Inquisition 21
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Child pornography
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Child porn is at the heart of our new sexual absolutism. Its laws have criminalized both artistic representation and objective intellectual examination and speculation.
St.Joan - John William Waterhouse (1849-1917)
The label of child porn
Scroll down for 'The origins of the child porn panic'
Important information
Anyone affected by the issue of child pornography, especially one accused of accessing it, should be aware that the recent major police campaigns of Landslide, Ore, Amethyst and others are collapsing due to police corruption. There are a number of stories HERE.
One also needs to be aware that the police control virtually all of the child porn images available over the Internet and use them either in legal entrapment or illegal activities, so if you see an advertisement for child porn it is almost certain to be a police trap or corrupt scam.
Beware the bogglywoggly!
Every year tens of thousands of articles are published in mainstream media about the great evil of child pornography, and how you will go to jail if you even so much as look at a single picture of child pornography. Without even going into how insane that law is in itself, I just want to point to the fact that I have never ever, in all these years, seen a single article that defined what they are talking about!
Imagine you said to a child: If you ever touch a bogglywoggly, you will die instantly. And you said this every day, and you never once told him what a bogglywoggly is. Do you think you would have a scared and nervous child? This sounds insane, but nevertheless this is being done all the time, not only to children, but to all of us, in many areas.
Courtesy Eolake Stobblehouse.
The Emperor has no clothes
Consider this statement – ‘Taylor and Quayle (2003: 80-83) found that child pornography on the internet was extensively used as a means of achieving sexual arousal and as an aid to masturbation: it was therefore actively used in the paedophile's fulfilment of their sexual attraction to children and in their sexual fantasies.’ Source: Child Pornography Law: Does it Protect Children? Katherine S. Williams, Department of Law, University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law 26(3) 2004: 245-261.
Let us consider this astounding statement, and the epistemic positions of the people involved with it. They are academics. The first, Max Taylor, a professor in charge of the Copine project at Cork University in Ireland, who is responsible for research into the motivations of individuals who obtain pleasure from child pornography, and who has contributed to the creation of a scale of offences (Copine) used in sentencing offenders.
Taylor also presents himself, with good reason, as an expert on child pornography and, through his work, he has managed to access and study images that would land the rest of us, including writers and other scholars, in prison.
Katherine S. Williams is also an academic who has written what is arguably one of the best and most objective analysis of the child pornography laws, raising serious questions about their effectiveness in protecting children, and going on to argue that the laws are more to do with implementing a perceived morality than with protecting children.
Now let’s return to Taylor and his research partner. They found that child pornography on the Internet was extensively used as a means of achieving sexual arousal and as an aid to masturbation. Can we repeat this? They found that child pornography on the internet was extensively used as a means of achieving sexual arousal and as an aid to masturbation.
We may need creatures from outer space to land on this planet and to see how we currently fear the bodies of children and legislate to attempt to control that fear. When those aliens go home they may send us copies of a report that records the remarkable fact of a race of beings, which, under pain of imprisonment, insists that the genitals of their young must be covered and that those young cannot even play at or copy the sexual acts that they commonly observe their elders engaging in.
If aliens do not land, we will have to imagine the writings of future historians on the matter. But here and now we do have one device for assessing this extraordinary moral panic. It is called epistemics but we don’t have to study it deeply to appreciate this apparent ‘oxymoronic conundrum’.
Epistemics teaches us that we all make meanings at different levels of awareness or within different domains of meaning-making. Ancient man and many uneducated people make them at the level of sense perception and do little abstracting, and this is known as making meanings at Stage 1. The absolutists and dogmatists and many scientists who actually believe that they are ‘objective’ operate at Stage 2 and make the doctrines and laws that control all of us. At higher levels one of the significant achievements in advanced awareness is that we become aware that we are part of the problem we are trying to study and address. The dogmatist and the arrogant scientist at the lower level actually believe that they are objective and separate from the thing that they are observing and judging.
Academic Katherine S. Williams is admiring the work of Taylor and Quayle as she reports their astounding statement. But it is not astounding to her as she does not see herself and the other two academics as part of the problem they are assessing, but separate from it, observing and measuring it. In this respect at least, and this may be an exceptional case for her as it does not appear elsewhere in her excellent analysis of the child pornography moral panic, she appears to be making meaning at the level of the doctrine that there can be a disinterested scientist, and not at a higher level where she would question the very method of the other two academics in their making the meaning itself, and where she would look for and accept ambiguity, and reject all labels, especially those with a priori bias, and where she would be aware that she and they were part of the very territory being studied (Korzybski).
