In the European parliament people, just like Santa Claus, get happy when they've helped children. In Spain the joy lately must be particularly big since they've successfully arrested people from a larger child pornography ring. This is not the first time that the Spanish police has had successes with helping children.

The information can be interpreted in two ways. Either countries with internet filters don't have paedophiles or people viewing child pornography online and therefore these evils exist only in countries without filters. But considering the Swedish police reports about 50'000 hits for the pages on our blocking list per day, I must assume that's not the case. Another possibility is that child porn is more easily tracked in countries without filters and that the police therefore has an easier time tracking it down. In the Netherlands a child porn ring was recently uncovered with the help of uncensored country USA, for instance. I noted a while ago that the European parliament committee LIBE appears to agree that facilitating police work is better than not doing so! Unfortunately, no Swedish parliamentarians spoke up.

Something pornographical affecting adults is a recent British proposal to block all porn except that which the user has told his or her service provider they want to access. To protect children against harmful influences. I sometimes wonder if hypersexualisation of society is due more to paranoia about sexualisation than the increased acceptance of sex.

The concern that pornography filters lead to internet censorship, however, seems more and more overrated. Hungary, a European country without pornography filters of any kind, is a perfect example of how internet and media censorship can be created without any principal resistance to porn at all. Citizens upset by harmful information can be just as bad as porn, and I note that Chinese search engine Baidu agrees.

At the mature age of 23 I've realized I actually don't mind children and find it adequate, even important, to help children in vulnerable situations. For instance refugee children without company who are currently lining up at the Swedish borders. During the course of the autumn I've noticed that Europe does not consider refugees kindly at all. In Sweden many municipalities don't want to accept more refugees and the children get stuck in transitory housing. I know that there's a group in Malmö that works specifically with refugee children desperate not to be sent back to refugee camps with violence, abuse and torture in other member states.

It further upsets me when the European Commission and its parliament join up in action against trafficked beggar children who, in many cases, actually from inside the union but from countries we are actively keeping out of the Schengen co-operation. I guess because we don't want their children on our streets. Hiding the ambition of cleaning the streets behind pretenses of child protection must be one of the least moral actions I have seen since I started working with EU issues. In the fight for better street cleaning, I regrettably must say Swedish voices have been agonizingly audible.

Ho ho ho.