Child Pornography

Crime, Computers and Society

Ian O'Donnell, Claire Milner

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781843923565
• eBook ISBN: 9781135846350
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the enduring appeal of child pornography and its ramifications for criminal justice systems around the world. It is based on an extensive review of academic literature and newspaper coverage, a trawl of websites frequented by those with a sexual interest in children, a survey of how police investigate these offences, examination of prosecutors' decisions, and interviews with judges.

It provides a framework for understanding the contemporary nature of this problem, especially the harms it causes, its intimate relationship with new technologies and the challenges it poses to law enforcement authorities. The internet plays a pivotal role. Its sheer size, the anarchic way it grows, the lack of any boundaries to its expansion and its disregard for national borders make it a legal environment without parallel.

An unwavering focus on the threat of sexual abuse has contributed to the emergence of a context where routine dealings with children are viewed through a 'paedophilic' lens. This can have the unfortunate consequence of distracting attention from more urgent concerns (such as poverty and neglect), which make children vulnerable to sexual exploitation. In this way an emphasis on the sexualisation of children could be said to aggravate the problem that it sets out to address. The book:

• provides a comprehensive analysis of child pornography issues in all of their complexity, including legal, psychological, criminal justice and social perspectives.
• presents significant volume of original empirical data gathered from police, prosecutors and judges.
• includes new qualitative and quantitative information set against a background of shifting international developments. The analysis is explicitly comparative.
• draws on a variety of sources including support groups for paedophiles, newspaper coverage of court cases involving child pornography, victim testimony and police operations.

Part I

Understanding the Context

Chapter 1

The enduring appeal of child pornography

The history of child pornography is difficult to write. While the academic literature might be modest in size and of recent origin, the same cannot be said for the phenomenon it describes. Paintings depicting adult men engaging in sexual activities with young boys have been discovered among the remains of ancient Greek civilisation (Dover 1978) and the Romans were famously tolerant of pederasty (Veyne 1987). This indicates that the origins of such activity, and the desire to record it for future viewing pleasure, date back at least to Antiquity. The invention of the printing press in the middle of the fifteenth century meant that large-scale reproduction became possible. The first pages to be stamped with hot metal and ink were the books of the Bible. But erotic material soon followed and by the middle of the sixteenth century the amount of obscene literature in circulation caused such alarm that Pope Paul IV established the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of books forbidden by the church that was added to until 1966 (Lane 2001: 8, 98).

Examples of written pornography detailing sexual acts with children have survived from seventeenth-century France and England. One of the most successful erotic novels ever, John Cleland's Fanny Hill, or the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, was first published in 1749 and has been in print ever since, an edition appearing as a Penguin Classic in 2005. Part of the novel's enduring appeal may lie in the fact that the eponymous heroine was just past her fifteenth birthday when she began life as a prostitute. Tate (1990: 33–4) put it well when he observed that: ‘Almost since man discovered the ability to write or draw he has recorded the sexual abuse of children’.

The pornography industry did not really take off until the early nineteenth century when the introduction of the camera, and improved printing processes, allowed pornography to be produced in a volume capable of satisfying a mass audience. By the late 1800s pornography was widely available in England (Pearsall 1969: 364-392). For example, in 1874 London police raided the studio of Henry Hayler and confiscated over 130,000 indecent photographs. Hayler was a good businessman and the catalogues that illustrated his wares were widely circulated. This was a family concern with Hayler, his wife and two sons working on both sides of the camera. He was also well connected and managed to flee the country before his home was raided, probably on the basis of a tip-off (Hebditch and Anning 1988: 4–5).

In Victorian England, establishing a studio, making and marketing obscene photographs and avoiding scandal required money, a degree of common sense and good connections. This was a middle-class pursuit and the price of the product meant that purchasers were likely to be men of reasonable means. Looking at the early industry, Jenkins (2001: 31) observed that: ‘Often, these images sought a kind of respectability by portraying their subjects in classical and artistic poses, but the prominent display of the genitalia leaves little doubt about the erotic purpose of the works’. The case of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (whose pen name was Lewis Carroll) is often cited in this context. He photographed young girls naked or in various states of undress, though never in any sexual act. Some of his photographs found their way into late twentieth-century magazines and a number of paedophile organisations (e.g. the Wønderland Club, see Box 2.1 pp. 38–9) have used his name or the titles of his stories to indicate the kind of fantasies that appeal to their members.

Liberalisation and mass production

Child pornography production and consumption in Europe in the twentieth century were at first closely tied to the adult pornography industry. Due to rudimentary production processes, the trade was amateurish in the forties and fifties and appears to have been focused more on written material than photographs. However, the publication of naturist magazines, which carried pictures of unclothed children in everyday (non-pornographic) situations, quickly gained a paedophile following (Tate 1990). Probably the best-known naturist publication, Health and Efficiency, which began publication in the USA in 1900 and in London in 1956, is still widely available (now as H&E Naturist) but no longer shows naked minors. Another example of this genre was Sunshine and Health which began publication in the USA in 1931 and unselfconsciously described itself as the ‘official organ’ of the American Sunbathing Association. According to Lane (2001: 45) it made more nude photographs available than any other source, and cost less.

