The Associated Press Stylebook recently updated its guidance for reporting stories about child porn and a new, preferred term.
Newsrooms around the world rely on the Associated Press Stylebook as a style manual. That style manual provides a unity in writing conventions so that content can be more easily shared between news outlets. One of the latest updates involves the horrible topic of child porn, a term the AP now says you shouldn’t use.
A new, preferred term
Authorities have come up with a new term they’re pushing instead of child pornography. That new term is “child sexual abuse material.”
Law enforcement agencies are not consistent on this, however. Several local sheriff’s offices in my market, for example, still refer to child porn as child porn. But the South Carolina Attorney General’s Office has embraced “child sexual abuse material.”
Since the term is new, news releases from the attorney general contain this footnote:
Child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, is a more accurate reflection of the material involved in these heinous and abusive crimes. “Pornography” can imply the child was a consenting participant. Globally, the term child pornography is being replaced by CSAM for this reason.
Personally, I think that’s ridiculous. There’s a reason we have the legal concept of an age of consent. A child can’t be a “consenting” participant in such material. The only people who think it’s reasonable for a child to be involved in pornography are sexual predators.
No one with even a modicum of common sense or decency believes otherwise. I find it to be insulting to the audience to suggest that a term somehow “implies” such consent.
Beyond that, child pornography has a distasteful sound to it. “Child sexual abuse material” sounds like a politically correct term that almost makes it sound not as bad. I don’t know why we’d want to lessen the emotional blow of such a crime.
It’s horrible and there’s no denying that it’s horrible. Whoever creates or distributes it — whoever victimizes a child — should be thrown under a jail.
But AP Style has ruled…
There are plenty of AP Style rules I disagree with. One is the goofy rule about street abbreviations. For streets, avenues and boulevards, you have to spell out those words unless you have a house number. If you have a house number, you abbreviate street, avenue or boulevard. But you can’t abbreviate road whether you have a house number or not. That has always seemed arbitrary; I would think more people would recognize the abbreviation Rd. than Ave. or Blvd. Surely there are more roads in America than avenues or boulevards anyway.
But now that the Associated Press Stylebook has updated its guidance, I’m stuck with this “child sexual abuse material” nonsense.
AP Style, mercifully, advises against using the abbreviation CSAM, particularly in headlines. That’s a good thing, since no one knows that that means anyway.
But going forward, I’ll have to use this goofy term. The style guide update adds this: “Use them only when essential in direct quotations or excerpts from documents.”
If the legal charge against one contains the old term, I’ll have to use it, then use the new term when explaining the evidence that led to the charge.
Once in a while, there’s nothing wrong with an older term.