Consider the judge who excuses himself so that he may study child porn images in his private chambers. Consider the police and prosecutors who collect child porn images and complain over the media about their distress and ‘burn out’, and then we read (April 2005) that several hundred men and women police officers have been caught exchanging pornographic emails to ribald laughter – enjoying it hugely. Consider the parliamentary committee of MPs in Ireland that wishes to sit in judgement on a file of images that may or may not be legally defined child pornography.
Truly, the Emperor has no clothes.
The criminalizing of beauty
What better place to begin an examination of the moral panic of child pornography than with works that are patently not pornographic, and are in fact at the other end of a scale where we describe some images as beautiful. We cannot begin, however, without first acknowledging that there are some in positions of influence who declare that what is appropriate for one individual to look at may not be appropriate for others, thus presenting us with a new kind of tiered human morality, aimed at the control of human thought and imagination.
This is a practical approach here, beginning with books of images, many of which, while being beautiful, emphasize eroticism. This is the genre often called ‘child nudity’ or ‘child eroticism’ but one should bear in mind that the Western ‘child’ for purposes of defining under agedness can be up to 17 or 18.
The books we shall now consider use, mostly female, models below the legal ages, for one good reason that the artist considers their bodies to be the epitome of a special class of human beauty. The advice to anyone seriously studying this question of what should and should not be criminalized as child pornography is to purchase and study these books, all sold through major bookstores and Amazon. Some examples are in the section Beauty is immanent.
The only author who does not fully acknowledge the sexuality and eroticism of either children or her own children in her work is Sally Mann, a position which has earned her some criticism. All the others both acknowledge and exploit sexuality and eroticism, and indeed treat them as elements to be celebrated.
The chosen authors are David Hamilton, Jock Sturges, Sally Mann and perhaps the most important, as her new book appeared in October 2004, Irina Ionesco with her Eva: Eloge De Ma Fille, which challenges the current absolutism that forbids the depiction of child sexuality by openly publishing a pictorial record of her own daughter’s sexual flowering, with many of the images staged in daring poses and theatrical surroundings.
All of these books caused outrage at one time or another, and censors and would-be censors still want them suppressed. There is an irony that while one can purchase them legally in most Western countries, were the same images found on one’s PC, the police and possibly the courts would treat them as criminal child pornography. David Hamilton went from having the status of a great artistic photographer of young female beauty to being reviled. US activists raised raiding parties to attack the bookstores with the works of Jock Sturges and tear them up. Some States even managed to put him on trial, but he was acquitted and his book sales increased. He is sad that the events ‘defined his life’. Once accused, one is always accused. Sally Mann’s pictures of her children were also put on public display and caused storms of protest. Despite this, her work can be found in the most prestigious galleries. As this is being written a new storm over the publication of Irina Ionesco’s Eva: Eloge De Ma Fille is sure to break.
All of these books are available now from Amazon at Beauty is immanent.
The label of child porn
Most newcomers who find this web site do so by searching under the keywords of ‘child pornography’, making it the largest subject category being researched by far.
As with sex abuse, the expression ‘child porn’, as widely used in our society, is a label, which signals that its user is employing Stage 2 thinking (see Sex abuse in the main menu for Stage 2). Here also, we are facing a doctrinaire mindset that is difficult to respond to. As with the sex abuse label, this one is used to cover a huge range of images from child nudity, through erotic posing and acting, to simulated and real sexual activity. The oversimplification of the labelling is particularly devastating by its lumping of certain images of all young women under 18, including those sexually mature from 13 on, in with younger children.
As with sex abuse, the label trivializes and normalizes as it over-simplifies. If images of beautiful nude children are as much pornographic as those of children being raped, then while the beautiful are criminalized the pornographic are made less criminal.