The sexual revolution of the mid-1960s, marked by the availability of effective methods of birth control and an openness to sexual expression and variation, heralded a burgeoning demand for pornography, with adult bookstores springing up in many European and American cities. Reflecting this change in attitude, most Western European countries relaxed their censorship laws and there was a narrowing of what was perceived to be obscene.

Denmark led the way in this regard. Encouraged by professional opinion in favour of decriminalising pornography, and difficulties convicting those brought before the courts on obscenity charges, the Danish government legalised the production of all forms of pornography in 1969. This included child pornography. Sweden followed suit in 1971. By failing to introduce relevant legislation or enforce existing legislation, it could be argued that other Western governments allowed child pornography to be produced or distributed by default. In an enlightening account, Tate (1990: 33) described the period from 1969 to 1979 as a ‘ten year madness’, during which time the circulation of child pornography became a global industry.

The speed with which the earliest producers were able to offload material indicated a strong latent demand. As Willy Strauss, a major Danish child pornographer, bragged:

Most dealers in Copenhagen showed one kind of pornography. I saw very early that there was only one thing better than normal pornography and that was bizarre pornography, speciality pornography … In 1971 I was the first to produce children magazines, at least with pictures … We printed the first 10,000 copies. It was the first child-sex magazine in the whole world: Bambina Sex. I sold those 10,000 copies on the telephone to other porn dealers in two hours and ordered another printing. By the end of the week I'd sold 19,000. (Cited in Hebditch and Anning 1988: 317–18)

The operation run by Strauss and his wife Leila soon became one of the world's biggest sources of commercial child pornography. Their initial involvement was opportunistic. A customer of their adult shop offered photographs of a man and a young girl having sex. Strauss took the pictures and put them in his desk drawer. Several weeks later he was offered a special price on a job lot of paper which had become available because another of his customers, a magazine publisher, could not pay his bills. Strauss decided to use the free photographs and the cheap paper to make a magazine. Readers responded by sending in their own photographs and by Strauss's estimation he promptly made another 40 or 50 magazines with the material sent in by enthusiastic amateur photographers from all over the world. In his view this was a ‘normal kind of business’ and because it was legally acceptable it was morally unproblematic (Hebditch and Anning 1988: 317–19).

The Danish company, Rodox/Color Climax Corporation, established by the Theander brothers, Peter and Jens, also capitalised on this new market. They created a huge pornography production camp on the outskirts of Copenhagen in 1975. Over the next two decades it is estimated that they produced nearly 100 million magazines and 10 million films (ibid: 53). While most of the content was adult, the company also produced a large number of child pornography magazines with varying degrees of explicitness and 36 hard-core child pornography films, the Lolita series. These were sordid and brutal affairs, which according to Taylor and Quayle (2003: 44), ‘exclusively involved pictures of young girls being sexually abused, primarily by men, but sometimes involving women or other children. The girls were mainly in the age range 7–11, but with some younger’. These films were around ten minutes long and the marketing strategy left nothing to the imagination. The series included such titles as: Sucking Daddy, Fucking Children and Little Girl Sex. More than a decade later, Tate (1990) claimed that US Customs identified the Lolita series as still the most widely traded of all commercial child pornography films. The Theanders rapidly became, and have remained, multi-millionaires. They had come a long way from the second-hand bookstore they opened in Copenhagen as ambitious twenty-somethings.

In addition to legalising pornography, Denmark's liberalisation repudiated the 1923 United Nations International Convention for the Suppression of the Circulation and Traffic in Obscene Publications. As such, little effort was made to stop the exportation of any form of pornography (Tate 1990). While both adult and child pornography were actually illegal there, Amsterdam became the primary distribution centre for child pornography exported from Denmark and other European and American cities throughout the 1970s. Dutch tolerance of the pornography trade provided an environment that allowed it to become highly profitable. The Netherlands also had its own producers, most notably perhaps Joop Wilhelmus who continued, unchallenged by the authorities, to publish Lolita magazine for seventeen years. As Tate (1990: 59) observed, the content was unashamedly explicit:

Lolita frequently included editorial pleas for new child pornography to publish: ‘This magazine can only exist if you help us! Send us photos from your collection.’ ‘We desperately need more photos from private files.’ Those requests amounted to an incitement by Wilhelmus for the magazine's readers to abuse more children and mail him the evidence. Lolita also provided a contact service for its readers, enabling them to advertise both for child pornography and for new children to abuse.

One advert read: ‘English gentleman, 37, paedophile, wishes to meet a mother with Lolita daughter or lady with paedophile feelings with view to marriage’. The authorities eventually closed the magazine by charging Wilhelmus with unlawfully procuring young boys for sex, but not before it had reached issue 55 in 1984 (Hebditch and Anning 1988: 326). Like the Lolita film series, Wilhelmus's Lolita magazine became an almost universal brand name for child pornography images.

