Why our language around child sexual abuse must change

We’re told that language evolves. But sometimes, it needs a correction, not evolution.

Especially when the wrong words make space for silence, for inaction, for misplaced empathy. The phrase “child pornography” is one such term. It doesn’t just fail the child. It quietly serves the offender.

When a crime against a child is described in soft, clinical language, it doesn’t just dilute the horror, it distances us from the truth.

The term “child pornography” sounds like content. It sounds like consent. But there is no such thing when a child is involved. What we’re really talking about is rape on record, abuse turned into currency, and a market that thrives on broken childhoods. Calling it by the wrong name doesn’t just blur the lines, it protects the perpetrator more than the child.

Words don’t just describe. They can distort

Language shapes how we process crime, and how we distribute blame. When we use terms like ‘child pornography’, we unconsciously shift the frame: from crime to content, from rape to material. We distance ourselves from what actually happened to the child.

Even when there is public outrage against the offender, the severity of his crime is often mellowed by the clinical language used to explain it: Paedophilia as a disorder, impulse control as a diagnosis, past trauma as a context. These are valid conversations. But they cannot come at the cost of the child’s pain and the crime that has been committed.

By this logic, every saint has a past and every Satan a future. But sometimes, we need to resist the urge to intellectualize or contextualize. Sometimes, we need to look simply and clearly at the present, and the crime that was committed.

In our attempts to be just to the criminal, are we being unjust to the child and their trauma?

Disorder doesn’t cancel out crime

The World Health Organization classifies paedophilia as a psychiatric disorder. And yes, there are helplines and counselling services for those who seek help before they cause harm. That’s how it should be.

But zoom in beyond the clinical frame, and the reality is brutal.

A man stares at children in a park, following them with a gaze they don’t yet know how to fear. Two others sit behind screens, searching for images of child abuse. Somewhere else, traffickers scout children to produce and sell these very images, responding to demand like any illicit market would. The man staring at the children in the park and the ones searching for such images are not just clinically ill people, they are the reason traffickers will scout for children and create ‘content’ to sell. They are the ones because of whom this market thrives.

This isn’t just impulse. It’s exploitation. It’s planning. It’s crime.

Acknowledging the disorder behind such acts does not mean we erase the act itself. Paedophilia might be a diagnosis but its consequences are not contained in therapy rooms. They spill into the lives of children who are abused, violated, filmed, and forever changed.

India’s terminology shift: More than semantics

A judgement by the Madras High Court last year shook the nation last year and exposed the very fundamental threats to children. The Madras High Court had dropped a criminal case against a 28-year-old man accused of downloading and watching pornographic content involving children on his mobile phone. 

However, when a network of NGOs filed a petition challenging the HC order, India found its way forward. Not just in action, but in semantics as well. In a landmark move, the Supreme Court of India (Just Rights for Children Alliance v. S Harish) overturned the judgment and also ruled that the term “child pornography” should be replaced with Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse Material (CSEAM). This isn’t just a cosmetic change. It’s a necessary correction when for the first time ever in the entire world, there was a definition of the term CSEAM that replaces and rejects the term ‘child pornography’.

“Pornography” suggests participation. “Material” sounds passive. But CSEAM tells the truth: this is the result of sexual exploitation. It is abuse. And it involves a child.

In a country where child rights are still catching up with legal reforms, such terminological clarity is essential. It aligns with India’s growing recognition that these materials are not obscenity but criminal evidence. This shift helps strengthen both our laws and our conscience.

Beyond borders, beyond softness

CSEAM is not a national problem. It is a global one. Abuse is filmed in one country, shared in another, and downloaded anonymously everywhere. Offenders operate in organised, international networks. The least we can do is match that with clarity: in law, in language, and in how we speak of children’s safety.

Technological tools are important. So is coordination across borders. But the fight must also begin with something as basic—and as powerful—as calling the crime what it is.

Justice begins with truth

When we cloak brutality in clinical terms, we fail the child twice. Once in the abuse, and again in the telling.

Our job is not to choose between justice and empathy. It is to understand where one ends and the other must begin. And sometimes, that begins with a word. A word that doesn’t protect the criminal. A word that doesn’t betray the child.

Let’s choose those words better.

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