Banning fictional child pornography is wrong

I'll let the Ottawa Citizen introduce the subject:

Ottawa Citizen: Crimes of imagination

Canada has charged an American and is threatening him with at least a year in jail because he came over the border in 2010 with comics on his laptop, comics the customs officer decided were child pornography. If he's convicted, he faces a mandatory minimum sentence of a year for importing the material. This case and others like it demonstrate the flaws in Canada's law.

According to the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund, the comics were in the "manga" style that originated in Japan (Astro Boy and Sailor Moon are examples of manga comics. Charles Brownstein of the CBLDF says he believes the comics in this case include images of stick figures in sexual positions).

The Canadian law criminalizes fictional child pornography, by which I mean pornographic material like drawings or text that features children, but that no real children were abused in the making of. I'll let the Citizen finish:

But Canada's current law goes beyond pornography that causes harm to children. It also makes some works of the imagination - stories and drawings - illegal if they depict people under the age of 18 in sexual situations. Many classic works of art might meet that definition, and the law does allow for a defence on the grounds of artistic merit. This puts the courts in the bizarre position of determining what is a work of art. Citizens cannot hope to know in advance what the law really forbids, and whether the judge will share their opinion of what is art. Policing the way you express yourself on a piece of paper or on your laptop comes awfully close to policing your thoughts.

Judges are not meant to be arbiters of taste; they are meant to balance rights in a free society. Imaginary people do not have rights.

Similar laws are in the works in Finland as well, where it will join other highly questionable laws that already make even the definition of child pornography arbitrary. In fact, Finnish courts are already not only determining what constitutes art, but also whether parody is succesful, because that is the determining criterion to whether a parody constitutes an IP violation. So in Finland, courts determining what is art won't be anything new.

If you think they're exaggerating about policing thoughts, by the way, Finland's state police have already applied for a law criminalizing talking about having sex with children in an approving manner. I so wish I was making that up.

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There are those who say that protecting children from sexual abuse is so important that we must do anything to stop it. Whatever one may think of this, laws against fictional child pornography fail on that count.

Daily Mail: Charity's anger at proposal to make child porn legal 'to protect children from abusers'

The research found that child sex crimes fell when child pornography was more easily accessible.

The discovery tallies with similar studies in Denmark and Japan, where child pornography is not illegal, that found incidences of child sex abuse were lower in those countries.

The conclusion of the new study is that ‘artificially-produced’ child pornography should be made available to prevent real children being abused.

Pornography was strictly prohibited in the Czech Republic between 1948 and 1989.

The ban was lifted with the country's transition to democracy and, by 1990, the availability and ownership of sexually explicit materials rose dramatically. Even the possession of child pornography was not a criminal offence.

Diamond and his team looked at what actually happened to sex-related crimes as it moved from having a strict ban on sexually explicit materials to the material being decriminalised.

Results from the Czech Republic showed that rape and other sex crimes have not increased following the legalisation and wide availability of pornography.

Most significantly, the incidence of child sex abuse has fallen considerably since 1989, when child pornography became readily accessible – a phenomenon also seen in Denmark and Japan.

They also found that the number of cases of indecent exposure and other, less serious, sex crimes fell dramatically in the wake of pornography becoming more readily available.

The researchers say: ‘As with adult pornography appearing to substitute for sexual aggression everywhere it has been investigated, we believe the availability of child porn does similarly.’

So not only are no children harmed in the making of fictional child pornography, its availability seems to decrease sex crimes against children. In general, pornography decreases sex crime, so this finding makes sense. I know that this cuts no ice with determined anti-pornography crusaders, who replace scientific data with claims that porn makes you gay, but the reality is that fictional child pornography, if anything, seems to make children more safe.

However, that's a terrible argument for not banning it. The Ottawa Citizen put it quite nicely when they said:

There's no point in having a right to free speech if we make exceptions for everything that people find distasteful or offensive.

In fact, that's the kind of free speech we have in Finland; our constitution guarantees Finnish citizens freedom of expression, except when constrained by law. In other words, our constitution gives us a right to say things that we're not banned from saying. Some right! The only place I can think of that doesn't allow its citizens to do things that aren't specifically forbidden is the fictional city of Raseir in the classic CRPG Quest for Glory 2, which boasted a street named "Everything Not Mandatory is Forbidden". So we, as Finnish citizens, have more rights than the inhabitants of a fictional computer game dictatorship.

