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posted by on Monday December 12 2016, @10:59AM   Printer-friendly
from the time-for-brain-bleach dept.

Most people have wondered how censors can watch so much horrible, degrading stuff without be affected by it, especially the stuff that's so bad that ordinary people need to be protected from ever seeing it.

In what might be the first of its kind, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) is claiming damages for the Post-traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) he is suffering after years of exposure to child pornography.

Const. Michael Wardrope says he was exposed to disturbing videos, photographs, interviews and interrogations as a member of the child abuse and sexual offence unit in Surrey, B.C.

"His mental health was impacted by unescapable images and memories from the files he had worked on," says the lawsuit filed in B.C. Supreme Court.

Wardrope says in the court document he was "flattered" when he was recruited to the unit in 2009. But he says he told his bosses he had three young children, had to commute hours per day and didn't think viewing child porn would be healthy.

He alleges his supervisor assured him that overtime was uncommon and that the amount of child pornography that needed to be viewed was "very minimal and almost non-existent," as the work was, for the most part, interviewing children.

Eventually Wardrope suffered a mental breakdown, and the Mounties dragged their feet for ten months before transferring him to another unit.


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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12 2016, @11:23AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12 2016, @11:23AM (#440310)

    You can only get PTSD if you're deployed to a warzone. If you haven't been deployed to a warzone, you're not traumatized, you're unpatriotic, and you should be ashamed of yourself.

    Even if you've been forced to watch your entire family being murdered while you were being raped, you still can't have PTSD if you're not one of Our Troops.

    PTSD is for Our Troops who defend Our Freedoms. And no one else.

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  • (Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday December 12 2016, @02:43PM

    by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Monday December 12 2016, @02:43PM (#440369) Journal

    As I understood it even Our[1] Brave Troops aren't diagnosed with PTSD half as often as they should be, since it is expensive to treat and/ or compensate and raises all sorts of uncomfortable questions about why we are fighting these wars in the first place, what kind of duty of care the military has to its combat personnel / veterans, just how many people are out there on the front line right now in a dangerously unstable mental state and just how many military / ex-military folks are walking the streets of their home country with a work-induced mental illness that could put them or other people at risk of violent death.

    [1] Talking from the UK here, but I'm pretty sure this comment could just as easily apply to the US or a number of other countries.