Warren Binford, a visiting professor at the University of Calgary, is photographed on campus on Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2015. She aims to raise awareness about the neurological impact on victims of child pornography in the digital age.Chris Bolin/The Globe and Mail
Warren Binford is trying to illuminate the Internet's darkest corners. As 2015 Fulbright Canada and Palix Foundation distinguished visiting research chair in child and family health and wellness at University of Calgary, she aims to raise awareness about the neurological impact on victims of child pornography in the digital age.
What prompted you to work in this field?
I'm an international children's rights scholar and advocate who represented the Dutch national rapporteur on human trafficking and sexual violence against children two years ago in the U.S. Supreme Court in a case involving restitution for child-pornography victims.
That is money that has to be paid by the perpetrator to the victim to help make the victim whole by, for example, making sure she has access to the psychological services she needs, receives compensation for lost wages etc. And during that representation of the national rapporteur, I was taken aback by how widespread and insidious child pornography had become in the digital age.
One of the things that struck me was how little research has been focused on victims. There's a lot of research right now focusing on addiction to digital sex images and how this is impacting addicts and offenders, but almost nothing that looks at what the impact is on the victims.
Why did you come to Alberta from the United States?
I came to Alberta specifically because Alberta has become one of the leading regions in the world with regard to an understanding of child and adolescent brain science. What the victims are describing based on the current brain science suggests that this could have a permanent impact on their brain development, and so I'm trying to identify potential collaborators here who might be interested in doing that research and building out that area of the research.
At the same time, I'm trying to support an awareness of this problem, specifically here in Canada. Most child sex abuse images outside the U.K. are found on servers in Canada and the U.S. And so, this is an area that requires international co-operation, not just with law enforcement, but also with policy-makers and with academics and researchers like myself.
What's different for victims of child pornography today?
The Internet has really become a Wild West. Here we're talking about children's sexual privacy, where they have been raped, they have been tortured, they have been abused, they have been exploited. And so their most vulnerable moments in their entire life are now being distributed in more than 15 million abuse images, which is how many were last estimated to be out there, all over the world.
The professionals say they have no idea how to help these victims recover, and so that's part of the tragedy. It's not just that society isn't talking enough about this issue and that they're not providing sufficient support to victims for this experience, but on top of it, the professionals don't even know what to do to help these victims cope with what is a lifelong continuing victimization of them.
Is anyone else studying this?
I have thoroughly researched to see if anybody has done brain scans of this population of victims and there is nothing out there that focuses specifically on possession and distribution of child sex abuse images as distinct from the initial sex abuse.
Part of what I'm trying to do here is encourage people to do it. I'm not a neuroscientist. I'm a law professor. I'm an international children's rights scholar. But I do have some fluency with regard to brain science and I am familiar with how these traumas can impact child development in a way that can be irreparable.
What gives you hope?
What gives me hope is to see the leadership that is being demonstrated in areas with regard to the child's developing brain. We can leverage your leadership in that area to help people to understand both what's making people addicted to these images and how we can best support victim recovery from these images. But we can't do that until we start talking about this openly and make people aware that this is a widespread problem.