2014 - A New Year, New Attitude And New Language.

Sent to all the UK major media outlets. Let's see what we get back.

"Good evening and a Happy New Year to you.

Now that we have a brand new year, please can I ask that we have a brand new attitude to the language that you use to describe child sexual abuse. What I am proposing is as below:

"Child pornography" to be changed to "Child Abuse Images" or "Indecent Images of Children" (the correct legal definition). Reasons are that by definition, children cannot consent to anything sexual under 16 years of age, therefore cannot do "porn". Also, by definition as well, the only people who would refer to images or videos of naked children, or child sex abuse as "porn" are paedophiles - the rest of us would never think this was porn in a million years. Why should we use "paedo talk" to describe such images then?

"Child Prostitutes" to be changed to "Prostituted Children". Reasoning, although it seems that there is very little change, is the way in which the wording of the two relates to the victim of this crime. "Child prostitute" implies consent and a willingness to do this from the child, whereas "Prostituted Child" implies the forcing of this sexual exploitation by a third party (offender) and is therefore the accurate description.

"Child Sex" to be changed to "Child Rape" or "Child Sexual Abuse". Reasoning is the lack of consent between offender and victim. Sex is a natural consensual adult activity - Rape is sexual assault  initiated by someone against the others consent. With the new guidelines coming into force soon, and the removal of ostensible consent, there is no reason to describe the rape of a child as "child sex"

Offenders having "Affairs" with girls (usually when describing teacher-pupil abuse) or "Relationships" to be changed to "sexually abusing". reasoning is similar to the above - affairs are normally described as a romantic and sexual relationship between two people who are not married to each other. As both "affair" and "relationship" imply consent, which is by definition not there as one party is a child under sixteen, this can only be described as Sexual Abuse.

I realise that all of you don't all use all the above, but you do use some of them. To stop trivialising these offenses, facilitating offenders,  and offending victims of these crimes, please can you consider my points as above.

I would be very grateful if you could let me know your thoughts - as I said above, "A new year, a new attitude and a new more accurate way of reporting.

Many thanks"