Hooray!

But I digress. As a criterion for banning expression, the harm it causes is a dangerous guideline. In nearly every debate on free speech, someone quotes the example of shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater. It might be salutary to remember where the expression comes from: it was used by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., to justify sentencing a man to six months in prison for distributnig anti-draft leaflets. It was the judge's opinion that inciting people against the draft posed a "clear and present danger" to the United States, and was therefore illegal.

This tug-of-war between the desire to criminalize dissent and uphold freedom of expression should serve to point out that the harmfulness or harmlessness of speech is insufficient in itself as a criterion. Harm is a flexible concept that can be stretched a long way, and if we subordinate free expression to a critetion of harm, are we really willing to ban anything that can be considered, or even proven, to have harmful effects?

Suppose that someone demonstrated that people who read detective novels are more likely to commit violent crime than people who don't? Or, to take a real-life example, someone came up with data to support the decades-old idea that comic books predispose childrne to crime? Would you then be willing to ban detective novels and comic books under the same criteria as fictional child pornography? After all, they'd be harmful. Remember that as far as we know, no form of expression can directly cause a person to commit a crime; all they can do is predispose. That's a matter of much correlation and very little causation.

This is why it's dangerous, and I believe in many cases morally dishonest to argue against banning fictional child pornography just by quoting its beneficial effect on sex crime rates. That isn't actually an argument in favor of freedom of expression; it's an argument that this particular kind of expression is beneficial and should therefore be allowed. It's a whole different story, and begs the question: if the data should be refuted by a better study, would you change your mind? And would you support the hypothetical comic-book ban if data in its favor were produced? If not, you're making a morally dishonest argument.

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In other words, this isn't a question of whether fictional child pornography is beneficial or harmful, but of what the limits of free expression are. It's been shown time and again that juging expression by the harm it supposedly causes is a primrose path to censorship. I can't believe that even the most ardent anti-child pornography crusaders would want to live in a country where all expresion is regulated based on whether it's deemed harmful to society or not. There's practically no limit to what such a dystopia might end up banning. After all, people are healthier if they're happy; therefore things that make them unhappy make them less healthy, and are therefore harmful. Under this rationale anything could be banned.

The only rationale for the outright ban on child pornography is that a child was necessarily abused to create the image. It should be recognized that this is also a problematic piece of reasoning; technically, it could equally well be used to ban pictures of terrorist attacks. Even if we accept the ban on child pornography, we can't extend it to fictional child pornography using the same rationale, because no children were necessarily abused for its creation. We don't ban other fictional depictions of crime, even other fictional depictions of sex crime, so why should the sexual abuse of children be treated differently?

Any ban of fictional child pornography necessarily creates one of two disturbing precedents: either that expression can be regulated according to its harmfulness, or that when it comes to child pornography, a different standard of civil rights prevails. Finland is currently pursuing the latter policy. Neither should be chosen by a free country.

Richard Dawkins is an asshole

Richard Dawkins is someone I think very highly of. Or at least I used to, until he took a stand on the Internet to compare a woman's, Skepchick's Rebecca Watson's, that is, fear of sexual assault to his annoyance at someone chewing bubblegum.

Read Phil Plait's summary of events here. Finnish readers can also check out Kaj Sotala's blog here. Ms. Watson's own reply is here. Frankly, the only way I can describe this is that Richard Dawkins is not only being an asshole, but is adamantly refusing to acknowledge it.

This whole thing is just depressing. As I understand it, what Ms. Watson was saying, was that a dude was creepy to her in an elevator, and she thought it was creepy. Her advice to men: don't be creepy.

Of course, what with the culture wars going on, you don't have to go far down in Mr. Plait's comments section for this to start:

At this point you are basically advocating total segregation of men and women.

Men are not allowed to make even the slightest advance towards women.

And it goes on from there. On that forum, and on so many others, people are jumping on bandwagons, and the most popular one is dedicated to framing her view as an attack on all men everywhere. According to these feminazis, men aren't allowed to have a sexuality at all and aren't allowed to talk to women, and so on and so forth.

I would be intellectually dishonest if I didn't mention that a particularly obnoxious anti-feminist from my very own political party got on the same case, ridiculously summarizing this whole episode as feminists being enraged at a woman being asked to have coffee, because they think all men are rapists.

