The unprecedented agreement, worked out by victims’ lawyers in cooperation with diocese financial officer Monsignor John Brenkle, is the most substantive sign of change yet in a diocese rocked by an escalating series of sexual and financial scandals. Over the past decade the Santa Rosa Diocese and its insurers have paid out at least $6 million in settlement fees to victims of sexual abuse by priests.

A monsignor, convicted of molestation, is in prison; one priest fled the country after repeated molestation charges; another committed suicide. On Friday, a former diocesan priest and youth ministry leader was charged with rape and committing lewd acts against minors in a series of complaints dating back several decades.

The situation reached a climax in June when Bishop George Patrick Ziemann, the diocese’s charismatic prelate, resigned amid charges of sexual harassment and coercion brought by a priest, Father Jorge Hume Salas, who had himself been dismissed after being accused of stealing from church collections. Ziemann, who resigned July 21 after Hume Salas filed a lawsuit against him, at first denied the sexual relationship. Then, confronted with taped and DNA evidence, he admitted it, but insisted the sex was consensual. Hume Salas’ lawsuit is now in pre-trial preparation.

In the weeks and months that followed, it was revealed that, on Ziemann’s watch, the diocesan funds had been raided to the tune of some $16 million. Money collected for school construction, parish maintenance, missions and church charities was instead used for payments to abuse victims, expansion programs, new hires and high-risk investments that left the diocese nearly bankrupt.

Ziemann, exercising his Fifth Amendment rights against possible criminal charges, has refused to talk to police or the media. Monsignor Thomas Keys, the diocese’s former high-profile finance officer, has gone into seclusion. More bad news emerges almost monthly — most recently the revelation that Ziemann and Keys, desperate to recoup their losses, invested $5 million in a Luxembourg-based firm that was under investigation for fraud by the U.S. government. To recover the missing funds, the diocese has joined a class-action lawsuit.

And yet the scandal may in the end show the way to a revitalized diocese and church. March has seen a remarkable number of apologies from church leaders, ranging from Pope John Paul II’s historic request for forgiveness of the church’s failings over centuries, to a small, moving ceremony held in Oakland, Calif., last weekend, where Bishop John Cummins publicly apologized to sexual-abuse victims in his diocese.

In the Diocese of Santa Rosa, leaders agreed to hold a cathartic series of town meetings, chaired by Brenkle, to let Catholic laymen as well as women, nuns and priests air their fear and anger. I attended one last month, and witnessed both the pain and the surprising healing power the scandals have unleashed within one corner of the church.

“When this news broke, I was devastated,” Brenkle told a standing-room-only crowd in the gym of St. Eugene’s Cathedral in Santa Rosa. “I didn’t believe the accusations against the bishop. Then the bishop came out, admitted his sexual misconduct, and we priests were just shocked.”

A cherub in his late 60s, gentle, avuncular and smart, Brenkle is probably the most respected priest in the diocese. In 1992, when the previous bishop left an already troubled ministry, 43 priests of this diocese sent a letter to the Vatican requesting that Brenkle be appointed their new bishop.

But Pope John Paul II, uncomfortable with the turbulence of democracy, looked instead to the nearest ranking hierarch, Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles. Mahony sent Ziemann, one of his auxiliary bishops, to Santa Rosa. Former Los Angeles clergy now occupy the dioceses of Fresno, Stockton, Monterey, San Francisco, Orange County, Boise and Salt Lake City; several of these bishops are also Mahony’s former classmates.

Now Brenkle, the man whose appointment might have prevented this mess, has been handed a mop and told to clean it up. The irony isn’t lost on him.

“As things began to unfold, I found myself angry,” he told the town meeting. “I felt duped, lied to and manipulated. Anger was followed by guilt — what could I have done to prevent this? There were red flags, I could have pursued it. We would go to a meeting where we would be introduced to new people, very able most of them, brought in to take care of the various ministries. We were told, ‘We have the money.’”

Brenkle recalled being contacted by someone from the Campaign for Human Development, the fund-raising arm of the Catholic Church’s charities, and told that some $90,000 that had been reported collected hadn’t been passed on. “Why did I not pursue that? Well, I had other things to do in my life. My own parish to administer. I trusted the bishop.”

Then San Francisco Archbishop William Levada called him about the emerging scandal. “When the archbishop says he needs to see you, you know you’re in trouble. He sat in my office, he said it would take a day or two or a week of my time. Even he didn’t know the extent of this. What has happened here has sent shock waves through the dioceses of the nation. We could prove to be a model for other dioceses.”

There was rueful audience laughter at this.

But Brenkel urged the audience to keep their faith, and work to reform their church. “I’ve been through some wonderful times with this diocese, and I’m not going to bail out now that we’re going through some difficult times. That’s life. You go through good times and bad times, and you grow through both of them.”

Brenkle was followed by Jim Dillon, a lean, silver-haired retired bank executive and chairman of the newly created diocese financial council. On this night he was charged with making sense of the numbers.

“I knew Bishop Ziemann,” Dillon began, like a polished finance officer making a boardroom presentation. “I was impressed with his charisma. I had a tough time accepting what had happened.”

“What happened” was a case study in bad management. “The reason we haven’t been more forthcoming with information is that we don’t know ourselves where some of the money went,” Brenkle told me in an interview. Only Ziemann and Keys know this, and there is a feeling that more bad news could come at any time.

But Dillon tried to make sense of the existing bad news anyway. “Generally, there were too many ministries, too many employees, no concern for financial responsibility,” Dillon explained. “For eight years, there was no budget. The chancery office was running an annual deficit in excess of two-and-a-half million dollars.

