BBC presenter Huw Edwards suspended over paying for sexual pics.

[Cerv]

I known the offences relating to this are categorised for a reason but I struggle to get my head round the idea there's a worst form as such.

Also, investigating and allocating these images must be hell on the mental health of those police officers doing so.

I recall was a very good BBC documentary series years back following officers who had to do exactly that. the operation that caught Pete Townsend among others.
they talked a bit about coping strategies and the support needed to get through.
I don't know if it's ever been repeated unfortunately.

 

[elbows]

if so, I think I might have misremembered.
I do recall a lot of problems that came out of interpreting pre-internet law in the internet age, and what changes were needed to deal with it. like did an automatically created temporary copy of an image file in your computer's cache really count as making a copy of a photo.
so perhaps I've gotten the addition of that wording to law mixed up with that.


But

Here is just one example of an article on a legal site that mentions it:

Unveiling the Dark Reality: Deciphering the Creation of Indecent Images | LawNews.co.uk

In the UK, it is a criminal offence to take or permit the taking of a sexual image of anyone under 18 years old, who is legally considered a child. This could be a photograph, selfie, video, electronic data, or pseudo-images (e.g. digitally edited or generated images). While there is no...

www.lawnews.co.uk

And I believe that I've finally found the documentation of the change to law, with the change in question appearing right near the top of this:

Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (c. 33)

www.legislation.gov.uk

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

so, making copies?

It's unnecessarily ambiguous.

As it should be, give them a decent length of rope with which to hang themselves from.

 

[Spymaster]

Not really seeing any ambiguity, tbh.

Well aside from "making" suggesting something else to many others, I suppose you're right.

 

[8ball]

As it should be, give them a decent length of rope with which to hang themselves from.

Maybe just call all the really bad crimes “BadCrime”, then people would have to think really hard about whether they were about to commit one.

 

[BigMoaner]

I recall was a very good BBC documentary series years back following officers who had to do exactly that. the operation that caught Pete Townsend among others.
they talked a bit about coping strategies and the support needed to get through.
I don't know if it's ever been repeated unfortunately.

I honestly don’t know how they can do it. Maybe the feds screen for it and get extremely low empathy types to do it. Got to be literally one of the worst jobs on the planet.

 

[8ball]

Maybe the feds screen for it and get extremely low empathy types to do it.

But if they did that, who would be left to man the phones at GP surgeries?

 

[SpookyFrank]

I honestly don’t know how they can do it. Maybe the feds screen for it and get extremely low empathy types to do it. Got to be literally one of the worst jobs on the planet.

I would think that the only thing that could motivate people to do such gruesome work would be a profound sense of empathy for the victims. That's certainly the case with other safeguarding type roles, where you're maybe not confronted with quite so much of the documentary evidence of these kinds of abuse but you do have to see the human consequences.

If you're looking at a picture or a video, you can break down. I'm sure it happens and nobody would think any less of you for it. If you're in the room with a victim, you have absolutely got to keep your shit together. You have to defer that emotional reaction. If you don't you can endanger investigations, prosecutions etc down the line.

As for the people quibbling over what's 'making' an image or what's 'copying' an image, I'm trying to think of a good motivation for raising that as a key issue in a case like but I'm drawing a blank.

 

[BigMoaner]

I would think that the only thing that could motivate people to do such gruesome work would be a profound sense of empathy for the victims. That's certainly the case with other safeguarding type roles, where you're maybe not confronted with quite so much of the documentary evidence of these kinds of abuse but you do have to see the human consequences.
.

Yep perhaps and a profound desire to catch the people behind them. That could be what holds them together, the desire to catch them and put an end to it.

 

[Silas Loom]

There’s a large effort underway to automate the classification of images of abuse. It’s the sort of thing AI is okay at, and it spares the need to have humans doing it. Obviously any image relied on for prosecution would need human review, but it deals with the problem of appropriately classifying vast CSAM hoards maintained by a single offender. Hash tagging known images helps as well.

 

[SpookyFrank]

Yep perhaps and a profound desire to catch the people behind them. That could be what holds them together, the desire to catch them and put an end to it.

Trouble is they probably know better than anyone that catching one sicko or a dozen of them never puts an end to it.

 

[AverageJoe]

There’s a large effort underway to automate the classification of images of abuse. It’s the sort of thing AI is okay at, and it spares the need to have humans doing it. Obviously any image relied on for prosecution would need human review, but it deals with the problem of appropriately classifying vast CSAM hoards maintained by a single offender. Hash tagging known images helps as well.

Humans still have to validate the images.

 

[Elpenor]

The best man of a friend is a copper and had to look at and categorise CSA images as part of his job when he was on whatever police unit is in charge of catching / charging these offenders.

I didn’t tend to ask him much about his job, but occasionally he was in the paper when someone was sent to prison. Not a job I would want to do, I hope there’s some form of ongoing psychological evaluation for those involved

 

[scifisam]

.
As for the people quibbling over what's 'making' an image or what's 'copying' an image, I'm trying to think of a good motivation for raising that as a key issue in a case like but I'm drawing a blank.