You can watch the video that prompted all this nonsense here, and determine for yourself that she says none of the things she's been accused of. Seriously, she doesn't. She gives men everywhere a very good, reasonable piece of advice: don't be creepy.

Most of the response to this is just astonishing. Not only is what she actually said being totally distorted to make her look ridiculous, but the whole point of this concerted attack is that she feels wrong. How dare that woman feel threatened! Why, it's an insult to men everywhere.

Read Ms. Watson's rejoinder to the whole thing here; it's beautiful.

So here we are today. I am a feminist, because skeptics and atheists made me one. Every time I mention, however delicately, a possible issue of misogyny or objectification in our community, the response I get shows me that the problem is much worse than I thought, and so I grow angrier. I knew that eventually I would reach a sort of feminist singularity where I would explode and in my place would rise some kind of Captain Planet-type superhero but for feminists. I believe that day has nearly arrived.

I, too, would like to say that this is exactly what makes me a feminist. From my point of view, the people attacking Ms. Watson live in an insane world. She felt creeped out in a situation where I, at least, consider that it was totally reasonable, and in response to her saying that, men from Richard Dawkins on down attack her. Clearly she's not allowed to feel creeped out!

What makes it quite simply sinister is that this fits in perfectly with the attitude that so much of our society takes to sexual harassment, objectification of women and even sex crime. The victimization of women in our society is real, but far too often any attempt to draw attention to it is dismissed and ridiculed. Feminist critiques of the gender system are totally misrepresented as ridiculous strawman caricatures, and things like false rape accusations are played up far beyond their actual numbers to suggest that all these women are just being silly.

I'm constantly surrounded by this. I already mentioned the ludicrous caricature that a fellow Pirate party member presented of this particular incident. Earlier, another fellow blogger dismayed me on the topic of rape. I have the greatest respect for him as a person, but it's just shocking when he puts together blog posts with such utterly ridiculous strawmen as "feminists claim rape accusations can never be false" and so on. Just last week, Finland's Aamulehti published a particularly idiotic article where the author claimed that in America, men can't even get into the same elevator as women without facing a rape charge, with no evidence beyond the woman's word required.

This stuff is completely moronic and untrue, and the people peddling it are being maliciously dishonest. What's even worse is that by doing so, they're actively trying to make claims of sexual harassment and rape appear suspect, overstated and false. Bizarrely, they often justify themselves by claiming that they're pursuing sexual equality: a lunatic definition of equality where men's sexual needs are paramount, and women simply aren't allowed to feel differently. The Pirate party member I've mentioned also authored a proposal for increasing sexual equality, which included using the school system to, frankly, teach girls to put out more. When it was pointed out that this kind of approach would almost certainly increase sexual harassment, in his response the proposer simply ignored this. To him, it seems, sexual equality means the satisfaction of men's needs, and the adjustment of women to conform to men's needs. And he, in all seriousness, calls himself an "equality activist".

By attacking feminism, and especially by attacking feminist critiques of sexual oppression, these people are quite simply enabling more sexual harassment and sex crime. The more we create an atmosphere where complaints of sexual harassment are viewed as frivolous, the more we make sexual harassment acceptable. It's absolutely unconscionable and immoral to participate in this kind of activity. Given my "criminal record", it should be obvious that I'm all for highlighting problems of gender and sexual equality for both sexes; what I don't approve of is this idea that it needs to be done through undermining feminism and women's rights. That whole notion is based on turning feminism into a ludicrous strawman.

The single most appalling reaction I've encountered to this whole business came from a wealthy white man, who was absolutely incensed that people like Ms. Watson are treating men as potential sexual offenders. He was hurt by this sexism! So somehow, Ms. Watson feeling creeped out is transformed into not only her being a sexist against the man who was creeping her out, but an attack on the rights of a man half the world away. Never mind that neither Ms. Watson nor Mr. Plait made any claims that "all men" are anything at all, or even the fact that this "all men are rapists" notion mostly comes from rabid anti-feminists who are hell-bent on regarding the SCUM manifesto as feminism's Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In my opinion, nothing illustrates how bad the situation is as well as a privileged white man coming away from this incident feeling hurt because women feel harassed and threatened, and somehow that infringes on his rights.