“The money all went to operating expenses. There were no vacation homes, no Cadillacs, no expensive gifts to people. It all went to ministries. Another $3.5 million went to pedophilia victims and counseling — $2 million was covered by insurance; $5.5 million in all.”

“The bishop had a discretionary account, linked to the consolidated account,” Dillon continued. This system, the brainchild of Keys, consolidated funds from more than 40 parishes in a single bank account, to which the bishop had access. “The bishop wrote checks on it. Last year alone, he wrote checks in excess of $970,000.” The audience gasped at this. “A total of $2 million went through the bishop’s discretionary account.”

The roll call continued, like the sad courtroom biography of a bankruptcy. The priests’ retirement fund, $2.5 million, gone; $790,000 in cemetery funds borrowed and not paid back. Even the dead have been ripped off.

What looms ahead, Dillon concluded, is a capital campaign to raise money to repay the loans from other dioceses, with a goal of $15 million. Dillon’s tone and posture changed from cool appraising banker to impassioned Catholic layman. “There is no ‘we’ and ‘they’ anymore. The people who created this are no longer in control of the finances of this diocese. The laity’s voice will be heard. We will need the efforts of everybody. We are the ‘we.’ We are the body of Christ.”

How aware was Ziemann of what he was doing? A friend of mine, a lawyer who has represented clients accused of misappropriating money, says they always insist it was borrowing, a temporary use of funds they fully intended to pay back.

What did the bishop tell himself? How did he justify to his own conscience what was happening? “I don’t know what it was,” Brenkle told me, “a need to be loved, maybe.” Or perhaps his family heritage: Ziemann comes from one of the most prominent Catholic families in Southern California, a heritage of papal knighthoods and Pasadena’s Millionaires Row. For the important things — education, the church, good works — money can always be found.

Ziemann worked out of an office that was a converted garage, drove himself around in an Oldsmobile Cutlass, spoke fluent Spanish, would show up wherever people requested him and was undemanding of ecclesiastical ring-kissing or ass-kissing. And he drove his diocese into financial ruin. My kingdom is not of this world. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. Money is not a problem when you have contempt for it. It’s easy to give away when it’s not yours.

As Brenkle and Dillon laid out the financial sins of what that night seemed like the world’s largest dysfunctional family, its sons and daughters were lining up behind microphones, waiting for a chance to speak. Some had been waiting years for this: The church that would not listen had promised that they would at last be heard, in public. The line stretched beyond each mike all the way up both aisles, to the standees lining the walls.

The first speaker was a woman, an abuse survivor, probably in her early 30s, heavy-set, round-shouldered as if under a burden of indignation and grief. In a voice thick with anger, moist with emotion, she asked “why this diocese acts with threats, oppression and condescending replies in response to a person who has been abused by a priest. The reality is that the priest-perpetrators are not blamed, the victims are.”

There was silence at the public enunciation of a painful truth. According to Richard Sipe, the Johns Hopkins therapist and former Benedictine priest whose Sipe Report is the most thorough study on the subject, the church has typically taken three steps when confronted with abuse allegations: First, leaders try to avoid a public scandal. Then the priest is removed, and third, the diocese in question will find therapy for the priest. Consideration for the victims has come only after a chain of successful lawsuits.

In the last two decades, the Catholic Church and its insurers in North America have paid out over a $1 billion in settlements to victims of clergy abuse, and some of the clerical responses have been appalling. Children have been characterized as seducers, their sufferings dismissed as harmless maturing experiences, their parents blamed for not keeping closer track of their kids.

In what has become a stock response to each new incident, church spokesmen profess shock, urge forgiveness for the all-too-human sinfulness of the accused priest and urge Catholics not to lose their faith. The accusers are often humiliated by lawyers. Up to now, there has never been an admission of wrongdoing or an apology from the church. There are sound legal reasons for this. It is also a moral outrage.

“Church leaders,” the woman testified, “are ruled by fear. A priest said to me, ‘Ignorance is bliss.’ I say, knowledge is power.”

There was thunderous applause at this.

A Latino man, indignant, stood at the mike and demanded, “These people have to come back and answer for their deeds! You didn’t find them out!”

Another indignant parishioner asked why the Vatican won’t help the diocese out financially, since Ziemann was the pope’s appointee. The beleaguered Brenkle said he couldn’t imagine that Rome would come to the financial rescue of a diocese in wealthy Northern California. “They have much more desperate situations on their hands,” he noted.

That worked to calm the crowd, as people realized their diocese has no monopoly on human anguish.

Asked when and how a new bishop would be chosen, Brenkle could only say one thing with certainty. “The next bishop,” he told the audience, “definitely won’t be chosen by the cardinal in Los Angeles.”

Another woman in her 30s, chunky and depressed, stood at the mike. “No one, no priest, has ever said, ‘We are sorry, we are responsible for the way you can’t walk into a church anymore.’ All I want is my damn therapy being paid for. It’s done some good, or else I’d never be able to come here and say this. Maybe, someday, I’ll be able to go to church again.”

Brenkle, shaken, grew even more soft-spoken. “It’s trite to say this, but I am sorry. I truly am, for what you’ve suffered. And for the others who have suffered too.”

“The first seminary had the greatest teacher of all. There were 12 seminarians. Two of them failed their teacher. One of them, Peter, came back. The other, Judas, hanged himself. One in six. We all have terrible choices to make.”

The town meeting, scheduled for an hour and a half, had lasted three. The crowded gym was stifling on a cold night. The audience stood and drifted off into the night, into clear air, high from the bracing experience of a non-hierarchical church: scruffy, teeming, messy, democratic. A church that is changing, whether it wants to or not.

