THE DAMAGING EFFECTS OF CHILD PORNOGRAPHY
by Diana E.H. Russell, Ph.D.
Written September 2004

DO NOT QUOTE WITHOUT OBTAINING MY PERMISSION.

Introduction and Background: I sent this manuscript to my editor at Routledge Publishers in September 2004. Unfortunately, I was very late in meeting my deadline for many reasons, especially my intense involvement in initiating a campaign against the richest landlord in Berkeley (after UC Berkeley) for his 15-year exploitation of minor sexual slaves imported from India -- among other crimes. My editor had just quit her position at Routledge to accept a job at the New York University Press, so my manuscript remained unread while Routledge searched for a new editor. By January of 2005, a new editor had still not been hired, so I wrote to Mary McGinnis, the Vice President of Routledge to ask her what I should do about this. I feared if I revised the manuscript before I had an editor, she might well request that I revise it yet again. Ms. McGinnis told me to go ahead and revise it. Meanwhile, she said she would also like to see my manuscript. Less than a week later, she called me and declared that, "There is no way that Routledge will be associated with a book of this nature." "Why not?" I asked her. "It's the branding issue," she replied. "What do you mean?" I asked her, but she didn't explain. I interpreted her statement to mean that she didn't want Routledge to become known for publishing such a shocking book. It included many sexually explicit child pornography stories written for pedophiles, as well as descriptions of child pornography, including gross cartoons, all of which were legal. I told Ms. McGinnis that I was willing to remove the material that bothered her, but she insisted that she had discussed the issue with members of the staff, and she wasn't willing to reconsider. She resolutely held to her position despite my continued pleas. Since my manuscript was late, I had broken our contract, so I knew she would have this excuse to disregard it. Of course, this wasn't a genuine concern for her, since she had told me that I should go ahead and revise my manuscript. She said that she would help me find another publisher for this book. However, she did not follow through on this promise. I contacted my previous editor at New York University Press to ask if she and this publishing house would be interested in publishing Stolen Innocence. It so happened that New York University Press had published the major social scientific book on child pornography in recently. So she said that there would be no interest in publishing a book that would be in competition with this volume. I considered suing Routledge for breach of contract, since the lateness issue was obviously not the real reason for refusing to give me a chance to revise my manuscript. A respected colleague advised me not to, because she believed this would make it next to impossible to find another publisher, as well as jeopardizing publishers' interest in future projects of mine.

Stolen Innocence: The Damaging Effects of Child Pornography
Chapter 13: Snuff and Other Sadistic Child Pornography

1. Child Snuff Pornography

Background

There are very different views on the authenticity of snuff films and videos with some individuals convinced that genuine snuff movies/videos exist, and others equally convinced that they do not. There is also considerable disagreement regarding the facts about the first Snuff film. The divergent accounts by journalist Beverly LaBelle and Pamela Donovan will be described in the following paragraphs.

LaBelle described the pornographic movie Snuff that was shown in the United States in 1975, as purporting to show "the actual murder and dismemberment of a young woman" (p. 272). It was believed to have been shot in Buenos Aires, Argentina, "where life is cheap" (according to the movie ad). The movie supposedly culminated in the actual death of a woman (p. 276).

LaBelle describes the movie's plot in great detail, but it was "the carnage of its final five-minute sequence" that made it so notorious. This segment showed the movie director having sex with one of the actresses. When she protested that they were being filmed, he picked up a dagger as he said, "'Bitch, now you're going to get what you want'" (p. 274). Then,

This misogynist film was shown in many theaters across the country "shortly after the New York City Police Department announced that they had confiscated several 'underground' South American pornographic films containing actual murder footage" (p. 272).

Feminists across the nation mobilized against the Snuff film in large numbers, protesting that the murder and dismemberment of a woman was an "incitement to acts of violence against women" (p. 278). yes"> To try to undercut the feminist demonstrations against the movie, the distributor declared that the murder of the woman was only simulated. However, the protests did not stop. Women denounced the fact that the depiction of the murder and dismemberment of a woman's body for men's sexual entertainment was considered appropriate commercial film material (p. 276).

