Sexual Abuse Int He Netherlands Essay

, Research Paper

Sexual intimacy of adults with children is most certainly one of the areas of public discussion in which there is the least degree of tolerance. Any kind of sexual contact with children is outlawed by the written and unwritten rules of society. Paedohilia, the platonic idea of sexual attraction towards children, is immediately linked to paedohile abuse, the immediate real action undertaken by an offender overcome by his urges. The high degree of insensitivity towards the subject matter has resulted in a more general blurring of distinctions and nuances towards sexual abuse of children in general. Public opinion is greatly intolerant of any kind of child-abuser, in the Western world at least, and consequently has orchestrated more involvement by the state on that area. The following paragraphs will compare two of such movements and their legal results, i.e. laws, by contrasting the way the sexual abuse of children is criminalised in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The contrast will be then placed into the larger context of the present discussion at the European and global level.

We will start off with the Netherlands, a country well known for its liberal attitude towards pornography and prostitution and neighbour to Belgium, a country that has been stigmatised by its peadohilia concentration in high levels of politics. The high level of media reach and influence in the Netherlands (compared to less developed countries) has certainly led to a growing public awareness that has in turn called for tighter legal controls on sexual abusers. As of present, the commission of a sexual act in contravention of a social-ethical standard contrary to morality, thus the lewdness of an act, with children under the age of 16 is punishable. Abuses committed on children below the age of 12 may be prosecuted without the complaint of any member of the victim while the prosecution of abuses committed on children between 12 and 15 must be preceded by a formal complaint by either the victim or his/her legal representative. This complaint procedure has come under fire recently, for although it professes to allow children to experiment and develop sexually while protecting them from sexual abuse, it provides great hindrances as to the prosecution of sex-traffickers and sex tourists, who rest safely behind the wall of fear created by the difficulty and insecurity of young prostitutes to come forward.

With regard to child pornography, the Netherlands possesses a maximum sentence of 4 years for its distribution. In order to fall under such a criminal category, the material must involve an image or video of a child obivously younger than 16 who is involved in a sexual act. There is some unclarity as to how far the material must be harmful to the person involved in it to be able to classify it as such, nevertheless, having determined the former, merely the possesion for solely personal gratification of such material is enough to land in jail. In addition, international pressure has had the effect that Dutch authorities are re-contemplating and discussing a possible raise of the age limit for child pornography, thus the legal age for children to be able to perform in poronographic productions, from 16 to 18.

In general, one could say that paedohile abusers are coldly hated, loathed and feared by Dutch society – swimming pools are being designed around the country that maintain to be paedophile-proof and after Internet agencies provide information to residents of a community as to the presence of released sexual offenders, they are sporadically openly assaulted and chased away from those communities. This public disgust and aggression is scientifically backed and reinforced by expert psychologist s reports on the uncurability of child-molesters. This momentum has led to political voices among the Dutch population becoming loud and demanding life-long incarceration or hospitalization of such social mutants. Directly linked to such an extreme isolation of active paedophiles is the notion of providing criminals with a certificate of good behaviour. Under this certificate, employers have the right to exclude convicted persons from certain jobs for up to eight years, although an increase to 20 years is becoming more and more probable under current legislationary processes. The spaces in, and chances within, society left for child molesters are being drastically reduced, stigmatisation and ostracism are the result of a growing sexual taboo.

The situation in the UK is at large similar to that in the Netherlands. Here too, growing public awareness has predicated an upsurge in the prosecution of child molesters and creation of social attitudes leading to the persecution of released sexual abusers. Surrounding this, the laws created undergo the distinction between females in specific and children in general. Two prohibitive laws concerning unlawful sexual intercourse with girls, those under 13 (life imprisonment) and those under 16 (two years), have been established in the UK, creating an overlap that is mostly used to the disadvantage of the offender. Gross indecendy with or towards a male or female child under the age of 14, thus covering all other acts besides the blatant sexual penetration, is equally prohibited and carries a maximum sentence of two years as well. Remarkable clause with respect to such offences in the English legal system is the so-called Youn