So really, when I see this kind of activity going on, it reaffirms my belief not only in feminism, but in the necessity of feminism. When someone like Richard Dawkins feels the need to speak up solely to belittle and ridicule a woman's experience of feeling harassed, it's obvious that we have a problem. When Ms. Watson regularly receives threats of murder and rape for speaking out, we have a problem. To far too many of us, women are still second-class citizens whose emotions and concerns can be dismissed, and even should be dismissed.

It's easy to think we live in a perfect world of gender equality, where feminism is no longer necessary. Then something like this comes along, and we're forcefully reminded that feminism is still very necessary. Sexual harassment isn't something to point and laugh at. It's especially reprehensible when privileged white men are the ones doing the pointing and laughing.

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On the subject of response, I'd be remiss if I didn't note that this even made the front page of Conservapedia! You know, the Reliable Encyclopedia (tm) that's bowdleriz...erm, retranslating the Bible. What it said when I checked was this:

Boorish and uncouth atheist men are causing disharmony between the sexes in the atheist community.

Followed by a link to a ridiculous blog post on this very topic. Atheists: boorish, uncouth and fat. Yes, there is a Conservapedia page titled "Atheism and obesity", and even worse, somewhere there are people who think that that page is a reasonable argument.

And I'll finish with a humorous endnote: Skepchick also has a Swedish-language site, which I shouldn't have been reading in the middle of the night, because I genuinely misread the second item of this post as "Finskor har också känslor. Så även skaldjur."

Finnish blogger in prison

Two years ago, I wrote about a Finnish blogger, Seppo Lehto, getting a two-year prison sentence. His crime was creating several blatantly fake blogs that purported to be written by Finnish civil servants. We may be in a third world country, but seriously, when you google a politician and find a ridiculously racist, infantile and insulting blog that focuses on the writer's genitalia and confesses to him being a KGB agent, really, you probably figure it's a joke.

In short, anyone with the Internet literacy of a brick understood that the fake blogs were juvenile parodies. I thought no-one took them seriously until it turned out that the Finnish police did. Lawsuits were raised, and as Hesari put it at the time, the crime was deemed "exceptionally serious" and Seppo Lehto was sentenced to two years and four months in prison for "aggravated libel". He also has to pay tens of thousands of euros of reparations.

After the sentence was passed, Seppo went on the lam. According to Aamulehti, the police finally caught him this midsummer as part of a random DUI screening. That tells you everything you need to know about the Finnish police's alacrity in policing search warrants, by the way. He's currently doing time at the Turku prison.

I just thought I should put this out there. Here we are, peacefully reading and writing our blogs, while in the country I'm writing this in, a man is going through a multi-year prison sentence for blogging.

Here's the problem: I can't accept that. At all. Honestly, I have no idea if anyone reads this blog regularly, but if you do, you may recall a couple of posts I did on rape in Finland. In this one, I related the story of a Helsinki police officer who got a two-year suspended sentence for raping a minor. He used his badge to get into her home and raped her. So he didn't go to jail at all. A lot of similarly "fun" examples here.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit to a certain personal bias. I did prison time too, for not serving in the army. If I'd spent six months playing war and raped an underage girl instead, I wouldn't have.

I live in a country that puts people in jail for blogging, but not for rape. There's no way I can express how wrong that is. And the fun thing is that no-one cares. Every time there's a high-profile rape case where the guilty party gets off with practically nothing, there's a storm of public outcry, but within a few days everyone's forgotten all about it and gone back to watching The Hills or True Blood.

That's the way civilization ends: not with a bang but with indifference.

Poland approves castration of pedophiles

Reuters: Poland okays forcible castration for pedophiles

(Reuters) - Poland on Friday approved a law making chemical castration mandatory for pedophiles in some cases, sparking criticism from human rights groups.

Under the law, sponsored by Poland's center-right government, pedophiles convicted of raping children under the age of 15 years or a close relative would have to undergo chemical therapy on their release from prison.

"The purpose of this action is to improve the mental health of the convict, to lower his libido and thereby to reduce the risk of another crime being committed by the same person," the government said in a statement.

I bring this up mainly because several people I know support this. Also, when a Finnish tabloid broke the story over here and included an online poll, 95% of respondents supported the legistlation. I'd like to take a moment to address the ethics behind this idea. Unless otherwise noted, data is sourced from Wikipedia.