In his The Art of Awareness (p98), J. Samuel Bois says, “A time comes when we see not what is actually there but what we believe is there, because our cultural unconsciousness causes us to believe that it is there. In such cases believing is tantamount to seeing (as distinct from ‘seeing is believing’). In 1964, New York barrister, James Marshall, wrote an article titled The Unreality of Accident Litigation: a plea for a new approach, in which he said, “What an individual perceives is the result of his personality, his environment, and his history, filtered through his experiences." (American Bar Association Journal– August 1964. p. 714.) His plea for a new approach appears not to have been heard.
There is a salutary example of the perils of labelling to be found in an attempt of an academic, who sees himself under the label of a ‘child porn watchdog’ to write a comprehensive article about child pornography. Professor Max Taylor, from the organization Copine, based at University College Cork, Ireland, did indeed succeed in writing a very comprehensive article, perhaps one of the best of its kind, using his considerable experience and huge collection of child pornography images, housed at the university. It was considered to be so comprehensive, and so sensitive to the wide range of images available, and so instructive in the ways one could access images and even avoid detection in doing so, that it was adopted and published by the International Pedophile and Child Emancipation group and is on their web site. (http://www.ipce.info/library_3/index.htm/)
The thinking process involved
Using the theories of Alfred Korzybski, made clearer and more practical by Bois, let us examine the process of abstraction used in identifying and judging what is called ‘child pornography’. The first kind is known as evaluative, using our sense of ‘feeling’, in the way we sense that mother and home are good. This form of abstraction comes not from the image of a child in a sexual or related situation, but from our previous experiences and our cultural assumptions. This emerges strongly in the ideas of the Internet censors who declare that what may be a legitimate image for one to view (picture of a baby in a bath viewed by its parents) may not be legitimate for another (a suspicious stranger without a ‘legitimate reason’ to view the image). This is actually a very interesting abstraction as it is two steps removed from the object viewed. It is an abstraction based on our judgement of another’s abstraction, and as such it has an extremely doubtful basis.
The evaluative statement says that something is beautiful or ugly, good or bad, threatening or attractive, but that judgement comes not from the image but from within ourselves. I may see an image of a naked twelve year old girl as beautiful, while my colleagues working on the Internet hotline may see it as an object fanning their hatred of paedophiles, capable of exciting abhorrent passions. Bois says that we make idols of our evaluative generalities.
The second level or kind of abstracting is classifying. This unfortunately is labelling, where we say that this is a rich man or a poor man, a bad man or ‘child porn’, with little regard for the potentially wide range of differences within it.
The third kind of abstracting is relational. Here we relate what we are seeing, or considering, to other things and to some overall or emerging idea. Here for example, we may examine the possibility that the availability of images of naked children at play or in naturist settings with their families may be good for all of society, and even reduce the likelihood of covert interest in them.
The fourth type of abstracting is self-reflexive. Here we are aware of our own role in our relationship with the image. We may find that, instead of it being in all cases the evidence of a crime, it could be natural, funny, a burlesque, or simply beautiful or erotic. Where it is an image of a real crime, we may decide that it could have a value in tracking down the criminal and reducing further crimes of this nature and thus see it through ‘forensic’ lens. If it is a record of incest, we may find it instructive in studying the causes and workings of this unusual expression of human sexuality. If we are poet or playwright, we may want to get a child to act out a part in the interests of a greater good, or if we are a novelist we may want to write about it to produce great comedy or tragedy.
Indeed, it is this very self-reflexive ness that may be contributing to our great difficulty with child sexuality, and the reaction of loathing to even the thought of it. At this level of abstraction, we are not a separate entity observing the image; we are participants also in that act of viewing the image. From this it is not hard to understand how what one may see as beautiful may be seen as loathsome by another. The beauty and the loathing are indeed in the eye of the beholder.
The origins of the child porn panic
“Children must be sacrificed for other long range ends” - the origins of the child pornography panic.
Kevin Kirk
One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation. - Thomas Brackett Reed
The child pornography panic started in 1976 when Robin Lloyd, who was a correspondent for NBC, published a book For Money or Love: Boy Prostitution in America. Lloyd initially put forward a figure of 30,000 male child prostitutes working in the USA at that time. The figure was never scientifically or empirically proven and was, according to the author, a ‘gut hunch’ that he used to throw at law enforcement officers to gauge their reaction. They came back that the figure was possibly too conservative so he increased it tenfold and came up with the figure of 300,000 underaged male prostitutes. He also put forward the notion in the book, again with no research, that many of them were also involved in pornography and thus the origins of the child pornography panic were sown.
