April Jones' murder

Julie Arliss is our guest blogger this week.  Her Philosophy and Ethics conferences will be starting in November – click here for details.

April Jones was last seen willingly getting into a four-wheel drive owned by former lifeguard Mark Bridger. Bridger was a friend of the family and she presumably had no reason not to go with him, as he was known to her. Her body has not seen since, and she is presumed murdered. Bridger has been charged with her abduction and murder. She was five years old and suffered cerebral palsy.

Whilst we may not presume that Mark Bridger is guilty we are entitled to ask some of the most profound philosophical questions, which this sort of case necessarily triggers in any thinking person. Is a person free to choose how they behave? Are there forces at work which incline some people towards wickedness and others not? Could there be any way of identifying personality types in advance of crimes committed? Could you or I find ourselves inviting a child into our car? What circumstances create this sort of person? 

The unspoken part of this kind of story is the horror of what we suspect happened to the child before death. What happened before the realization that he now had to kill her, in order to silence her forever? We don’t like to allow our minds to think those thoughts, do we? What happened to a small frightened child?  It is unthinkable. How is the mind perverted to the point that it can find a child, assuming this to be the motive, sexually interesting? How is the mind so perverted that the point is reached where it is allowed to contemplate doing unspeakable things to a real flesh and blood child? Could this just happen by chance, or could any of us wake up in the morning with this feeling that ‘today I am attracted to children’?

Police have monitored internet activity with respect to child pornography. The hope was that they would be able to identify those who watched the material and stop them. It is, after all, illegal to use a child under the age of 18 in a porn movie. Sadly the users of child porn proved so numerous that any thought that it could be stopped was ridiculously ambitious. Nothing can be done to stop people watching child porn, while it is available. Child porn is one of the many options available to those who get bored of regular porn and it is my firm view that until those who make and facilitate the circulation of this material are stopped, (and that includes far more responsibility to be taken by internet servers) all children are at risk. The mind is very elastic. It learns to make associations by repeat experiences. When a person masturbates to child porn their mind is more and more open to the possibility of harming a real child. It is normalized in their mind and once that happens, its not a question of if, but when.

Few people are willing to pursue the question of how these horrific things happen in our society. Some will argue that it’s always happened; we just hear about it more these days because of the media. This is a cheap way of avoiding the deeper questions we need to ask. They are profound philosophical questions. How does a person get to the point where they want to sexually abuse a child? Are they free to choose to do otherwise? Is there anything as a society that we can do to prevent attacks on children? Political philosophy, moral philosophy, theory of mind, epistemology, ethics. In no other subject will you cover such a rich range of questions or find yourself so powerfully engaged with so many relevant ideas. Our society needs deep thinkers, with new ideas, and new ways of thinking. This subject area is probably the most important one of all for encouraging young people to engage deeply with things which to be honest most people try not to think too hard about. But these things really matter to us and our community. We have to do the tough stuff! Welcome to Philosophical Investigations. 

Sexual ethics forms part of the A2 course, but do we need to go deeper and ask, what are the sources of the over-sexualisation of young people? What feeds the seemingly insatiable demand for pornography in modern culture?

Photo: Reuters