In practice, chemical castration means that the prisoners will be forcibly given drugs that reduce their sex drive. Technically, they're not being castrated in the proper wince-inducing sense of the word, as nothing is being cut off or even permanently disabled. However, their hormone production is lowered, leading to changes in both body and mind.

Several US states have passed similar laws; for example, in California a prisoner convicted for a second time of child molestation may be treated with MPA if they are on parole, regardless of their wishes. The ACLU, in opposing similar legistlation in Florida, called it a "return to the Dark Ages". Their paper can be read here.

I'm sure some people are aghast that the ACLU could oppose something like this. After all, it's for the children. It's worth looking at the core of the ACLU argument, because it puts my first point very concisely.

Sexual assault is not about sex - that is a myth. This law reinforces the stereotype that men are sex-crazed individuals and that child molesters and sexual predators need to be drugged to control sexual impulses. In reality, sexual assaults are about violence, power and the humiliation of a survivor or victim.

Eliminating sexual desire or a body part, for that matter seems like a quick fix. No more trying to squeeze extra convicts into already overcrowded jails. No more spending money to feed and clothe another felon sentenced to life. Just get rid of the testes. But this law avoids the real issues.

Firstly I should point out that pedophiles and child molesters are not the same thing. Having said that, sex crime against children does indeed happen for a variety of reasons. Most child molesters have many other psychopathological issues apart from a sexual attraction to children, and it has been argued that it's the other psychological issues they face, most especially sociopathy, that drive them to commit crimes, not their sex drive. As a matter of fact, studies have found that several convicted pedophiles already have low testosterone levels to begin with, strongly suggesting that it isn't their testosterone that makes them commit crime.

This is really the same argument as with any kind of rape. Men do not rape because of their sex drive. Men who rape do so because they have deep-seated psychological problems. Quite simply put, diminishing their sex drive does nothing to fix the underlying causes of their crimes. In a very real sense, chemical castration doesn't treat the problem at all because of this.

What I just said is highly relevant, because none of the drugs currently used for chemical castration have permanent effects. If the person being treated stops taking the drugs, their effects will subside. What this means is that the drugs will only work if the person being treated is willing to keep taking them.

In general, the best results have been gained from a combination of pharmacological and psychiatric treatment, and basically, drugs that control sex drive are no different from any other psychiatric medication. In conjunction with therapy, they can work. Without therapy, though, the medication doesn't address the underlying problems at all. In many cases, all it gets us is a former child molester who no longer has as much sex drive as before, but is still the kind of sociopath who is capable of sexually abusing children.

What's more, given that rape is not primarily an expression of sexuality but an expression of power and control, actual sexual functioning would seem to be secondary. And as I said, the drugs will need to be taken for the rest of the offender's life for them to stay effective. What if they just stop taking the drugs? You can't force anyone into therapy if they don't want it.

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There are also some very real human rights issues involved. Sadly, "pedophiles" are such a good enemy that for a lot of people, they don't have any human rights at all. Here's how the Reuters article I started this post off with continues:

Prime Minister Donald Tusk said late last year he wanted obligatory castration for pedophiles, whom he branded 'degenerates'. Tusk said he did not believe "one can use the term 'human' for such individuals, such creatures."

"Therefore I don't think protection of human rights should refer to these kind of events," Tusk also said.

His remarks drew criticism from human rights groups but he never retracted them.

This is the kind of thing I expect from really bad novels, not actual politicians, but there you are, he said it. In Poland, pedophiles are not humans, and therefore they have no human rights.

Okay, so it's just the opinion of their prime minister. But it's a frightening one. In past times, chemical castration has been used in, for example, Britain, to treat homosexuality. Renowned computer scientist, cryptanalyst and mathematician Alan Turing agreed to undergo chemical castration to avoid being sent to prison for homosexuality. A few years later, he killed himself.

That brings me on to what I find most disturbing about this idea. The treatment will lower a patient's testosterone levels, which I pointed out are already low in some pedophiles. This means radically changing not only the person's sex drive but also their body and personality in general. If they're forced to take these drugs for a prolonged time, the "treatment" really means personality change.

Are we okay with the idea that the government can change your personality?

