Parenting & Family Quote by Jock Sturges

Sturges frames his sentence like a moral flare shot over contested ground: he’s not just condemning abuse, he’s preemptively positioning himself inside the camp of the righteous. Coming from a photographer long dogged by controversy over nude images of adolescents, the line reads as both empathy and insulation. The repeated intensifiers - “terrible, terrible,” “devastating degree” - function less as careful argument than as a performance of certainty, a way to flood the zone with outrage so the speaker’s own proximity to the subject feels safer.

The intent is clear: to insist on the victim’s personhood, to reject the dissociation that offenders rely on. But the subtext is where it gets charged. “Pedophiles and people who have sexual desires on children” is a clunky, almost legalistic doubling, as if he’s widening the net to cover not only an identity label but any attraction that could be implied. That phrasing suggests an anxiety about categories: who gets called what, and who gets implicated by association.

The most forceful move is “real people,” a phrase that shouldn’t have to be said unless the conversation has already drifted into abstraction - “art,” “beauty,” “consent,” “nature.” Sturges yanks it back to consequence: “suffer forever.” That absolutism is rhetorically effective (it refuses minimization), but it also quietly narrows the discussion to one moral axis: harm. In his context, that’s strategic. If the debate around his work is about boundaries and power, centering irreversible damage is a way to demand the audience judge everything by the only metric that matters - and to imply he does, too.