Researcher Donovan (2002), on the other hand, refers to snuff films as a "crime legend." She dates the first Snuff movie as being shown in 1976, and attributes the notion that it was "a documentation of a real event," to rumors (p. 194). She maintains that "It is quite clear from all historical accounts that the film's maker, Alan Shackelton, intended to benefit from the pre-existing rumor and from the credulity of his audience" (p. 194). Donovan (2002) contends that Shackelton "even hired his own protest pickets," thus contributing to the Snuff movie's box office success. yes"> Finally, she notes that law enforcement agencies in the United States, Scotland Yard in Britain, "the FBI, and local police departments" have not been able to find a single snuff movie (p. 196).

With regard to children, it may not be so relevant that no corpse of a Snuff victim has yet been found. According to the Anti-Slavery Society, there were 100,000,000 slaves in the world who were children some time before 1991 (p. 260). This organization also maintained that, "At Bangkok's main railway stations, for between 70 and 100 British pounds, you can buy a child who will be yours to do with as you will" (cited by Gordon Thomas, 1991, p. 259). Investigative journalist Gordon Thomas (1991) not

Thomas claims that these children "are used for every kind of porno experience, including child-sex murder and snuff movies" (p. 259).

In addition, Thomas wrote that human rights workers reported that "by the mid-1990s the number of children used in the commercialized sex industries will outstrip that in the traditional child slave-labor market" (p. 261). It does not take much imagination to see how some of these vulnerable, undocumented, expendable children could be disappeared by their owners.

Furthermore, some individuals, including some feminists, are more concerned about the grotesque brutality, sadism, and misogyny portrayed in Snuff movies -- than whether they are authentic. These individuals are also profoundly disturbed by the demand for snuff films. This point of view is evident in my definition of child snuff movies to follow. Thomas, for example, describes the existence of Internet bulletin boards in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Stockholm in 1990 that offered Snuff pictures of children being murdered (p. 262). He also emphasizes that the authenticity of the pictures of child murders is beside the point. "The damage such images can do to young and impressionable minds is incalculable," Thomas concludes. yes"

My expectation is that very few children would see these Snuff films. The damage would be to the adults who view this material.

Defining Child Snuff Movies

I will use the term child Snuff movies to refer to the real or simulated murder of a child on film for the purpose of sexual arousal. Murders that are simulated well enough for a viewer or viewers to believe that they are authentic, are included in my definition.

Extrapolating from my causal theory of child pornography as a cause of child molestation (explicated in Chapters 8 and 9), the effects of exposure to real or staged child Snuff films (corresponding to the effects of exposure to computer-generated or non-computer-generated child pornography) predisposes some males to become sexually aroused by the images portrayed in these films, as well as undermining the internal and social inhibitions of some males against acting out the behavior depicted in these films. Furthermore, the creation of a demand by some converts to Snuff pornography can be expected to result in some of the viewers simulating or perpetrating the actual murder of children to meet the demand.

Child Snuff Movies

Wyre, the clinical director of the Gracewell Clinic for convicted pedophiles in Birmingham, England, who treats "some of the most notorious sexual killers," notes that there is no information about the number or prevalence of sadistic pedophiles in the U.S. population (Tate, p. 179). However, he is adamant that "some men do derive sexual pleasure from the torture and killing of young children" (p. 179). In these cases "the murder may be a sexual act in itself" (p. 179). yes"> Wyre then asks a rhetorical question: "If the sexual torture and killing were not a turn on for some paedophiles, why do so many keep cuttings from newspapers giving details of the murder and mutilation of young children?" (cited in Tate, 1990, p. 179).

When police catalogued the child pornography collection of a pedophile, "they discovered a number of such newspaper cutting, including a series covering the Jason Swift killing" (Tate, p. 179). Tate quotes the pedophile as saying, "'Um, I don't know why I collected them.... Maybe it was because they had beautiful bodies and I liked looking at the photographs'" (p. 179). Both Tate and Wyre were skeptical about his explanation. Unfortunately, they do not explain how they interpreted his collection.

Wyre reports that some of his

John Bulloch, a British pedophile who was one of Wyre's clients described the following child Snuff video that he watched.

"It was a snuff video from America, only about twenty-five minutes long. In it there was a scene with a girl -- she was between ten and twelve years old, I would say. yes"> She was being horribly mutilated while some men were sexually abusing her.