The treatment affects the offender's entire sex drive, at worst effectively denying them any kind of sex life. Pedophiles divide into exclusive and non-exclusive; the first kind are only sexually aroused by children, while the latter sort also have "normal" sexual impulses. Only roughly 7% of pedophiles are exclusive, so if a blanket chemical castration is applied, it means depriving 93% of the "patients" of a normal sex life. If that isn't cruel and unusual punishment, then I don't know what is.

The medical fact is that pedophiles are, by definition, mentally ill. Most child offenders are also mentally ill. What they need is treatment, not just for their sakes but for our sake as well. If people suffering from these mental disorders are going to rejoin society, they need to be treated for our safety as well as their health.

As it stands, the Polish scheme isn't going to prevent sex crime against children. Many sex offenders already undergo therapy without it being forced on them by the law. For the remainder, chemical castration won't be a treatment, it will be a punishment. And not only that, but a punishment that isn't effective at deterring the crime it's supposed to deter.

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All in all, compulsory chemical castration is inhuman and ineffective. The only purpose it seems to have is to get politicians cheap votes from the moral panic on pedophilia. No matter how strongly we feel about any kind of crime, we can't just abandon our concepts of human rights to punish the offenders. It's even worse if we punish them in a way that doesn't even deter the crime.

Also, on a wider note, legislation like this can open doors to really scary places. As I said, are we comfortable with the idea of government-mandated personality change? In a way, that's what forcing you to take hormone-altering medication is. As psychiatric medicine advances, if we start passing laws like this, why not prescribe personality change as a punishment for other kinds of crime as well? I'm not seriously arguing that there's a direct and slippery slope from this law to a mind-control society, but it's worth thinking about. If only because the combination of moral panic, blatant disregard for human rights and enthusiasm about medical solutions sounds very scary indeed.

Swedish town applauds rapist

This is basically that one South Park episode where they have a convicted murderer freed because he's from South Park.

The Local: Girl raped and rejected by Swedish community

A storm of outrage has met revelations by Sveriges Television (SVT) that a 14-year-old girl from a small Swedish community was raped at her school only to be rejected by her friends and adult society when she reported the attack.

I could quote all of the article, and I could write a book about this whole topic. I intend to return to it in future posts, but for now, suffice to say that this is an old, old story, here taken to tragicomic extremes.

A 15-year old boy raped a 14-year-old girl. Despite his initial denial, there was forensic evidence and witness statements supporting the girl, and he confessed and was convicted. Despite this, the community decided that it must somehow all be her fault. At the end-of-term ceremony at the local church, he was celebrated as a hero.

Later that same night, he raped a 17-year-old.

The community he lives in believes that this, too, is a fabrication, and the boy is innocent of both crimes. He is a local hero.

This is the year 2010, in Sweden. You can rape two underage girls and be the town hero for doing it.

Rape is legal in Finland, pt II

Earlier post on the same topic here. I also posted on the same topic at greater length in my Finnish-language blag. The fact that I have multiple posts on this topic makes me think I should have a label for "rape", but I just don't want to.

Helsingin Sanomat International Edition: Suspended sentence for police officer convicted of raping a minor

A Helsinki police constable received a suspended sentence of two years' imprisonment for the rape of a minor.
The crime, which took place in November 2006, was revealed when the victim later contacted an Internet "virtual police" line.
The case was reported in the Wednesday edition of Ilta-Sanomat.

The police officer found guilty of the crime was dismissed after the investigation was completed. No other similar cases have been found in the constable's background.
According to the Deputy Chief of the Helsinki Police Department Jari Liukku, the police have also not received any other contacts from the public concerning the officer in question.

The 51-year-old constable working in the Helsinki Police Department had lured a 16-year-old girl - who had allegedly told him she was on the run from home and had nowhere to sleep - into his car and thence to his apartment by showing her his police badge.
In the apartment the girl had become intoxicated on the alcohol served to her by the officer and had fallen asleep.
After she fell asleep, the constable had raped her twice. He also took pictures of the situation, which he then placed on his personal computer.

The Helsinki District Court handed down a suspended two-year prison sentence.

The article goes on to say that Finland has been internally and internationally criticized for its "nonchalant attitude towards crimes of sexual assault", as they are in HS English.

And rightly so. I read this particular news item while I was still in prison myself, because in Finland, if a person refuses to serve in the army, they are automatically sent to prison with no possibility of a suspended sentence or parole, but if a police officer lures a 16-year old girl into his apartment and rapes her, he doesn't go to prison.