The parish where this current scandal began, St. Mary of the Angels in Ukiah, now has a lay pastor, a woman. The priest in charge, burned out by the scandal and its aftermath, has resigned. The parish in Eureka that continuously hemorrhaged money is now operating independently of the diocese. And most recently, through Brenkle, the church has apologized for wrongdoings it attempted to ignore before.

What no appeals to conscience, scripture, reason and logic could change, necessity is turning into a fait accompli. The church of pay, pray and obey is gone from this part of the country, and all the thundering edicts of aging patriarchs will not bring it back.

The Catholic Church is being revolutionized, one person at a time.

That his torturers are women — three, to be precise — is certain to raise eyebrows on America’s sensitive shores, as it did in Britain, though it’s worth noting that Thomson isn’t the first one to swivel the genders of Sadean stock; Quebecois writer Anne Dandurand toyed with the same premise, and with the same chilled, edgy language, in her 1985 short story “Histoire de Q,” kindling a minor ruckus in Canadian literary circles. Unlike Dandurand’s, however, Thomson’s story revolves less around the obvious turnabout in roles — an easy conceit that’s hard to take seriously (can the Stockholm syndrome manifest itself as an erect penis? etc.) — than it does around its far less obvious and very serious aftermath. Thus, what seems at first glance an exercise in subverted prurience blossoms into a disturbing fable of abuse, which begins, essentially, at the moment the women ditch their victim in that chipper Amsterdam suburb.

Though the city raises its head infrequently, like some drowsily sated beast, Amsterdam proves a perfect match for Thomson’s tale. An American writer would no doubt have chosen Los Angeles or, perhaps, in a more classical mood, New Orleans — both among our tawdrier national corners, with their underbellies of seediness, their moist incarnations of the louche. Thomson’s setting bolsters his novel’s unlikely premise, so that when the protagonist, a handsome, even beautiful English dancer, ducks down to the street to purchase some cigarettes for his girlfriend and shortly finds himself abducted as a sex slave, it’s almost believable.

The qualifier is important here. Despite the crystalline dignity of Thomson’s prose, the scenes of sexual impoundment don’t always ring quite true (more qualifiers because, yes, I’m hedging here); they waver between dark mischief and fetish-porn clichi. The protagonist’s complex responses, however, are splendidly drawn, ranging from anger to appeasement to a sort of empathetic assent:

He had reached a point where he had begun to feel as if his fate was no more or less than he deserved. There was nothing random or accidental about what had happened to him. There was nothing unlucky about it. All those years of performing on stage — exhibiting himself … What was dance if it was not exposure of the body? It was as though he had advertised himself.

It’s this pathology that prevents the protagonist, once he is released, from disclosing his experience. There are parallels here with female rape victims whose feelings of piercing guilt and shame prevent them from reporting their assaults, but also important distinctions: For one, the protagonist sometimes gleans a prickly pleasure from his imprisonment — “a feeling that lurked behind the others, shadowy and sly — insidious: a feeling of excitement”; and also, not insignificantly, he achieves repeated orgasms, something few female rape victims report. He feels so much like an accomplice that he allows his girlfriend to leave him, thinking that he’s had “some kind of affair, some perverted liaison,” rather than reveal the truth. “I let her believe what she wanted to believe,” he says. (Thomson employs the third person only for the internment scenes, engendering a sophisticated distance in them.) “It saved me from having to tell the story. It meant I could pretend that none of it had ever happened.”

The five-year span that follows his girlfriend’s desertion is intricate, suspenseful and frequently surprising. The shabby elegance of Thomson’s prose and the knotty, purgatorial psychology of his plot draw easy comparisons to Graham Greene (which I’m not the first critic to make). Abandoning his dance career, the protagonist embarks on an around-the-world odyssey under the delusion that perpetual motion might cure him. Back in Amsterdam, he undertakes a dissipating sexual odyssey, bedding hundreds of women in an oftentimes vicious hunt for his former captors, combing through bodies for the few details he remembers — a small round scar on one captor’s hip, the blunt, nail-bitten fingers of another, the other’s waistless form and curious red hair. Yet the endless tangle of flesh yanks him further and further from his goal:

The bodies of the women I had seen in the white room five years ago were beginning to merge with the bodies of the women I had been with since. They were being super-imposed, one on top of the other … It was as if I had taken a slide of each woman I had been with, put them in a pile, in chronological order, and then, by shining a light down through the pile, tried to see the three women who were lying at the bottom.

Worse yet, he discovers, he has morphed into a kind of captor himself:

I had become as monstrous as the women I was looking for. That was their effect, their legacy. Like vampires, they had turned me into another version of themselves.

And that, of course, is one of the grimmest elements of sexual abuse: its tendency to echo endlessly within its victims, to reproduce itself, cancerlike, in their future relations. Thomson’s portrayal of those festering aftershocks, coupled with his spare but nourishing meditations, is the crux of his book’s sublimity. Soaring beyond the lurid contortions of his premise, he expertly toe-steps the darkest edges of human consciousness in this troubling and unforgettable novel.

Immediately after the killing, there were some perfunctory expressions of pity and a resurrection, now almost reflexive, of the gun debate: Kids shouldn’t have them; guns should have safety latches; schools should have metal detectors even for kids who are 6 years old.

But where were the 100 volunteers — before or after the tragedy? Where were the people who recognized this boy’s misery, who would hold him so that he might heal, so that he wouldn’t suffocate from neglect?

Amazingly, there has been very little public outrage about the child neglect in this story, other than a finger-wagging condemnation of the boy’s parents and uncle for allowing him access to guns and drugs. And that is frightening, because this is a story about neglect. The gun is merely a prop, an attention-grabbing finale to an epic tale of mistreatment and pain.

