Getting Help
If you find yourself viewing images of child pornography on the Internet, even sometimes saving those images, you may feel very uncomfortable about where this behaviour is taking you. You may be afraid that family or co-workers will find out about this activity. You may want to stop; yet you find yourself returning to the material online.
Some things you need to know about child pornography offending on the Net:
- Viewing, downloading, trading or making child pornography is wrong and harmful.
- It is also a serious crime.
- Wanting to look at child pornography does not mean you have an addiction – law enforcement authorities will treat it like a crime. You will not be treated as an addict by the legal system – you will be treated like a criminal.
- There are harsh penalties for those who are caught.
- In New Zealand, law enforcement authorities (The Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) Censorship Compliance, The New Zealand Police and The New Zealand Customs Service) have specialist staff trained to track down those committing child pornography offences online. They are increasingly successful at doing this.
- It hurts children - in order for you to watch child pornography, a child has to first be sexually abused.
- By collecting and trading child pornography you give the child abusers who created the pornography, and those who profit from the trading of this material, the encouragement they need to commit more abuse.
- Child pornography permanently records the victims’ abuse and its continued existence can cause them great distress in future years.
- Would you sexually assault or torture a child yourself? Would you stand back and watch a child being sexually assaulted in front of you? If you answered 'no' to these questions then why would you watch this on the Net?
- Even though you may never intend to sexually abuse a child, New Zealand research shows that people who watch child pornography are much more likely to have sexually abused a child than the average person.
- What you are watching is not a picture of children and young people enjoying themselves, even though you may think they look like it. You are watching children being sexually abused.
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