Initial reaction in Turkey does not indicate whether its people will really face the facts behind the issue prompted by the strong intent to do so in 2007 or whether the issue will be just another story for the 2006 archives
EMINE KART
ANKARA - Turkish Daily News
Towards the end of 2006, one particular question has gripped minds in Turkey as the country is faced with the bitter reality of widespread Internet usage for the purpose of viewing child pornography: If children are the living messages we send to a future we will not see, as a prominent media theorist and educator once said, what is the message being sent from this part of the world, where there exists a society known to be conservative and nationalist as well as paternalistic and religious? Prominent Turkish intellectual Murat Belge once asserted that Turkish society, for numerous reasons, is guilty before its children.
When Neil Postman in the early 1980s, in his famous book titled “The Disappearance of Childhood,” described children as living messages sent to the future, he was not specifically talking about child pornography but was talking about the world of “Barbie baby models” in the United States.
At that time the Internet was still in the development stages and the PC era had not begun. An international and global pornography market was not in the picture whereas today Turkey is a part of just such a market.
Officials have so far categorized the issue simply as a problem stemming from the misuse of technology, while individuals comforted themselves by saying that all of the recent incidents involving child pornography were products of deviant minds that may be easily kept distant from their purely decent and upstanding lives. So far, the initial reaction in Turkey does not indicate whether its people will really face the facts behind the issue prompted by the strong intent to do so in 2007 or whether the issue will be just another story for the 2006 archives.
“We can now easily say that we have moved to ‘the era of annihilating children' from ‘the disappearance of childhood',” literary critic Zeki Coskun argues. He takes the following facts into consideration: Google Trends, a service from the leading search engine providing insights into global search patterns, shows that Turkish towns rank in the top five places in terms of Web searches for “child porn,” and a 17-month-old baby girl was raped by three men in the presence of the girl's mother two months ago in Izmir.
“It is not possible to consider the rape of a 17-month-old baby girl as isolated deviant behavior and pass over the issue lightly,” Coskun said in a brief telephone conversation with the Turkish Daily News.
Turkish society is unfortunately known for its short memory. Actually, it is not the first time a scandal related to pedophilia has dominated headlines in the Turkish press. In December 2001, a teacher and guidance counselor in Bursa province was captured by police as part of an operation against child pornography involving 18 countries.
Coskun, also a columnist for the daily Radikal, brought to mind the fact that at the time a senior columnist, who is a mother and defines herself as “liberal-democrat,” defended “the right to pedophilia.”
“What lies behind the banning of child pornography is the banning of a fantasy for pedophile adults, and this is the fundamental impulse behind censorship. As long as they don't harm children, people have the right to be pedophile,” the columnist to whom Coskun referred argued at the time.
“Thus, in addition to a developed child pornography industry, this issue has a correspondence in the intellectual world with ‘hyper-libertarian' authors,” Coskun said.
While officials tend to discuss the issue of pedophilia or child pornography by showing technology as a root cause or excuse, a more responsible and comprehensive debate among intellectuals appears to be necessary.
Borrowing from what sociologist Kemal Inal said in a recent article: “After all, closing the file of child pornography just with a few incidents and suspects is the biggest ever malice against children.”