The easy response, the knee-jerk reaction that temporarily quiets that nagging feeling that the world is intrinsically unsafe for our children, is to assign blame. We can point at those bad parents, who obviously screwed up, and then feel good, because we are better parents. We do not allow our children to roam free in a crack house in a bad neighborhood.

The distance we put between ourselves and those people is created out of a lie that prevents us from getting angry enough to do anything about child neglect and abuse. We can dismiss the abusers as criminals, and we might even convince ourselves that there’s nothing we can do to keep them from hurting their children.

But we can’t escape the fact that the way their children are raised affects our children, too. If we understand that rescuing pilot whales is, ultimately, an act of self-preservation, why can’t we make the connection with our own species?

We are letting abuse happen. Children are abused and neglected because we are unwilling to spend the money on programs to prevent it, and because we look away when we see a kid who is hostile and violent or extremely withdrawn — two classic signs of a kid who is being hurt.

We are surprised and horrified when we hear about the worst cases: the child locked in one room for several years, the father who poured gasoline on his daughter and set her afire in the desert. But it’s hard to conceive of how this applies to us, until something like the Michigan shooting grabs the headlines.

I am amazed and I am devastated by what people don’t know, or don’t want to know, about child abuse. Around 1 million children are known to be abused or neglected in this country each year. Yet people are shocked when I tell them the things I see as a child advocate: broken bones, fractured skulls, cigarette burns, belt marks across a 4-year-old’s face, sexual abuse of a 3-year-old, a 1-year-old in a coma because of abuse.

As I confront these things, it’s not the physical injuries that startle me; it’s the look in these battered children’s eyes. They don’t want to look at me; they don’t want to trust me, or any adult. They don’t see the world as safe or peaceful or interesting. They see it as terrifying.

And I see it as terrifying, too, because there are so few people invested in ending child abuse and helping to heal the victims. We criticize Child Protective Services for not investigating reports or for dropping the ball, but every year in state legislatures across the country, child advocates struggle to get funding for more and better-trained CPS workers — and fail. There are not enough foster families, social workers and volunteers to work with these children because it’s a tough job and dollars are scarce. We have not made this a national priority.

And while these needs are monumental, they still address child abuse and neglect only after it happens. Even if we could drum up money for more and better people to identify and address the effects of child abuse, it would do little for prevention. We need to find out why it happens — a bigger question with a much more complex answer.

Poverty, youth and lack of education are big factors in abuse and neglect, as are drug abuse, parents who were victims themselves and those moments of insanity and rage that every parent feels from time to time. None of these are issues that can’t be addressed through better emotional, educational and financial support of parents and children. Parents need help in dealing with whatever demons are plaguing them. By helping them, we spare their children.

In every case I’ve seen, a little help in just one area probably would have made the difference. In Michigan, this little boy’s mother was evicted and his dad was in jail, which meant the kids went to live with their uncle in a crack house. I wonder what would have happened if someone (the landlord, a neighbor, a friend) had looked into where the mom would go after being evicted and what was going to happen to the kids.

Where is our passion for other human beings? Why does it seem easier to lavish it on pilot whales? We need to identify with the parents who hurt, or might hurt, their children. We need to find the courage to say, “What do you need? I’ll hold some of the crap you’re carrying so it doesn’t get too heavy for you.”

When we see a kid who’s being a pain in the ass, like the boy in Michigan apparently was, or who is too quiet and afraid, we need to stop thinking that it’s none of our business; we need to stop dismissing the kid as a brat or a freak, and find out what’s going on.

The Michigan shooting is a perfect opportunity for some good old-fashioned public fury and some private transformation. We need to confront the ugly reality of neglect and feel an urgency to address it, because it affects all of us. And then we have to make protecting children the most important thing we do.

We need to believe that all families are connected, and that we have a responsibility to other parents to be aggressive in reaching out to them when they need help, in making sure the services they need are there and in helping them be good to their kids.

It is easier — or at least no more demanding — than standing waist-deep in water with your arms around a whale.

The customer agrees to drop everything and run over, but then doesn’t show, forcing the undercover police to cool their heels for six hours before giving up. Later the cops do nab the suspect, who says the photos were taken by the kids’ uncle who thought the children’s play with the sausages was “funny.” The Burbank police decide to let it go with a warning laced with disgust: There’s nothing “funny” about photos like these, photos that are indecent, degenerate and, next time, criminal.

As a script written for the Keystone Kops, this much ado about sausages scenario would be funny. But it is a true story. It is a sorry saga about our confused desires when it comes to kids and sex, and the way these collective desires are reflected in our failure to clearly define and execute the laws governing child pornography. This black comedy set in Burbank proves a scary point: At this time there is no way to differentiate — legally — between a family snapshot of a naked child and child pornography.

Not that photo labs don’t try. They do, and every now and then they light upon (or concoct) what they take to be a case of child pornography. There are about 10 cases in the last dozen years that have emerged in the press. Some are worthy of mention here, mostly because they weren’t worthy of attention when they occurred:

• William Kelly was arrested in Maryland in 1987 after dropping off a roll of film that included shots his 10-year-old daughter and younger children had taken of each other nude.
• David Urban in 1989 took photos of his wife and 15-month-old grandson, both nude, as she was giving him a bath. Kmart turned him in and he was convicted by a Missouri court (later overturned).
• A gay adult couple in Florida decided to shave their bodies and snap their lovemaking, convincing a Walgreens clerk that one of them was a child. They are suing the Fort Lauderdale police.
• More recently, Cynthia Stewart turned in bath-time pictures of her 8-year-old daughter to a Fuji film processing lab in Oberlin, Ohio. The lab contacted the local police, who found the pictures “over the line” and arrested the mother for, among other things, snapping in the same frame with her daughter a showerhead, which the prosecution apparently planned to relate somehow to hints of masturbation.