How about the fact that some offenders - ones who aren't famous, ie nearly all of them - can use the ambiguity to pretend to those around them that all they did was download something, possibly even by mistake, even if the "making" in their case actually involved making the images?

That seems fairly important to me.

 

[SpookyFrank]

How about the fact that some offenders - ones who aren't famous, ie nearly all of them - can use the ambiguity to pretend to those around them that all they did was download something, possibly even by mistake, even if the "making" in their case actually involved making the images?

That seems fairly important to me.

Yes, which is why I'm not interested in all this, 'that's not fair, if all he did was save a file' bollocks.

 

[Spymaster]

Yes, which is why I'm not interested in all this, 'that's not fair, if all he did was save a file' bollocks.

Which has been posted by absolutely nobody.

 

[scifisam]

Yes, which is why I'm not interested in all this, 'that's not fair, if all he did was save a file' bollocks.

That is not what anyone is saying at all.

 

[xenon]

It's worse - he's been charged with making them.

(A worse charge for him obvs, just as bad for the victims)

I’m just catching up with the thread so this might have been covered. But making them includes distributing images. Not necessarily that he was the firsthand source. It’s utterly disgusting of course. But just wanted to make that point. By copying an image it’s described as making it. Well there’s probably some legal finalities around that but I mean copying it and distributing it on another platform.

 

[xenon]

I should’ve probably read further on.

 

[A380]

I honestly don’t know how they can do it. Maybe the feds screen for it and get extremely low empathy types to do it. Got to be literally one of the worst jobs on the planet.

Most of the cops who do it are the most empathetic in the service . Many are older women with their own kids. This is both the cops and the staff investigators. They get some support, but of course there aren’t enough of them and there isn’t enough funding for the support.

 

[polly]

I should’ve probably read further on.

To the next post!

 

[Bus Honeygun]

Most of the cops who do it are the most empathetic in the service . Many are older women with their own kids. This is both the cops and the staff investigators. They get some support, but of course there aren’t enough of them and there isn’t enough funding for the support.

I seem to recall police officers only do such work for a limited time as well - a year or two max. It might have been the documentary above (I can't remember where I heard it), but I recall one officer saying that it was his Christian faith that pushed him through and that a lot of the others who did such work were religious too.

 

[klang]

Know a cop who's been involved in very disturbing cases involving young children, some of them very high profile.
He's a thoroughly decent guy who is involved in a lot of voluntary community work to 'tackle the problems before they get out of hand'. He still believes in the goodness of human beings.

 

[klang]

I've met a few of his team, mainly from the training department. They were all very compassionate human beings who were in it to make things a little better, from smallish community stuff all the way up to psychological after care for victims and people affected by the crimes, and looking after their colleagues.

 

[TopCat]

I remember well Pete Townsend getting a generous hearing here from many posters after admitting to this type of offence. Wrong then wrong now.

 

[Boo Radley75]

It's worse - he's been charged with making them.

(A worse charge for him obvs, just as bad for the victims)

If he just looked at child porn, on line, that is classed as making images as it appears on he screen and his history is stored on his hard drive. It is a bit of a misleading term, I agree.

 

[Elpenor]

I seem to recall police officers only do such work for a limited time as well - a year or two max. It might have been the documentary above (I can't remember where I heard it), but I recall one officer saying that it was his Christian faith that pushed him through and that a lot of the others who did such work were religious too.

The guy I know who did it was there a few years but he was sergeant then I think so perhaps coordinating the work as much as actually doing it

 

[rasputin]

Years ago, I knew an ex cop who used to work for the Vice Squad at the Met. He explained to me that (fairly obviously) distributing images and making images are at different levels of severity in law. According to him, he was involved in a case where a particularly nasty piece of work, who had thousands of child images, was prosecuted for making images, where what they had done was to save files and thereby create a new copies. It seems there is no increase in severity just because of the number of images, so they went for the "making" charge instead.

They never thought they would get away with it but the court accepted the argument and it's now established case law.

 

[elbows]

Years ago, I knew an ex cop who used to work for the Vice Squad at the Met. He explained to me that (fairly obviously) distributing images and making images are at different levels of severity in law. According to him, he was involved in a case where a particularly nasty piece of work, who had thousands of child images, was prosecuted for making images, where what they had done was to save files and thereby create a new copies. It seems there is no increase in severity just because of the number of images, so they went for the "making" charge instead.

They never thought they would get away with it but the court accepted the argument and it's now established case law.

But as discussed earlier, making was specifically added to the law in 1994 (came into force in 1995) specifically to deal with the internet and digital files. So it wasnt a particular case that enabled 'making' to apply to digital copying, that wording was formulated in the first place to deal with just such cases.

By the way, they added the pseudo-images/pseudo-photographs wording in the law at the same time, and that was done due to the digital era too.

 

[Saul Goodman]

As it should be, give them a decent length of rope with which to hang themselves from.

It shouldn't be even remotely ambiguous. There can't be ambiguity in criminal law. That's how people get off with stuff.
If there's any ambiguity, the court has to view it in whatever way is most favourable to the defendant.
It was probably made deliberately ambiguous because nonce judges needed a get out of jail free card.