Why I need to see child porn

It's outrageous that academics and reporters like me can be thrown in prison for doing front-line research into pornography.

By Debbie Nathan

Aug. 25, 2006 | New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald looked at a lot of kiddie-porn Web sites recently while researching the front-page article he published last weekend about "child model" erotica. The kind of looking he did can get a journalist arrested, but Eichenwald isn't very worried. He told me as much in a series of e-mails. His lack of concern irks me, because when I stumbled on similar material earlier this year during my own research, I was terrified I'd be busted simply for doing my job as a member of the media. For a couple of days after my accidental viewing experience I was sleepless with fear. After that I still didn't rest well for a while.

But my second stage of insomnia came from anger. It infuriates me that the government prohibits reporters and other legitimate investigators from doing front-line research into child pornography. I'm not talking about obsessive coverage of John Mark Karr and JonBenet Ramsey, which was the spur for Eichenwald's piece. The reporting I'm talking about involves testing government claims about how prevalent child porn really is, and what makes an image pornographic in the first place. To get answers, investigators must look at illegal material –- lots of it. Those investigators must also be independent of the government. Otherwise the government can use our fear and loathing of kiddie porn to make false political claims. And to terrorize people like me.

Here's my story:

Last fall I started working on a book for young adults about pornography as a social issue. The publisher, a children's press in Toronto, asked for a short section on Internet child porn. I thought that was a good idea. Over the past two decades, I have done a lot of critical writing about baseless sex abuse scares in day cares and schools. Back in the Reagan era, law enforcement helped fuel the panic. One way was by claiming that hundreds of thousands of U.S. kids were involved in kiddie porn, and that the business earned billions of dollars annually. It took a while for the press to figure out that commercial child porn was virtually nonexistent by the 1980s. In fact, as researchers eventually discovered, the main manufacturer was the U.S. government, which produced and sold child-porn magazines for sting operations. The media was also slow to realize that many individuals, including mothers and fathers, were prosecuted for taking photos of their kids that were nothing more than innocent "baby on a bear rug" shots. I covered a couple of cases like that in the 1980s and 1990s. In both, prosecutors screamed "Porn!" on the nightly news, and only in trial or appellate courts did reporters finally have a right to examine the images. By then, people's lives had been ruined.

Because of these facts, there's been some doubt about the feds' more recent claims that child smut is epidemic on the Web. With my book assignment, I set out to do some research. I was especially interested in the fact that it's not illegal in the U.S. to make and post "morphed" images of children having sex. Morphing is something like cartooning: There's no real child being abused, so according to the law there's no crime. But how much child porn these days really is morphed? I was curious.

The best information I found was published five years ago. It came from Adult Video News, the online porn industry magazine consulted by all mainstream media who report on the trade. AVN said morphing wasn't happening much, and that the vast majority of kiddie-porn images on the Web were probably real kids. Chilling, but informative, so I poked through more AVN articles. I found one about a 16-year-old girl named Molly, whose mother created a Web site where subscribers could pay for photos of Molly dressed in swimwear and shorts. It sounded creepy but clearly not illegal. And it was from 2001, meaning Molly would now be 21. Too old to be a child model for people with strange desires, but did she still have a Web site? I typed in her URL.

There I found a new Molly, a 10-year-old, still wearing ordinary swimwear and street clothes, and posed much like JonBenet during her beauty-queen days. Again, creepy but not illegal. The new Molly linked to other "child model" sites. Assuming they'd be similar, I clicked again.

And that's when I hit dozens of grossly illicit pictures. Most showed little girls around 9 or 10 years old, in bikinis or lifted skirts with skimpy panties, their legs draped and spread so the camera focused on the crotch. U.S. law calls this "lascivious exhibition of the genitals." Since the early 1990s it's been classified as child porn, even if the genitals are clothed.

I almost fainted, but not from disgust at the depravity of making and displaying these pictures. After all, reporters see depravity all the time. Rather, I was consumed with fear of the U.S. government. Technically, according to federal statutes, just visiting a kiddie-porn site makes you a lawbreaker, because regardless of why you went there, the images end up in your hard drive. You "possess" child porn, which is a serious crime. You can notify the authorities. You can clean up your cookies and your cache. Still, you broke the law. The feds might excuse you, or they could arrest you. It's entirely up to them.

Next page: An award-winning journalist was tried, convicted and incarcerated