Later on, when he appeared before the Illinois Legislative Investigating Commission, which was investigating the claims, he admitted that he couldn’t substantiate the figures nor could he supply any sources for them. As a journalist, he broke just about every rule in the book but, as a sensationalist, he was, well, sensational.
His mythical figure of 300,000 children involved in pornography was taken up by Judianne Densen-Gerber, the director of Odyssey House, a chain of residential treatment clinics for drug addicts - it was also used by the European Council of Ministers who in a report on child exploitation in 1986 claimed that: ‘a study of boy prostitutes had suggested that there were 300,000 boy prostitutes in the United States, many of whom are designated runaways’.
Densen-Gerber used this figure to extrapolate her own figures, reasoning that there must be at least as many females as males involved in the industry, which took the figure up to 600,000 and then she doubled it again because she reckoned that there must be twice as many in reality, as only half the real number would be detected. In this way she arrived at the mystical figure of 1.2 million children involved in the production of child pornography in the USA alone. She used this figure as definitive when she appeared before a congressional committee in 1977 and again when she gave evidence to the UK House of Commons Committee, which led to the 1978 Protection of Children Act, on which Operation Ore was based.
Judianne Densen-Gerber was a controversial figure, but one who had, through the sheer force of her personality, the ear and patronage of various powerful politicians who were coerced into supporting her drug rehabilitation empire, Odyssey House, which she’d started in 1966. By the time she found her new role as the guardian of youth her empire was being given $3,000,000 a year in federal and state funding and had operations running all over the US and Australia. But it began to unravel in 1979 when Attorney General Robert Abrams launched an investigation into alleged financial mismanagement at Odyssey after former staff members and patients claimed that private donations and government funds were used to maintain Densen-Gerber's jet-set lifestyle
Moreover, there was considerable disquiet about the intensely racist and abusive methods she used in her organization. For example, she was reported to have tied young black people to chairs and then invited the white members of her facility to spit on them. Her Mabon program on Ward's Island, supposedly to assist addicted mothers had included women who were not addicts but needed temporary shelter for themselves and their children to shield them from abusive partners. On at least three occasions, when these women tried to leave, Densen-Gerber ordered her staff to keep them in the program by refusing to release their children, as she needed the money. Mobilization for Youth had to obtain a writ of habeas corpus to get two of the children returned to their mother. *
She was also exploiting two teenage prostitutes, who were not addicts, in national-television appearances instead of helping them. The two young women were housed and counted as addicts to help obtain extra funding. They were subjected to strip searches, including rectal examinations, when they entered and left the building. Their personal belongings were confiscated, and they were forced to wear signs round their necks with humiliating messages written on them and donkey’s ears if they complained about their treatment or broke one of her myriad rules.
Her staff had to pledge their personal loyalty to her, including lighting candles to honour her, and she used the inmates as personal servants catering to her every whim. Many of the inmates were not allowed to leave even after their treatment program had finished in order to increase the headcount and thus the funding. The treatment itself was disorganized and unclear and, in most instances the staff themselves had no idea how to implement it. The inmates wrote their own evaluations and there were no follow-ups to determine whether the discharged inmates had relapsed. She would not allow the inmates to have any physical contact and even holding hands would result in harsh sanctions.
She once famously remarked “There are times when, as in war, children must be sacrificed for other long range ends.” This is a slogan that seems to have been taken to heart by many of the people who are making such a good living out of the child porn panic.
She had tried to link the issue of child pornography and drug abuse by stating that it was because of youthful sexual experiences that many people went on to become addicts. A viewpoint that is still enthusiastically endorsed in government and ‘child care’ circles even today. Many people have asserted, with no little justification, that she started her child porn crusade in order to deflect the public’s attention away from the more unsavory aspects of her life. Eventually the Adams enquiry found she was indeed misusing the funds, which she promised to pay back but never did. She died in 2005 in ignominy.
To further her crusade, she teamed up with Sergeant Lloyd Martin, a vice cop in the Los Angeles Police Department and himself a controversial figure. He began working in the field of sexual exploitation of children in 1971 in Los Angeles after being appointed by Ed Davis who was then the chief of police. He was assigned to the pornography squad in 1973 and founded the Sexually Exploited Child (SEC) unit in 1976.
