Pornography’s Threat to Children

An interview with Ernie Allen, President of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

 

Citizen magazine conducted this interview in June 2008.

Citizen: What evidence is there that consumers of child porn go on to molest in significant numbers?

Allen: In 2006 there was a hearing before then-Chairman Ed Whitfield’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of House Energy and Commerce in which Dr. Andres Hernandez of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons testified. The issue was convicted defendants in the federal system who were sentenced to the Butner, N.C., facility for possession of child pornography. Virtually all of them basically said when they entered the facility, ‘We just looked at the pictures. We didn’t harm an actual child.’

Dr. Hernandez and his team at the Bureau of Prisons put them through a program, used the polygraph periodically to validate their truth or lack therefore, and by the end of the program 85 percent of the offenders admitted physical offenses against real children, most of them against multiple victims. That’s never been published, but I think it’s the most powerful research I’ve seen that indicates there is a connection.

 

Citizen: How successful would you say the porn industry has been in getting its business repositioned as a free-speech issue and neutralizing forces for decency?

 

Allen: Now, 20 years ago it was much easier to argue this was a free-speech type issue because you could wall it off. You could zone it into certain areas. You could prohibit the unwanted exposure of this kind of content to people who didn’t want to see it. But in 2005 we worked with the University of New Hampshire on unwanted exposure of children to obscene material online. And 42 percent of the kid surveyed said they had encountered online pornography in a year’s span. Two thirds of them said they did not want to view the images and had not sought them out.

 

Kids are encountering this kind of content at younger and younger ages. There is fairly compelling research out there. There’s research that shows children exposed to violent pornography become conditioned to the hostile, power-focused themes conveyed in the pornography so that conditioning affects their attitudes and their expectations about what’s sexually appropriate and certainly can lead to sexual aggression.

 

Citizen: How much do we know about actual harm from this youthful exposure to porn?

 

Allen: There is research that shows that children exposed to pornography experience the sensations of sexual behavior too early in their developmental process, leading to heightened risk that children are going to act it out. There’s other research that shows that for youthful sex offenders the average age of first exposure to pornography is 7.6 years of age, that deviant sexual fantasies began at 9.2 years of age, and non-contact sexual offenses at 9.25 years of age.

 

So, this suggests a pathway. Our big concern is that we already live in a time when there is a kind of sexualization of children–from consumerism and marketing and technology and pornography. The latest studies now indicate that the brain is still under development into the early 20s, especially for boys, and that children are physically developing at younger and younger ages. There is research now probably more than a decade old that indicates that adult males exposed to pornography, particularly violent pornography, develop hostile attitudes toward women and distorted perceptions about sexuality and attitudes that trivialize rape.

 

While there may not be research that establishes direct cause and effect–and we recognize there are lots of factors–there is no question that when the under-developed, youthful human brain is exposed to this kind of content, that it is affecting attitudes and behavior of millions of kids. And it’s changing that whole developmental cycle at a really critical time.

 

Citizen: Comment on the whole ‘barely legal’ pseudo-child porn trend that’s conditioning men to view children as sex objects.

 

Allen: The Supreme Court said child pornography is not protected speech, but if you comply with that requirement in a totally literal way—you take a 20-year-old and put her in pigtails and a cheerleader costume or like a school uniform—there is no question what the intent is. And the intent is to commoditize and to create an image of younger and younger kids as sexual objects.

 

Not only that, but you can even go into advertising and marketing, and the imagery that one encounters—inappropriate sexually oriented dolls created for 5- and 6-year-olds. If you look at garments–panties for very young children with language like ‘eye candy.’ We understand that sex sells, but there’s just got to be more responsibility than that. We’re seeing an increasing commoditization of children and a normalizing of the view of children as sexual objects at younger and younger ages.

 

Citizen: How far do you think this can go?

 

Allen: I’m a lawyer, and we all believe in the Constitution and the First Amendment. But I think there’s got to be limits. We have reached out to advertising and marketing leaders, and we have urged them to be more sensitive. But there’s no question there are those who are going to push right to the edge. Here’s something that everybody agrees is unlawful, and what we’re witnessing is demand for younger and younger kids.

 

What seems to be happening is a kind of addiction. Once people are exposed to these sorts of images, then it’s not enough just to look at the same kinds of images over and over again. There is a demand for something new, something different, something more extreme. We’ve seen it in the research. Even the producers of this stuff say you can’t survive in this business basically producing and showing the same kinds of things over and over again, that there is a saturation that takes place, and people want to see something new, something more dramatic.

 

Citizen: What do you think of FBI Director Robert Mueller’s famous assertion that we’re losing the battle with child porn?

 

Allen: I hate to disagree with the FBI director—and I think the FBI is doing extraordinary work in this area, but the sheer volume is overwhelming. The FBI asked me to come over and speak to a conference they had recently. A lot of their forensic people were there, and we identified a kind of fundamental conflict. When people are arrested now, we’re getting these computers with 50-60-100,000 images–they’re terabytes of data. And there’s even a new category—a petabyte [1,000 terabytes or 1 quadrillion bytes].

