Warning: this article contains details about child abuse that many readers may find disturbing
Last week, Australian Border Force (ABF) officials revealed a disturbingly sharp increase in the smuggling of childlike sex dolls into their country from Asia. The ABF released a photo of one of the 61 gut-wrenching dolls it had seized in the past six months, as reported by The Daily Mail.
The Australian federal government banned the importation of the sickening dolls last year, imposing a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison on offenders.
“If anyone for any reason in their weird world thinks it’s worth the risk to import a child-like sex doll, you’ll be getting a knock on the door,” Customs and Community Safety assistant minister Jason Wood told The West Australian. “You’ll be getting arrested, you’ll be getting prosecuted … and you’ll also be going on the child sex offender register,’ he said.
The dolls, Wood adds, are almost invariably seized alongside “child abuse material,” a very fitting alternate term for “child pornography.” “When they’re (authorities) going further in their investigation, they’re uncovering other forms the offender is involved in of child abuse material. There is an absolute, very strong link.”
“Tackling child exploitation is an operational priority for the ABF, and we are committed to stopping the movement of these products across the border,”ABF Investigations Commander Graeme Grosse told the Mail. “The importation of child-like sex dolls and other child exploitation material is of significant concern to the ABF, and we are committed to pursuing those attempting to import such items.”
Across the pond in Great Britain, the New York Post reports, more than a dozen of these dolls are seized at the nation’s borders each month.
Customs officials have reportedly seized 230 items suspected to be child sex dolls in the last 18 months, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said back in March.
In the absence of any law specifically banning the dolls or their importation, however, authorities are forced to use a legal loophole from a Victorian ban on the import of “indecent or obscene articles.” Under the ban, sex doll smugglers could be jailed for up to seven years.
“There is no ambiguity that they are designed to depict children and their purpose is to stimulate sex,” a spokesperson for The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children told the Post. “We have serious worries that adults who use sex dolls could become desensitized and their behavior would become normal to them so that they go on to harm children.”
Peter Fagan, a researcher at John Hopkins School of Medicine, echoed that concern in an interview with The Atlantic, stating that contact with child sex dolls could “cause pedophilic thoughts to be acted upon with more urgency.”
In America, there is currently no federal ban on child sex dolls or their importation into the country. Attempts have been made, but so far each bill proposed to ban the importation of these dolls has stalled for unknown reasons.
“These dolls can be programmed to simulate rape. The very thought makes me nauseous,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican said of the Curbing Realistic Exploitative Electronic Pedophilic Robots (CREEPER) Act of 2017, according to Newsweek.
“These dolls create a real risk of reinforcing pedophilic behavior and desensitize the user causing him to engage in sicker and sicker behavior,” Goodlatte added. “They put our children in danger and we must not tolerate them.”
The CREEPER Act died in the Senate in June last year. A similar bill, the JUSTICE Act of 2019, was introduced in the House in August of 2019, but has yet to make any progress.
Clearly it’s not a priority to much of our elected officials to stamp out pedophilia.
It’s a pretty popular notion today that alternatives to physical sex, like these dolls, will somehow satiate predators and keep them from harming someone else to fulfill their twisted desires.
Pardon me, but that is absolute nonsense.
The problem isn’t having a “safe outlet” like a doll. The problem is having these disgusting desires in the first place. Until we stop coddling these perverts, we can never expect to see an end to child sex abuse and trafficking. It’s that simple.
