well. Jessie is herself an artist now, with a PhD in neuroscience; Virginia is a lawyer in New York. Both have their own thriving families. And who knows what her also promising son, Emmett, might have achieved but for a tragic accident that led ultimately to an early death?

And if the “New York lawyer” career sounds like a repudiation of the rural idyll, it doesn’t mean Virginia has turned into a hard-nosed female version of JD Vance, that famously self-styled hillbilly who made it to an elite law school and Vice President of the United States.

We only need to hear her singing to realise the family’s artistic side is strong within her. I urge you to do so. For the fourth of her eight chosen discs to take to the notional desert island on DID, Sally picked Virginia as the soprano soloist, singing the Christmas carol “O Holy Night” with her high school choir when she was in her mid-teens. It starts around 27 minutes into the show. It is heavenly and of course could hardly be more suitable listening at this time of the year.

THE GENERATION GAME, AMERICAN STYLE