In Finland, a suspended sentence means absolutely nothing. The guy won't go to prison; he'll have a criminal record and probably be banned from working with children, and he'll have to pay some thousands of euros in damages. That's it. From a personal standpoint, the day the sentence was handed down I was in prison, and the police constable was probably in a bar somewhere, celebrating.

I can't really express the way that makes me feel, in writing or in any other medium.

The prosecutor is appealing the case, so it'll go to an appeals court. Hopefully they'll decide differently. The problem is that they can, in fact, quite easily decrease the penalty.

In my previous post, I discussed the impact of the introduction of the "lesser rape" charge, which led to a systematic decrease of sexual assault penalties. If this case, and the plethora of others like it, lead to an increase of, say, the minimum penalties for rape, this will change nothing, as the courts will simply classify more cases as "lesser rape". I dealt with the legalities of this more fully in my Finnish-language blog, so I won't get into that here. Suffice to say that Finnish criminal law, like all other Finnish law, defines everything so loosely that courts are practically free to interpret cases as they like. Even this case could easily have been tried as a "lesser rape" case, because the wording of the law is so elastic. So, in fact, the appeal by the prosecutor may very well lead to the rape conviction being overturned and replaced by a conviction for "coercive sexual contact" and a lesse penalty.

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It's almost certain that this case will reinforce the demands made in Finland for making the penalties for sex crimes harsher. The problem is that in the current Finnish justice system, this completely fails to address the core issue. Rape sentences are theoretically severe; the problem is that courts use every excuse to hand down more lenient sentences.

A far more important problem in this particular case is the fact that according to Finnish criminal law, the decision on whether a sentence must be served in prison or as a suspended sentence (i.e. nothing) is entirely up to the court's discretion. So demanding harsher penalties won't change that, either, as even if the minimum penalty for rape is raised, courts can still pass suspended sentences, meaning that the perpetrators will still be getting away with nothing. It'll just be a theoretically longer nothing.

In short, what is needed is not simply an increase in penalties for sexual assault, but a revamp of both the Finnish criminal code and the general attitude of Finnish courts. The simple fact is that in Finland, courts are clearly predisposed to let sexual offenders off with very light penalties, and the vagueness of the law lets them do it. And despite the continued public outcry over this, no-one is willing to do anything about it.

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Welcome to Finland, where a police officer can lure a 16-year old girl into his apartment, get her drunk, rape her twice and take pictures of her, and not go to prison.

Rape is legal in Finland

As I wrote previously, I'll be going to jail this summer for refusing to serve in the army. There's one kind of criminal I'll be extremely unlikely to meet there: rapists.

Phil, who I stole the title of this post from, quotes Helsingin Sanomat:

According to a news report aired by the commercial television network Nelonen on Sunday, courts in Finland have been handing out relatively lenient sentences in cases of sexual assault - even in some which have led to physical injury.
Nelonen examined all sex crime cases handled by Finnish district courts over the past year and found out that prosecutors and courts have considered acts involving injury to the victim, or in which the woman’s home has been violently broken into, and even in which the victim has been kept a prisoner for several days, to meet the definition of “coercive sexual contact”, a category of sexual assault considered less serious than actual rape.

The new category was introduced to Finnish law in 1999. Opponents of the new definition predicted at the time that the change would lead to more lenient sentences in sex crimes.
The Nelonen report found that more than half of those convicted of actual rape have to serve real prison time. Less than one in ten of those convicted of the lesser crime have had to serve custodial sentences.

The original purpose of the introduction of “coercive sexual contact” as a lesser category of sexual assault was to encourage the prosecution of cases in which one partner was not a fully willing participant of sexual contact, but which are not seen to qualify as full-blown rape.
The Nelonen report suggests that the change has had an opposite effect - that of letting real rapists off with lenient sentences.

My boldface. I apologize for the bad Hesari english, but the point is fairly clear. The original Nelonen story is here. There's some shocking stuff in it, some of which I'll summarize in English here.