Martin pushed for every police department in the country to set up a Sexually Exploited Child unit, which has pretty much happened, plus more: there are now a considerable number of both state and federal units, for example the FBI's undercover operation, code-named ‘Innocent Images’. Other agencies include the US Customs Cyber smuggling Center, and the International Child Pornography Investigation and Coordination Center, founded in 1996. In 1999, the FBI increased its number of online child pornography task forces from one to ten. Just about every police force (including those in Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand) now has its own child pornography and/or child sexual abuse unit. Estimates put the number of police officers alone working in this field at over 50,000 and that does not include customs agents, the FBI, USPIS and so on.
Martin admitted that children can and do initiate sexual activity with adults. In his testimony at the Kildee-Murphy hearings that preceded the first child pornography statute, he said, “The most difficult concept for most people to understand and accept is that very often these children are consenting partners in the sexual activity. In some cases they initiate the sexual activity with direct propositions or with seductive behavior.” Which rather puts paid to the assertion that all child-adult relationships are abusive. Particularly when he followed it up by saying: “Only 1 case in 200 involves a child who is the victim of force.” He also notes that that the relationship between a man and boy is often very warm and affectionate. His definition of a paedophile, which not surprisingly hasn’t been echoed by other members of the child abuse industry, is: “Somebody paying more attention to the child than the parent would.”
He seemed to have little interest in heterosexual paedophiles, but directed his ire instead at homosexual relationships. He covered up his intense homophobia by saying that he was only after men who had relationships with boys, an action which he reckoned was worse than death. Because, by his reasoning, death was over quickly but the scars of an adolescent (or indeed any) homosexual relationship will live with the person for ever.
Martin later had to take psychiatric leave from his post at the LAPD and was finally forced to quit for harassing witnesses and, unsurprisingly, falsifying evidence.
Gerber-Densen and Martin bounced around the USA in 1976 and 1977 making more and more outrageous claims, culminating in Martin stating on television that "pedophiles actually wait for babies to be born so that, just minutes after birth, they can grab the post-fetuses and sexually victimize them." ** He also went on to claim that ‘police have found evidence that Mexican children are being smuggled into California in specially constructed cars. They lay eight children under the floorboards and fender wells, they stuff those kids in. Then they take them across the border, put them into a hotel, and clean them up’. He said that these children were smuggled in for use by sadists ‘who can only achieve sexual gratification by torture and killing’. Densen-Gerber, not to be outdone, said that foreign children are smuggled into America ‘primarily for the purpose of killing. An American youngster has a school record and a family. But if a child has been taken off the streets of Guadalajara or Acapulco, it's much easier." She also claimed that American children are being sold to rich Arabs because ‘in their world, blond, fair-haired children would get a higher price’. Which, in my mind contradicted her previous assertion regarding American kids.
The fact that these claims were never substantiated, nor - despite millions of dollars being pumped into investigations – has there has never been a proven case of a single ‘snuff’ movie being made, didn’t stop the press from getting in on the act. In the national periodicals during 1977 dozens of articles appeared; even the New York Times, a newspaper not known for sensationalism, printed 27 articles that year compared to one in the previous 2 years.
A Time article on April 4 1977, called ‘Child's Garden of Perversity’, described horrific scenes such as a movie of a ‘ten-year-old girl and her eight-year-old brother in fellatio and intercourse’. It was later found to be false. And in May 1977, the Chicago Tribune reported that ‘child pornography has become a nation-wide multi-million dollar racket that is luring thousands of juveniles into lives of prostitution’ and exploiting up to 100,000 children at any time. Again it was a lie.
This press hysteria culminated in May 1977 in the popular television journalistic series ‘Sixty Minutes’, devoting a program to child pornography. This was so shocking that a flood of letters to politicians ensued, even though it was subsequently proved to be untrue as well.
Other firebrands emerged, again primarily targeted at the gay community but under the child abuse banner, like Anita Bryant. Although she did not testify at the Kildee-Murphy hearings, she screamed loudly enough about the homosexual threat to children to have her viewpoint heard and the press loved quoting her. It is interesting to note that her charity, the ‘Ministries for Counseling Homosexuals’ was later charged with financial mismanagement; 1978 tax returns show that the Ministries raised $1 million, of which $450,000 was spent on ‘direct fees for raising contributions’, including the anti-porn and anti-child abuse activities of the, illegal, subsidiary Protect America's Children. Only $150 was ever spent on counseling.