"Her fingernails were pulled off, then her fingers were cut off with shears. She was cut awfully and all the time she was screaming, screaming for mercy, and all the time the men were doing sexual acts against her. Eventually they did slit her throat....

"It didn't turn me on -- it sickened me. But then I don't know how far I would have gone for kicks if I hadn't had treatment. I hadn't reached that pinnacle of murder then, but I could have done;...

"I mean, how far does one go for kicks? I started off with masturbation, went on to oral sex and then intercourse. From intercourse it went to anal sex, then group sex and vibrators. It could have quite easily reached rape, and it could have reached murder." (Tate, pp. 178-79)

While there is no way of determining the authenticity of the Snuff movie that Bulloch watched, it is quite clear that he took it for the real thing. If the viewer believes it is genuine, this belief is more relevant than whether or not the movie does in fact involve a real murder or femicide (the killing of females by males because they are females).

Another example of a Snuff movie was reported in The Oakland Tribune by an unnamed reporter who described two men, Fred Berre Douglas, 55, and Richard Hernandez, 38, luring "two teen-age girls to a remote California desert to make 'snuff-type films'" in 1982 (p. 3). Margaret Krueger, 16, and 19-year-old Beth Jones, both of whom lived in Anaheim, California, disappeared on August 13, 1982. yes"> "Their skeletal remains were found on March 30, 1983" (p. 3). Douglas (who had previously been tried in 1978 "for allegedly plotting to torture two women to death while making pornographic films") and Hernandez were charged with murdering the girls. Each was "charged with two counts of murder, one of conspiracy to commit murder and one of conspiracy to solicit and engage in prostitution." ("Two accused of murder in 'snuff' films," Oakland Tribune, August 6, 1983, p. 3).

Durkin and Bryant (1995) describe a case that occurred several years ago in which "two Virginia men used a computer bulletin board in an attempt to locate a young boy to use in a 'snuff film'" (p. 16). Californian law enforcement officers "discovered the plot through an ad placed by the two men on a computer bulletin board," and arrested these two men (p. 188). Durkin and Bryant noted that,

Durkin and Bryant concluded that, "Apparently these are not isolated incidents" (p. 188). Unfortunately, these authors do not explain their basis for making this statement. Although their plot was foiled by authorities, there is no reason to believe that the men would not have carried out their plan to produce a snuff film.

San Francisco Chronicle reporter Stacy Finz (1998) described Daniel DePew and Dean Lambey's scheme to "kidnap a young boy, sexually abuse him and ultimately kill him during the making of a snuff film" (p. A21). According to Finz, "Police and FBI agents believe that the two would have carried out their scheme had it not been for several San Jose cops going undercover in cyberspace" (Finz, SFC, Dec 7, 1998, p. A21).

Yaron Svoray (1997) describes a Snuff film that he claims he was "made to watch"... "as part of my initiation into the neo-Nazi underground" which he joined in order to conduct research about them. He described the film as follows:

Elsewhere, Svoray says that the film consisted of "newsreel footage of Hitler haranguing his troops" interspersed with the Snuff film -- searing into his eyes and his memory "the images of an eight- or nine-year-old girl being brutally raped and then murdered" (p. 23). yes"

An international team of three journalists (Jason Burke in London, Amelia Gentleman in Moscow, and Philip Willan in Rome) contributed to an article entitled "British link to 'snuff' videos," published in the Observer on October 1, 2000. The authors noted that "Britain is a key link in the biggest ever international investigation into the production and supply of paedophile 'snuff' movies -- in which children are murdered on film." The most important suspect was a Russian man called Dmitri Vladimirovich Kuznetsov. He "had given up his job in 1998 to devote himself to the lucrative pornography industry." When the police raided his flat, "they found two boys in a makeshift studio" -- presumably to be abused in the making of child pornography. In addition, the officers "seized a huge quantity of films and other pornographic material as well as lists of clients in Italy, Germany, America and Britain." Many customers repeatedly ordered videos from him.

Police in Russia and Britain believed that Kuznetsov and his associates had "been in business for more than two years in which time they [were] believed to have recruited around 100 boys -- aged between nine and 15 - to be filmed." According to Kiril Mazurin, a police spokesman,

Many of the children "were lured away from orphanages. 'Children are not locked in,' said Mazurin. 'Anyone can come along and promise them a meal at McDonalds. It doesn't take any more than that.'" Some of the children were paid "to find other boys willing to be filmed."