Even though the number of arrests is not large and the circumstances seem ridiculous, this photo lab idiocy is a serious matter: It puts all of us at risk, and it significantly erodes free speech protection by insisting that a photograph of a child is tantamount to molestation. Since it is what is outside the frame (the intention of the photographer, the reaction of the viewer) that counts legally, we are actually encouraged to fantasize an action in order to determine whether or not this is child pornography.

Every photo must pass this test: Can we create a sexual fantasy that includes it? Such directives seem an efficient means for manufacturing a whole nation of pedophiles.

The laws, whether state or federal, are inevitably firm-jawed when it comes to meting out punishment to child pornographers. But they seem uncertain both in what it is they want to put an end to and how far they want to reach into our home photo albums to do it.

In the great sausage caper, the photo lab operator and the Burbank police acted as our representatives to decide whether pictures of children and sausages constitute child pornography. This suggests that they have a clear idea of what a child is and that they know porn when they see it. What this also means is that we have a system that allows criminal conduct to be determined by just about anybody.

So, how do I know which kid pictures I can take to Wal-Mart, and how does the Wal-Mart photo guy know when to call the police about my pictures? The short answer is that there is no way I can know because there is no way he can know.

Some states require that photo labs report any photo that they deem suspicious to the police while others do not, but none give much help in explaining what suspicious photos of children actually look like. State law on child pornography is murky at best, and it varies from state to state. And when a photo lab sends its material to another state for developing, federal laws (which may differ from the state laws, but are equally murky) come into play.

In the absence of clear jurisdictional authority, much less clear laws, anyone snapping pictures of kids and wanting to avoid the slammer might decide to simply ask about the policies of their local labs and the corporations that direct them. How do they separate those who are simply charmed by their naked kids from those who seek to charm others for profit?

I expended no little energy trying to unearth the guidelines from the corporate headquarters of photo developing giants. I may as well have tried to get to the bottom of Cosa Nostra rub-out policies by making a few calls. I did discover that the world of photo developing is surprisingly small and, perhaps not so surprisingly, secretive.

When one talks to people at the top, as I did, one finds a penetrating and pervasive fear of public exposure. My sources promised to speak only on guarantee of anonymity. Too many lawsuits are pending and too many threats of others simmer to allow policy issues to be made public, said a top lawyer at one of the nation’s largest photo developing companies.

Still, according to all my sources (which include executives on the corporate level and also five local photo-lab people incautious enough to spill the beans), the correct procedures for handling questionable photographs are never clear and they vary — even within the same corporation — according to state law. They do not pertain to erotic pictures of adults unless they appear to depict rape or some other illegal activity. (Or unless one of the adults could be mistaken for a child.)

Kids are different. Naked kids under the age of 5 or 6 are probably OK, so long as nothing else in the picture invites suspicion. Nudity in older children may be a problem — or maybe not. It is up to the lab person or a supervisor to consult his or her own sense of propriety and moral sensitivities, as well as any rough-and-ready training that has been given in how to determine whether a photo constitutes child pornography.

Actually, given that the focus of the law has shifted from the photo to the reaction of the viewer, the wise technician will consult his or her loins: A turn-on means porn.

In any case, it seems obvious that only a society under great stress, wanting to look at kids’ bodies and blame it on somebody else, would tolerate dissemination of its policing functions to photo development clerks. We put photo labs in the position of resolving a massive cultural confusion that is both vicious and duplicitous.

No one, of course, is allowed to say that improper snapshots are not a problem — much less that child pornography in all forms is nothing but an urban legend. Nevertheless, according to state police officials in California, there is no commercially produced child pornography in this country and hasn’t been for some time. The risks of making it, they say, are simply too great.

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.

Even so, one might argue that amateurs are pros-in-the-making and that the problem of distribution is not solved by such a distinction. But as Philip Stokes, a photographer and senior research fellow at Nottingham Trent University, points out, although it may be true that somebody guilty of assault on a child has nude photos of children, that does not allow us to reverse the argument and say that possession of such photos means someone is contemplating the act. One might as well assume, he says, that anyone possessing antique magazines is on the road to burglary.

The truth is that true research in this area is impossible, given that it’s illegal to look at anything that is or might be child pornography. As a result, nobody knows exactly what child pornography is, what forms it takes, where it is, how much of it exists — or even if it exists. We seem happy that nobody knows: That way we can take our fantasies, project them onto phantom demons (the child pornographers) and feel righteous.

As for kiddie porn developed by mainstream photo labs, I would bet that it hardly exists at all. Oh sure, you may be able to find a case or two, but, allowing for a certain hyperbole on my part, I would say that we are off on another loud ride into fairyland, duplicating our earlier trips into satanic ritual abuse and recovered memory accusations.

We know that kids are not harmed by family snapshots or any other kind of photography this side of snuff films and photographs that document actual cases of assault, rape and other forms of violent coercion. So when was it, exactly, that the law lost the ability to tell the difference between a family snapshot and kiddie porn?

The latest wave of confusion comes from two developments in the ’80s and early ’90s: New laws were passed to differentiate child porn from unapologetic adult hardcore porn, and a new philosophy of pornography emerged that insisted that a potentially lurid photo can be considered not just illegal but a criminal assault on its subject.