Foremost amongst the politicians was Congressman Mario Biaggi, who was also noteworthy after having to resign from congress after being found guilty of embezzling public funds, diverting defence contracts and tax evasion. He was actually using the subject of child porn to prove how unworkable Reagenomics were, so he turned it into a political bunfight. He was forever interviewing almost tearful social workers who were complaining that their child protection activities were under threat because of the budget cuts. He opined: “There is a highly sophisticated and organized child pornography industry operating in this nation. It has already captured an estimated 300,000 children nationally as victims. It has produced 264 different publications sold nationally, depicting pornographic activities involving children as young as three years old. The industry is both national and international in scope. Large quantities of pornographic materials are imported each year, primarily from Europe. Hundreds of children from Mexico are smuggled into this nation each year to engage in child pornography.”
If indeed the market was this size, then you’d expect the child pornographers to have an army of lawyers and lobbyists fighting for them. Think of all the other things that are intrinsically bad for society and the planet that are not sanctioned, even encouraged, because they can muster the funds, legal clout and the political wherewithal to fight their corner. There are armies of lawyers and lobbyists in Washington who’d take up any banner as long as the pay was right. Yet not a single person spoke up for the industry, which, in itself should have set alarms bells ringing as to the real size of the market. Even at this early stage the people in the know must have realized they were grossly exaggerating the market but, obviously, it didn’t suit their purposes to let the cat out of the bag.
On the back of this hysteria a subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives was formed, before which both Densen-Gerber and Martin appeared and they held a series of hearings on the subject which lasted until late that year. The chairman of the committee was Representative John Conyers Jr., who had organized the hearings to pass judgment on the proposal of Representatives Kildee and Murphy for a first Federal law against child pornography. Conyers took the figure of children involved in the ‘industry’ from Densen-Gerber and doubled it again because it didn’t include, at least according to him, all the 16 and 17 year olds involved, even though they’d supposedly been counted in already.
He also reasoned that all high school drop outs should be included in the figures, even though there was no evidence that drop outs would all gravitate towards the sex trade. He then went on to state "So we have somewhere possibly in the neighbourhood of 2 million kids who form a ready market for sexual exploitation from pornographers and the like." Thus we arrived at the mystical 2,000,000 kids a year are abused ‘fact’. Which must mean every 15 years one tenth of the population of America has become involved in the porn business, certainly every child. You’d have thought somebody would have noticed.
Other statements included those by John Murphy who said child pornography ‘has become a multimillion dollar industry. By recent count, there are at lest 264 different magazines being sold with sexual between children or between children and adults’. Congressman Robert Young claimed that child porn ‘has become a virtual avalanche that must be stopped’. He also said that child porn profits ‘are enormous.... near the billion-dollar range’. and Robert Dornan referred to the ‘booming billion-dollar’ child porn industry.
It was all nonsense. The industry, if it could be called that, was never particularly large even in its heyday. For instance the figure of 264 monthly magazines containing child porn that was put forward by both Densen-Gerber and Martin, and which was even used in 1981 in a report ‘Exploitation of Child Labour’ by the Commission for Human Rights of the United Nations, was based on a myth. Densen-Gerber’s daughter had scoured the New York adult bookshops for her mother and had found 264 magazines in total, many of which were duplicates.
The real figure was a maximum of five publications a month in its heyday, according to research undertaken by Professor Ernst Braches (who was Chief Librarian at the University of Amsterdam). And the number of copies sold as ‘running into millions’ was likewise fabricated. According to Dutchman, Joop Wilhelmus, who published the Lolita series which was by far and away the most popular child porn monthly publication, 25,000 copies was the maximum he ever produced of any issue with the norm closer to 5,000.
And the figures of billions of dollars in profit for the industry are similarly fabricated. The largest, convicted, child porn distributor in the USA was Catherine Wilson of Los Angeles. Wilson allegedly sold a significant quantity of child porn from the late 70s until her arrest in 1982. During that period police officials estimated that Wilson was responsible for 80% of all commercial sales of child porn in the entire USA. It is worth noting that from December 1973 to December 1983 a total of $556,182 ran through Wilson's bank accounts and only a small percentage of that was child porn as she also sold a substantial amount of adult porn. If we extrapolate those figures out we arrive at a maximum value of $70,000 per year.