The pornography industry developed a market earlier in America than in Europe, as evidenced by the publication of Hugh Hefner's Playboy magazine in December 1953, featuring a full-colour photograph of a nude woman in every issue. In parallel with European developments, a commercial interest in the production and distribution of child pornography soon emerged. Once again, liberal views on pornography, combined with lax law enforcement, enabled the trade to flourish. After lengthy deliberations, President Johnson's Commission on Pornography and Obscenity concluded in 1970 that the national interest would be best served by repealing all laws that restricted the distribution of obscene materials in the USA. Unsurprisingly, the Commission's findings were hugely controversial and overwhelmingly rejected by the Senate.

The case of Miller v. California in 1973 was significant in facilitating the growth of child pornography into an organised commercial activity. Marvin Miller, operator of one of the West coast's largest mail order businesses dealing in sexually explicit material, was prosecuted on foot of complaints from unwilling recipients of one of his mail shots. He was convicted under Californian law of distributing obscene material. Miller appealed to the US Supreme court on the grounds that the sale and distribution of obscene materials by mail was protected under the First Amendment's freedom of speech guarantee. In a 5–to–4 decision the court found against him. The Miller judgment found that obscene material did not enjoy First Amendment protection and replaced existing definitions of obscenity with the following threepronged test:

(a) whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest … (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

The Supreme Court thereby indicated a narrow view of what constituted obscenity. It put the onus on state governments to legislate against obscene material. As the overwhelming majority of states did not have the relevant legislation in place at this time, child pornography soon became part of the commercial mainstream of pornography. According to The Meese Commission Report (Attorney General's Commission on Pornography 1986: 595): ‘… by 1977 [child pornography was] sold over the counter and in considerable quantities. While a substantial amount of such material was of foreign origin, much of it was made using American children’. Commenting on the ease with which such publications could be obtained, Jenkins (2001: 32) noted that:

At least for a few years, it was easy to walk into a store in New York, Los Angeles, or London, and purchase what was frankly advertised as child porn. This might include pictures of, say, young girls performing oral sex on adult men or women or men performing anal sex on young boys, as well as countless pictures of eight- or ten-year-old girls in Penthouse-type cheesecake poses.

International collaborations also emerged, with photographs and films criss-crossing the Atlantic in an effort to ‘launder’ the products and conceal their origins (O'Brien 1983: 115–18). Healy (1996: 4) discovered that:

Most of the children depicted were Caucasian. Many who were featured in European child pornography magazines were photographed in the United States and the photos were published in magazines assembled abroad. Some of the material produced in Europe during the 70s, however, included children from India and Mexico and one series included black children from Africa.

These magazines and films also developed a following outside the paedophile community as society opened up to sexual experimentation and individual choice. Jenkins (2001: 32) described how, in the early 1970s, European and US avant-garde magazines, which were notionally devoted to rock music and radical politics, would ‘throw in occasional images of pubescent nudes’, thereby reaching an unprecedented audience.

Paedophiles start networking

The emergence of paedophile support organisations during the 1970s was a further sign of the lax attitude of the authorities towards adults expressing a sexual interest in children. The Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) was founded in the United Kingdom in October 1974 in order to campaign for an acceptance and understanding of paedophilia. Its formally defined aims included giving advice and counsel and providing a means for paedophiles to contact one another. To this end it held regular meetings in London and produced magazines and a ‘Contact Page’, a bulletin in which members placed advertisements, giving their membership number, general location, and brief details of their sexual and other interests. Keith Hose, chairman of PIE, summed up the group's intentions in its 1975–1976 annual report:

The only way for PIE to survive was to seek out as much publicity for the organisation as possible … If we got bad publicity we would not run into a corner but stand and fight. We felt that the only way to get more paedophiles joining PIE … was to seek out and try to get all kinds of publications to print our organization's name and address and to make paedophilia a real public issue.

PIE claimed that advertisements seeking erotica or contact with children were turned down, but Tate (1990: 134) reproduced a number of notices that give the lie to these assertions and argued that PIE paid paedophiles to provide it with non-obscene pictures of children (usually boys) for its various publications. At one stage, PIE even surveyed its members (numbering around 180) to identify if their preference was for boys or girls and which age range was of particular interest (Wilson and Cox 1983). Among PIE's members were an employee of MI6 (the British intelligence service) and the author Tom O'Carroll, who managed to have a book on the subject published in London in 1980. Paedophilia: The Radical Case advocates a change in the law to allow for sexual relationships between adults and children. O'Carroll has continued to be an activist in this area despite serving a number of prison terms. In 2000 he addressed the annual meeting of the International Academy of Sex Research in Paris on the theme of sexual privacy for paedophiles and children. His book remains easily available but, as is often the case in this area, potential purchasers will pay a premium for their inter...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Understanding the Context
• Part II A National Case Study
• Part III Formulating a Response
• References
• Index