**

There are three kinds of rape in Finnish law: rape, aggravated rape and "coercive sexual contact". Here is an example of "coercive sexual contact", a lesser crime than rape, from the Nelonen report:

A man, born in 1977, forced a woman to have sex with him in the disabled persons' bathroom of a restaurant by hitting her head into the wall and twisting her arm behind her. The woman could not call out for help because the man held his other hand over her mouth. Earlier that evening the same man had tried to forcibly kiss her in the restaurant. The state prosecutor demanded a sentence for coercive sexual contact, because the violence used was mild and the act was performed under mitigating circumstances. The public court decision does not set out these circumstances. The man was given a seven-month suspended sentence and ordered to pay 1000e in reparations.

Understand this: in Finland, if you beat a disabled woman's head into the bathroom wall and rape her, you are not going to prison.

The inept HS English tells us that "more than half" of those convicted of rape go to prison. What that actually means is that 54% of rape convictions result in a prison sentence where the convicted person actually goes to jail.

54%. Remember that a case like the one described above is seen, even by the prosecution, as less than rape. A rape must involve serious violence. Even then, only half of those convicted go to prison. Only 10% of those convicted of "coercive sexual contact" actually go to prison.

**

This is sickening. If you refuse to go to the army, the state has no qualms about putting you in jail. I'm receiving a far more severe sentence than the majority of Finnish rapists will ever receive. That's what passes for justice in this country.

Finland prides itself on being a "just state" on the model of the German Rechtsstaat. What this means in practice is that our Parliament passes laws that leave actual decisions on legality and sentencing almost completely up to the courts. In the case of sexual assault, the courts and prosecutors routinely apply the lesser penalties, even in cases where this seems to be bordering on insane.

And that's not all they do. At the end of 2008, public feeling in Finland was inflamed against the Eastern Finland appeals court (HS), because of a case heard in November 2008. There, the appeals court found that five adult men, previously sentenced for the rape of a 15-year old girl, were not, in fact, guilty of rape.

The girl had been given alcohol until she was drunk, tied to a bed and raped by all five men. The Eastern Finland appeals court decided that the men were guilty of sexual abuse and aggravated sexual abuse of a minor, but not rape. According to the court, it could not be proved that the men themselves had gotten the girl drunk and tied her to the bedposts; therefore they could not be found guilty of rape. Their sentences were halved. (HS)

So, to recap: not only is beating a woman's head into the wall and sexually assaulting her not rape, but tying a drunk minor to a bed and gang-raping her isn't rape either.

Iltalehti has summed up several interesting previous decisions of the same appeals court over the 2000's:

* In October 2003, a 33-year-old man's jail sentence for rape was changed to a suspended sentence because of his employment history. He had held a steady job for a long time, and his employer had decided to terminate his employment if he went to jail. He didn't have to!

* In September 2003 a 33-year-old man's prison sentence for attempted rape was commuted to a suspended sentence because he had no previous convictions and had paid a large sum in reparations.

* In September 2002 a 27-year-old man had his prison sentence commuted to a suspended sentence and community service, again because of his job.

**

Finnish courts and prosecutors will, even in cases involving physical violence, not even call for a sentence for rape if the sentence can be handed out as "coercive sexual contact". Of those sentences for rape, barely half actually end up in prison. Of those who do, if they're in Eastern Finland, clearly a trip to the appeals court is worth the trouble, as if you have a good enough job, you won't have to go to prison.

As a feminist and as a human being, I'm disgusted. Overall the Finnish justice system seems dedicated to bending the law in favor of men convicted for sexual assault. Do we really want to live in a society where physically assaulting a disabled person and forcing them to have sex with you is not a serious offense? In a country where an appeals court believes that it's possible that a drunk 15-year-old girl tied herself to a bed in order to be raped by five adult men? I'm sorry, coercively sexually contacted by five men.

I'm not even going to start on the common problems of sexual assaults and domestic violence, like the fact that most go unreported. The way our justice system handles even those that are reported is appalling.

A brief comparison: Finnish internet pundit Seppo Lehto got two years and four months in prison for creating obscene web pages insulting and defaming Finnish politicians and civil servants (HS). The guy who beat a disabled woman's head into a wall and raped her didn't get a prison sentence at all.

From my own perspective as a person actually going to prison in a month or so, this is totally bewildering. I've refused to complete my "civilian service" and because of that, I'm going to jail. If I had, instead, attacked and raped a woman in a bar, I wouldn't be going to jail. I just can't get my head around that.

That's the country I live in. And I'm not proud.