 

There is so much in this era of broadband and high speed, the sheer volume of what’s out there makes it very difficult for law enforcement to do the follow-up. And I was saying to the FBI it’s really important when we identify these guys that we do the forensics on every one of these images because it may be image No. 49,500 that enables us to identify and rescue a child we’ve never seen before. The challenge is huge, and I agree with Director Mueller that we need to bring more resources to the problem, we need to improve our forensics capability. But I do think we are making headway on it.

 

Citizen: Can you give us an example?

 

Allen: I was absolutely shaken to the core by one case. We’ve handled 600,000 reports of child sexual exploitation through our Cyber-tipline, and one of those reports led to a husband-and-wife pair of entrepreneurs in Texas who were not producing the content, but were processing the charges. They basically went into the child pornography business.

 

We worked with federal law enforcement and the Dallas police department, and when these people were arrested and their business was shut down, they had 70,000 customers paying $29.95 a month and using their credit cards to access graphic images of small children being raped and sexually assaulted. One of their sites was called Babyrape. My reaction was, naively, who are these people? And can there be that many people out there interested in this kind of content?

 

So, I started talking to people in the business, and I talked to the then-chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Richard Shelby of Alabama, and Sen. Shelby said, ‘If people were buying heroin and cocaine and using their credit cards, we would be outraged and would do something about it.’ And so, we tried to attack this well-defined, narrow element of the problem–that commercial child pornography had become a multibillion-dollar industry, driven largely by people who were not necessarily sexual interested in children, but just saw it as an easy way to make a lot of money.

 

So, we now have a Financial Coalition Against Child Pornography that set a goal of eradicating commercial child pornography. We’ve got 30 companies involved, including MasterCard and Visa and American Express and Bank of America and CitiBank, representing 95-96 percent of the payments industry. And in less than two years we have virtually eliminated the use of the credit card. They have given us accounts. We have federal agents making purchases on those accounts, following the money. This is an illegal use of the payment system.

 

Citizen: What kind of a dent has the Financial Coalition been able to make in this vile business?

 

Allen: Payments are being stopped, and sites are being shut down. The price of this content has increased dramatically–from $29.95 a couple of years ago, it’s now $100, $200, $500. And, when you click on the credit card and try to give your payment information, one of two things happens: They steal your identity and use your information for other illegal purposes—and, if you think about it, it’s sort of the perfect crime. Or they don’t take your credit card information, but offer you another way to pay.

 

We’re following the money. We’re trying to track down these new payment methods and make it so difficult and so expensive for these people to execute their business plan that they move into some other illicit activity. I think that’s the kind of model we’re going to have to use to attack this problem. We’re going to have to engage the private sector like never before. We’re going to have to use technology. We’re going to have to awaken the public to what’s going on.

 

Many people don’t know that sending obscene material to a child is a crime. The U.S. Department of Justice asked us to take reports on unsolicited obscene material sent to a child. We want to let the public know that if they encounter this stuff, report it to us. Send it to cybertipline.com, and we will do the follow-up, we’ll assess it, we’ll identify the appropriate law enforcement agency. We’ll do the investigative follow-up to determine if we can identify who the sender is–which is one of the challenges here because this stuff is bouncing off servers all over the world.

 

Citizen: What do you know about the enticement of young boys online by Internet pornographers?

 

Allen: One of the areas in which we take reports is ‘misleading domain names.’ There are people who set up sites to trap kids into their porn sites. For example, you go to playstation.com and you accidentally type for the last letter an ‘m’ instead of an ‘n’–you type ‘playstatiom.com’—that’s a porn site. I think it’s shut down now.

 

Now, who are they trying to get to that site? Who would go to playstation.com? Kids. That, too, is illegal. There’s a host of techniques to get kids into their sites and then ‘mousetrap’ them to keep them from getting out. They don’t want to let them out because kids are far more likely then to spend money or subscribe or do other kinds of things.

 

This is about more than obscenity. It really has two tracks: One is sort of the non-commercial networking track, the people who are using peer-to-peer and file-sharing and other devices like that simply to trade images with people of like interest. But on the commercial side, which is smaller, it’s purely about money. We’re talking about a multibillion-dollar industry. Of the offenders we’ve been able to identify, 6 percent have had images of infants and toddlers. So, this is very different from what the general public thinks it is.

 

Citizen: Doesn’t this kind of enticement of kids put the lie to industry assertions that they’re for child protection?

 

Allen: There is no question that there are people out there who are specifically targeting kids. Is that the whole universe of people in that industry? Probably not. But there is no question that kids are a target. One, you get kids into this kind of stuff, you affect their attitudes and their views, and they stay for a long time. Two, there is a very substantial amount of disposable income that can be targeted there. And it’s illegal.

---

If you enjoy reading stories like this one, sign up for the free CitizenLink Daily Update e-mail. You'll get news and commentary from Focus on the Family Action delivered right to your computer.