We owe the latter assertion to the lamentably influential anti-porn feminists Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. They argued that porn (originally adult heterosexual porn) constituted not just image but action — action identical to sexual assault that is repeated each time the photo is distributed or viewed. (They did not, however, bother to define “pornography”; they assumed we all knew it when we saw it, which, in turn, ensured that we could never really know when we were not seeing it.)

Child protection experts used these arguments to redefine activities that looked vaguely pedophilic as criminal actions. Child pornography became tantamount to murder. Lloyd Martin, the infamous LAPD officer who was considered a national expert on the dangers to children throughout the ’80s, popularized the equation. Any form of pedophilic activity, he announced, is “worse than homicide.”

I think I’d rather my uncle take a picture of me with any number of sausages than kill me, but the real question is: Why would we make such comparisons? Why does a nude kid with a sausage make us think of murder? What leads us to feel that family photos of naked kids might demand attention? What are we criminalizing? What are we protecting? Can’t we tell the difference between a photo and an action? Even if the photos seem, to some people and to some degree, erotic, so what? Can’t we sense the erotic without acting on it? Why do we pretend that photo lab operators and cops are experts in the interpretation of images and the erotic impulses of those who record them and those who look at them?

The law provides no answers. In fact, we have made the key terms in operative legal statutes so vague that we can hardly be certain that any photo is clearly pornographic or, more to the point, not pornographic.

In 1982 (N.Y. vs. Ferber), child pornography, as yet undefined, was declared
to have no artistic significance and to be indefensible on those grounds.

In 1984, child pornography was, for the first time, distinguished from adult
pornography in federal law and defined as the “lascivious exhibition of genitals” in an underage subject.

By 1989 (Mass. vs. Oakes), “nudity with lascivious intent” was added to the definition. (All of this, I should add, is a part of federal law, which comes into play only in cases of interstate activity. Otherwise it functions as no more than a set of suggestions for state laws, which vary widely and wildly.)

The inclusion of “intent” shifted attention from the photo itself to the motives of the photographer and even the receiver of the photo. As a result, more laws were needed to list the elements that might provide clues to the photographer’s intentions. Now such things as a “visually suggestive setting or pose,” “inappropriate attire considering the child’s age,” a suggestion of “sexual coyness,” an intent “to elicit sexual response in viewer” or the use of a photo, regardless of the photographer’s intent, are specified “factors” in making the determination as to whether or not a picture of a child can be considered pornographic.

And that’s not all. The subject need not be naked for a photograph to qualify as child pornography. In 1994, Janet Reno decreed: “Neither nudity or [sic] discernability of genitals through clothing is a required element of the offense.” It is also not clear whether child pornography needs to involve actual children. If the photo conveys the impression that a child is involved in lascivious photos, that may be good enough. So morphed and simulated photos may still be judged to have a devastating “secondary effect” by stimulating the public appetite for such photos.

The law leaves us in a fog surrounded by murk enveloped in blackness. Sometimes adults who look like kids are photographed lasciviously. Other times, what are clearly kids are pictured in what some regard as lascivious attire. New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani and many others were deeply shocked by a proposed Times Square billboard showing small boys in expensive underpants bouncing on a suitably expensive couch. He thought it might encourage lascivious thoughts — not in him but in pedophiles. Calvin Klein backed down and allowed the furor to give him the publicity the billboards were aimed at.

Makes one wonder. What would it take to produce a picture of a child that was indubitably not pornographic? Put another way, why do we declare some things innocent and some criminal, some cute and others disgusting?

Consider this: Within the same cultural climate that sees sausages, showerheads and sofas as erotic props, “Naked Babies,” a book of photographs of the same by Nick Kelsh with text by Anna Quindlen, is not just acceptable — it’s in its second printing. Quindlen’s prose — full of treacle and truism, bathos and balderdash — provides a sentimental counterpoint that negates any suspicions aroused by Kelsh’s rain of naked bodies: “Adults in the presence of a naked baby reach out their hands,” she oozes, “as though to warm themselves at the fire of perfection.”

But how exactly is it that nakedness is divine at one point and the desire to touch it an act of flat-out reverence when, a few years later on in the child’s life, nakedness becomes shameful and any adults reaching out hands to warm themselves at the fire of perfection will find themselves in manacles? According to Quindlen, a naked baby is “androgynous,” “sensual as anything but not sexual at all,” while “a boy, a girl — well, they are something else.”

I agree that children are at risk — but not from cameras. Children are put at risk by neglect, emotional and physical abuse, bad health care, lousy education, lack of hope. Even sexual abuse, which ranks low among their torments, is not a problem of stranger abductions, child pornographers, priests or scout masters; it’s a family problem. And we all know that. It’s so well-known it can, it seems, be ignored.

Even sexual abuse, though it commands our attention, is not, statistically, a highly significant form of child abuse. The National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse reports that 11 percent of reports to child protective agencies involve sexual abuse (a little higher than “other”), far below physical abuse (30 percent) and neglect (47 percent).

One almost wishes that what we call “abuse” were the only nightmare kids have to face. For instance, 500,000 kids a year are classified as “throwaways” by the FBI. They are not foster children nor runaways (there are even more of those), but kids who really are set adrift, kids who would like to stay somewhere if someone would let them. But nobody will.

And yet we hurl our outrage and our resources and our art-critic police headlong into solving the non-problem of improper snapshots. It’s a little like starting a campaign for flossing in the midst of the Black Death.

Our alarm at abuse through camera lenses is a clear instance of the way we substitute a trivial problem for a perilous one. It is also a clear instance of the confusion that drives us to do just that. We seem so obsessed by the need to distinguish sharply between kids and eroticism that we inevitably stir them together; meaning to put them in separate rooms, we provide secret passageways so they can visit. We say so often and loudly that there’s nothing erotic about kids that we cement the association.