Hardly a multi billion dollar industry.
In addition there were two large scale US government investigations undertaken and both concluded that the claims were not based on any facts. One investigation was carried out by the Illinois Legislative Investigating Commission (aka ILIC). The reason for the investigation was the claim made by Judianne Densen-Gerber in 1977 that Chicago was a stopover for boy prostitutes who were being transported back and forth between New York, Los Angeles, Houston and New Orleans.
The ILIC conducted a three-year investigation in cooperation with the FBI, the U.S. Postal Service and U.S. Customs, and the report was published in 1980. The report concluded that the largest underground publication containing erotic images of children and teenagers: ‘could attract, at most, 1,000 individuals’. It went on: “Even if each individual passed his copy on to several others, it takes a stretch of the imagination to think that there are 50,000 to 100,000 readers of child pornography 'out there,' particularly given the nature of the other operations we have mentioned in this part of our report.”
The other investigation was undertaken by the FBI under the codename ‘Miporn’ and took the form of various sting operations and countrywide raids. Their conclusion stated that in two years of searching for child pornography on a commercial level, none was discovered. Furthermore, none of the 60 raids resulted in any seizures of child pornography, even though the raids were comprehensive and nationwide. Even the police agreed that the figures were wildly exaggerated with the head of the New York Police Department’s Public Morals Division proclaiming, in 1980, that the stuff was ‘as rare as the Dead Sea Scrolls’.
Other researchers included Bruce Selcraig, a government investigator of child pornography during the 1980s who went online in 1996 as a journalist to review the spread of child porn on the internet, concluded in the cyberspeech debate that the dissemination of child porn amounted to ‘a tuna-sized red herring’.
Attorney Lawrence Stanley, in the Benjamin A. Cardozo Law Review, what is widely considered the most thorough research of child pornography in the 1980s, went further by concluding that the pornographers were almost exclusively law enforcement agencies.
Indeed in 1990 at a Southern California police seminar, the LAPD’s Toby Tyler proudly announced that law enforcement agencies were now the sole reproducers and distributors of child pornography. And author James Kincaid said in 2000: “Several speakers at an L.A. police seminar I attended a few years back laughingly admitted that the largest collection of child porn in the country is in the hands of cops, who edit and publish it in sting operations. There is at most, they say, a small cottage industry among civilians in which pictures (most of them vintage) are traded.” And even the UK’s self-styled ‘Internet Abuse’ Guru, John Carr, said “I have only seen child pornography twice in my life and then it was at conferences and I was shown it by the police.”
Furthermore the numbers of children involved in the ‘industry’ for profit is nowhere near the figures that have been enshrined in the mythology. For example Max Taylor, who is the Professor of Applied Psychology University College Cork, the creator of the EU funded COPINE (Combating Paedophile Information Networks in Europe) project and one of Europe’s, possibly the, leading child pornography researchers said, “In our experience, the trade in child pornography on the Internet is not characterized by financial gain -- it is mainly a process of exchange either directly through protocols like irc or icq, or indirectly through newsgroup postings and web sites.”
He went on to say “Commercial involvement in child pornography does still exist on the Internet mainly through web sites, but it is in my experience of limited scale and scope. Anyway, there is really very little market potential for commercial initiatives, because so much material is available free of charge through the newsgroups.”
And what about those 2,000,000 kids a year involved in the industry?
In their report ‘The Trade in Child Pornography’, Jan Schuijer and Benjamin Rossen, came up with the highest estimates of the number of children that were involved in the trade as being 10,370, this figure including everything from clothed children to the nastier end of the market, of which most were available free of charge. They arrived at this figure by counting the number of children appearing in photos or movies, which they admitted is probably as much as twice as high as it is likely to be, through double counting, where the children had changed their appearance or have simply aged between one shoot and another.
Of these, from their figures, some 1,918 children actually took part in any sexual contact from oral sex through to BDSM. Which is around the same number as those who have appeared in naturist poses.
These numbers were pretty much confirmed by Max Taylor who said: “In the sample we have of over 50,000 pictures from the Internet, which we have downloaded over the past 2 years, we roughly estimate over 2,000 boys and girls are shown in explicitly sexual pictures, and a similar number in pictures involving erotic naked posing. We estimate that about 85% of the sexually explicit photographs we have and about 20% of the nude erotic posing photographs are over 10-15 years old.” (that is from 10 to 15.)
