Jason Clarke

For months, I felt as though I was moving almost unconsciously through daily life, numb to the world and yet overly sensitive to everything. Finally one day, six months later, unable to bear the sense of helplessness and unjustified shame about what happened to us, I sat down at the computer and began to write about it. And I began to feel something shift inside me, a subtle but distinct change from a sense of powerlessness to taking back some sort of control of our lives. I wrote in a fury, and when I sent the story to my wife, she sat in her office and cried. I sent it to our friends who had gone through this with us. Although seven months had passed, they still had not come to terms with what had happened. Rusty’s boss had been understanding, but they said their children still talked about it in the most unexpected moments. “My youngest daughter will say, ‘Why did they think that, Mommy?’” Janet said. “‘Why did they think we were drinking beer and doing things wrong?’”

I set out to answer those kinds of question myself. As I did, I discovered there are simply no uniform standards for police officers, teachers, childcare workers — or photo lab employees — to tell lewd and illegal photos from harmless family pictures.

I read this article from Salon last night, called They called me a child pornographer. It’s easily one of the scariest things I’ve read in a long time. I think the author does a very good job of explaining the horror of a false accusation, while still maintaining that protecting children is of utmost importance.

The issue comes down to a lack of clear guidance as to what constitutes child pornography, and that nobody in the process seems to have the authority to make a good-judgement decision that something does not constitute child pornography.

I don’t know what the process is like in Canada, and I pray that nobody I know ever has to find out. But what an awful ordeal these two families had to deal with.