We are so obsessed by the bodies of children and are so devoted to protecting those bodies that we construct a world where very nearly everyone (but us) is driven wild by the sight of a child. Though we treat people who are sexually aroused by children as monsters possessed by feelings altogether unknown to the rest of us, we also act as if they were everywhere.

We like to say that the child pornography business is enormous, a multibillion-dollar industry; that the Internet is crawling with pedophiles distributing kiddie porn as they go; that millions of children are sexually molested by adults.

At the same time, we act as though these predators are not of us, are none of us, are as unknowable and rare as werewolves. Pedophiles are everywhere and nowhere, common and freakish; above all, they act as scapegoats for our own confused desires. We enter into heated mock battles with them at the oddest places: day-care centers, Satanic sites, schoolrooms and now photo labs.

We would not find ourselves in the midst of such a collective mess if we did not, on many levels, collectively want to be there. We all gain from sideshows like photo lab stings. And what we gain is immunity from thinking our own feelings. If we blame others loudly enough, we need not look at our own hearts and desires. It is a Gothic world we create with simple villains (the pedophiles) and equally simple rescuers (us).

Jock Sturges, the art photographer who has spent years in court for his photographs of children, analyzes all this very clearly for us: “I had to pretend to be something that, quite frankly, I’m probably not, which is a lily-white, absolutely artistically pure human being. In fact, I don’t believe I’m guilty of any crimes, but I’ve always been drawn to and fascinated by physical, sexual and psychological change, and there’s an erotic aspect to that. It would be disingenuous of me to say there wasn’t.”

So shines an honest man in a weary world. We all should be drawn to and fascinated by the beautiful and the arresting, including beautiful and arresting children, without being terrified by the erotic aspect in our fascination. Admitting to an erotic attraction is not the same thing as admitting to rape or assault: We do not commonly attack what we love and we do not feel the need to act on every impulse. Finding something erotic does not drive us irresistibly to mount it. We could use more complexity in our thinking on this subject, more tolerance for difficulty. And a lot more honesty.

The price we allow our children to pay for our scapegoating cowardice is enormous. Our kids, caught in the middle of all this, don’t mind our snapping lenses, but they do mind the ghastly world we picture for them. It is a world filled with dangers around every curve, with safety only in non-pedophilic adults and our friends, the police. We ought to examine more searchingly if we are really doing all this for their good, if we really need to see the world this way, if we aren’t the ones afraid of the demons. Especially the demons inside us.

She married and had a baby boy. Her husband, seven years her senior, worked construction and was often out of town. Jenks worked part-time as a
waitress but money was tight. That was when things
got bad. “Right after I had the baby I had a hard time,” she says. “All my
friends went off to college, I had no support, I was 19 and I had weight problems.” Around this time, Valerie decided to enter therapy.

Before she did, she sought advice from other
women. They recommended Dr. Mark Stephenson, then affiliated with the Eastern Idaho Medical Treatment Center. Jenks, 20 at the time, went to her first session with her first husband. Her original reasons for going were a weight problem and alcohol abuse. “He asked if I knew anything about hypnosis and gave a brief description of what it would entail,” Jenks says. “I never went under hypnosis before, but my husband was there and, after all, this was a doctor who was supposed to be helping me.”

By the end of the first hypnotherapy session, Jenks came to believe that she’d been sexually abused not only by her family but also by friends and strangers. Jenks says she answered “yes” to many of Stephenson’s questions by tapping the index finger of her left hand.

“I had no belief I was molested by anyone. But it wasn’t a dream,” she says about being under hypnosis, during which time the doctor took notes or recorded what she was saying. “I was conscious and awake and knew what I was saying. When I’d ask how can I believe it, he would say, ‘Our memories are true.’

“I already suffered abuse, so I made myself vulnerable,” she says now. “I
was searching for answers and he offered the right ones. He made everything fit. I wanted to believe there were reasons for my weight problems, alcohol problems and depression.”

Over the course of six months, Jenks was led through a series of
so-called repressed childhood memories that included specific details of
being sexually molested. Meanwhile, her marriage began to crumble.
Already an introverted person, she cut off family and friends and
frequently considered suicide. She had nightmares of the sexual
abuse; she recounted them to her therapist. The doctor then drew out further memories, including one of her being a member of her grandparents’ satanic cult. She was led to believe she had helped torture and kill babies
and children. After six sessions, Jenks’ entire perception of her memory had been altered. Jenks claims that by asking repeated questions and coaxing “yes” or “no” answers from her, Stephenson was able to create pictures in her mind of events that haunt her to this day.

“His leading and guiding questions brought me to the conclusion that I had
been molested and raped by several family members,” she says.

Later that summer, Stephenson concluded that Jenks was having an affair with her father and diagnosed her with multiple personality disorder (MPD). Jenks claims this was an incorrect diagnosis spawned from the memories he was planting in her mind. But that wasn’t enough to get Jenks out of Stephenson’s office. The sessions reached a finale
when Stephenson asked Jenks to participate in a three-hour hypnosis session to unearth the object implanted in her mind that originally made her a satanic cult member.

Sound wacky enough for you? It was for Jenks. She stopped seeing Stephenson in August 1993. In the fall, she visited the doctor’s employer, the Eastern Idaho Medical Treatment Center, and made her complaint.

There, Jenks found out that several other patients of
Stephenson had the same stories. Shortly after, Stephenson was fired, although he was then rehired by the hospital due to a contract dispute. It wasn’t
until Jenks and two other former Stephenson clients filed a complaint with Idaho’s state licensing board that Stephenson’s activities came to light.