He went on to say that his team was uncovering only 1 or 2 new sets of images per month. It is worth noting that pornographic images, of all types not just child porn, tend to be in sets. For example they may be a sequence of a child undressing or may be ‘grabs’ taken from a video clip – it is rare that only single images of a child exist unless they are very old, which it must be noted the majority of child porn images are, some of which go back 50 years.
In addition the overwhelming majority of what is termed child pornography in the US and UK is actually perfectly legal in the rest of the world, belying the ‘fact’ that there is a consensus on the prohibition of child pornography.
As Attorney Lawrence Stanley who did considerable research into this issue confirms: “... law enforcement officials have exaggerated the incidence of possession of child pornography by including depictions of sixteen and seventeen year-olds and by labeling as 'child pornography' a wide range of materials, including sex education books such as ‘Show Me’, artwork, postcards, naturist magazines and films, and other material depicting nudity rather than sexual conduct.”
There may well be a consensus on the principle of child porn, but there is little consensus on what constitutes child porn.
Suffice to say for the moment that real child pornography is and has always been a very tiny industry and has never made any money, certainly not the sums that have been bandied around by the law enforcement officers. Furthermore, most of the images that are currently available on the internet and have been used in successful prosecutions are of adolescents involved in naturist activities or kids posing in swimming costumes, cheerleader outfits and the like.
In other words there never was an industry as such, the actual numbers of children who were really abused being relatively miniscule, and the number of images involved in sexual contact being produced has substantially diminished and so the panic has very little foundation.
However, there is now a huge bureaucracy, stuffed full of people, employed in the ‘industry’ and it would be politically very difficult to get rid of them. In addition to the estimated 50,000 police officers, there are also a similar number employed in the FBI, customs etc. And that is not counting the huge numbers of people in the charities and NGOs (there are 21 NGOs operating in Bangkok alone). Conservative estimates put the total number of people employed in the industry at over 250,000, with dozens more joining every month. Contrast that number with the 2,000 kids that have EVER been abused to make child porn.
It is precisely for his reason - not the mealy mouthed excuses trotted out by the politicians and the rest of the bureaucracy about viewers becoming doers - that the laws have become increasingly more restrictive, creating an ever-widening circle of images, even text, that fall within the prohibition; and is the reason why simple possession has been ramped up to become a crime exceptum. There are just not enough people making the stuff to justify a bureaucracy of this size, so they had to find other targets to justify the massive expense. Just like with drugs – which after all were only criminalized to provide employment for the army of people employed during Prohibition - a juggernaut has been created that the politicians will have problems stopping. Yet even now, with some political will, it’s not too late.
But it soon will be.
And this is costing society dearly. Purely in monetary terms each possession charge in the US costs around $1,000,000 to detect and prosecute in police, forensics and court costs alone (the figures are similar in the UK where Operation Ore cost slightly more per successful conviction at a little under £1,000,000 each, including those given a caution) and that doesn’t include the massive overhang of the rest of the bureaucracy plus the associated costs of incarceration, monitoring, etc. Not to mention the damage caused to society by the division and hate that is engendered by the emotive rhetoric and the brutal police methods. As Thomas Sowell once said: “What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race.”
And all in order to solve a problem that never really was.
*Editor. Interesting point that this is exactly what the CWCC in Cambodia has been
accused of – kidnapping and holding against their will women and children whom they ‘rescue’ to get the figures up for funding.
**Editor. This could be the origin of the urban legend that there are child porn images of babies being abused while still attached to the umbilical cord. And may have contributed to the ‘snuff movie’ legend he mentions also.
Important information
Anyone affected by the issue of child pornography, especially one accused of accessing it, should be aware that the recent major police campaigns of Landslide, Ore, Amethyst and others are collapsing due to police corruption. There are a number of stories HERE.
Child pornography
Background reading
Mitsubishi abandons employee
Henry goes to prison
Dangers from your hard drive
Operations Ore and Amethyst are discredited
The Athlone story - State of malice
Irish judge in child porn allegations
Who did it? When child porn appears.
Operation Ore on the verge of collapse
Alabama man’s four year wait in Limbo
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