In November 1998 Jenks reached a modest out-of-court settlement with Stephenson, who, she says, changed her perception of her
childhood forever. She was ruled the victim of false memory syndrome (FMS), a sister epidemic to the widely publicized MPD. In FMS, using mostly hypnotherapy, mental-health practitioners recover so-called repressed memories from patients they believe are suffering from traumatic events they’ve blocked from their memories.

According to a new book by Joan Acocella, “Creating Hysteria: Women and the Myth of Multiple Personality Disorder,” 40,000 cases of MPD were reported between 1985 and 1995. According to the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, 92 percent of the people who have it are female; 74 percent are between the ages of 31 and 50; 31 percent have education beyond college; and 60 percent report memory of abuse prior to age 4.

In the past five years the number of reported cases has declined, but malpractice suits continue to fill courtrooms and women like Valerie Jenks are now telling their stories and seeking compensation. Sums of $11 million and more are being paid to victims and, most recently,
mental-health practitioners are being prosecuted. In September of this
year, a Wisconsin jury awarded $862,000 to a victim of a psychiatrist’s
incorrect recovered-memory and MPD diagnosis.

Acocella argues that the rise in recovered-memory treatment was aided by feminism and child-protection groups as well as by the belief that, as she says, “Childhood sexual abuse is very common, affecting about one-third of girls.”

Repressed memory syndrome (RMS) therapy is based on the idea that childhood traumatic events often
dictate emotional behavior in adulthood. As Elizabeth Loftus, Ph. D.,
professor of psychology and adjunct professor of law at University of
Washington, puts it, “Mental-health practitioners use techniques to dig out
allegedly buried trauma memories under the belief that they must be ferreted out to heal the patient.”

Jenks’ therapist used hypnotherapy to get at those memories. In his statement before the board of psychologists of the state of Idaho in 1996, Stephenson cited his paper, “Overcoming the Structure of Control,” in which he explains that patients can discover this structure through motor responses to questions (hence the finger movements).

“He was trying to get a response via body movement,” says Chuck Lloyd of
the Minneapolis firm Lindquist & Vennum. Lloyd was one of three lawyers who represented Jenks. “When he [Stephenson] didn’t get the answer he
liked he’d tap on the ‘yes’ finger.”

Stephenson’s technique used the concept of ideomotor response, or a
physical response to an idea, in which fingers are used to designate
“yes,” “no” and “I’m not sure” answers. At Jenks’ first session, the questions went from the innocuous (name, birthday) to the more significant (“Have you ever been sexually molested?”).

“The notion of hypnotherapy makes sense if you believe that we
store everything we hear or see,” says Pamela Freyd, Ph.D., of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation in Philadelphia. “But it makes no sense because that’s not how the memory works. These recovered memories are highly contaminated; they can be false because of the suggestions by the
therapist.”

New York therapist David Halperin, Ph.D., steers clear of
hypnotherapy. “The problem is the issue of suggestibility,” he says. “When a person is in a state of hypnosis, the question is, To what extent are they impressionable? Is it a reflection of the patient, or a reflection of what the hypnotist is bringing to the situation?” And yet Halperin, as do thousands of others, concedes: “Freud used hypnosis. A colleague of mine used it. It can be used as a relaxation technique, but suggestibility is much more part of the process, and the risks are greater.”

According to Freyd, most people treated for RMS are white and female, between 25 and 45. “All of them were distressed with something in their life to go into
therapy for the first place,” he says. “Some went after birth of a baby, some were
anxious about relationships, a lot of people got into this because they
were too fat, so people entered into therapy for a variety of reasons. But
if you turn to somebody for help, and they tell you you were abused, then
that stage is set.”

Attorneys are getting a big boost from the epidemic through
malpractice cases. Christopher Barden, a Minnesota psychologist and another of Jenks’ attorneys, has made a career of successfully suing therapists in MPD cases. Barden participated in one of the largest settlements in history in a psychotherapy negligence case when one of his clients, Patricia Burgus, received a $10.6 million settlement in November 1997.

Lloyd points out that big settlements generally occur in states such as Texas, where juries historically award big sums, as opposed to states such as Idaho, where juries tend to behave more conservatively.

Although media hype has waned, court cases and victims continue to crop up. America’s therapy community may be partly to blame. Also, in an atmosphere filled with inaccurate information and dramatic Hollywood reenactments, few laws govern how psychotherapists and mental-health practitioners operate. “In Washington, you can call yourself a therapist if you have $80 and take a test,” Loftus says. “The public is not at all educated on therapy. They can’t make distinctions.

“Because it wasn’t regulated, the crisis
erupted and these false accusations became widespread,” Loftus says.
“The regulation [of therapists] has, sadly, been accomplished through
litigation. Only after huge settlements that were leveled against
psychotherapists have insurers stopped paying.”

Acocella claims that many women who missed the boat on feminism found solace in their presumed mental dilemmas. “Many of these had the same grim lives as their mothers: early pregnancy, unkind husbands or boyfriends, boring jobs, little money, no education. The process helps to explain the great outbreak of female disorders in the last few decades. Many women, then, had reason to take shelter in multiple personality disorder. It restored their dignity; it gave them a career.”

Jenks is now working on a real career. She lives in Boise, Idaho, with her second husband and newborn. Her plans are to attend college and pursue journalism. Looking back, she says, “Before I met [Stephenson] I had a weight problem and guilty feelings. Now I’ve lost childhood memories and I have severe depression. I’ve lost a lot of time with my family. I’m never going to therapy again. Heavens, no.”