Kuznetsov was arrested and imprisoned in Moscow "for the distribution of thousands of sadistic child pornography videos and pictures." He was tracked down after these videos were found in the possession of British pedophiles. Two men were arrested and imprisoned with Kuznetsov by Moscow authorities. However, only Dmitri Ivanov, who "was sentenced to 11 years for actually participating in the abuse that was being filmed," remained in prison for a substantial amount of time. Kuznetsov and the other collaborator "were released under an amnesty aimed at clearing Russia's overcrowded prisons."

The Italian police intercepted 3,000 of Kuznetsov's videos that had been ordered over the Internet and were on their way by mail to clients in Italy. According to Burke et al., "This sparked an international hunt for paedophiles who [had] bought his products." The police repackaged the videos, then had them delivered by undercover police officers to the customers who had ordered them. After "the police searched more than 600 homes," they obtained "evidence against about 500 people."

The cost of Kuznetsov's videos was between 300 and 4,000 British pounds -- depending on the type of video that was ordered. yes"> Burke et al., reported that, "The most appalling category was code‑named 'Necros Pedo' in which children were raped and tortured until they died." The Italian investigators confirmed that the videos included "footage of children dying during abuse." Prosecutors in Naples considered charging those who had bought the videos with complicity in murder. They said some of the customers "may have specifically requested films of killings." A newspaper in Naples "published a transcript of an alleged email exchange between a prospective client and the Russian vendors. 'Promise me you're not ripping me off,' says the Italian. 'Relax, I can assure you this one really dies,' the Russian responds. 'The last time I paid and I didn't get what I wanted.' 'What do you want?' 'To see them die,'" was the answer. Burke et al., noted that "Among the suspects were businessmen, public employees and a university student. Several of them were married, with children of their own."

British authorities confirmed that scores of Kuznetsov's videos had been found in Britain. They were concerned that "'snuff' movies in which children are killed may have also been imported." British pedophiles were paying between ?50 pounds and ?100 pounds for one of Kuznetsov's tapes. yes"> Additional fees were paid for access to a website that featured child pornography involving "extremely violent abuse." Approximately twelve British men were "arrested and charged with offences alleged to be connected to the Russian tapes." "Since then there have been dozens of other finds." Hundreds of people were also under investigation in Germany.

Campagna and Poffenberger bring up the important connection between "the international trafficking in children for commercial sexual exploitation" and all manner of brutal child pornography-related sexual abuse -- a trade that is escalating astronomically including in the United States (p. 144). For example, the

About the notorious Wonderland pedophile group, Jenkins (2001) noted that according to one report, "'The only thing they banned was snuff pictures, the actual killing of somebody'" (p. 83). He quoted a member of the group claiming that, "a couple of members were barred because they trafficked in those pictures" (p. 83).

According to Calcetas-Santos: "Images of children, sometimes as young as eight or nine, depicting their rape, torture and even murder, can be downloaded easily by anyone with basic knowledge of the Internet" (p. 58). Unfortunately, Calcetas-Santos does not provide addresses for these websites. She also refrains from indicating whether or not she thinks the portrayals of murder are authentic.

More recently, M. Benecke (2002) maintains that "a growing number of short video clips have been distributed via the internet" which belong in the snuff genre (p. ). Two study groups analyzed these video clips for their authenticity and concluded that they are "fictional on the basis of technical details" (Benecke, p. ). Given my definition of Snuff movies, these qualify as such. They and much of the material described above, reveal that there is a demand -- presumably by pedophiles -- for this most extreme form of masturbatory material.

While the police have found videos of young girls who were raped, tortured, and murdered at the homes of killers like the notorious mass sex murderer Bernardo and Homolka -- his sex slave wife who participated in these crimes -- this material is not considered to be Snuff. Perhaps this is because the videos were not made to be distributed as Snuff films.

Wyre has been "quoted as having viewed snuff films firsthand in America" (p. 9). However, he makes it clear "that the films he saw were 'sophisticated simulations.'" (p. 9). Nevertheless, he apparently "insisted that the FBI had a number of snuff films in their possession" (p. 9). He also maintained that "snuff films were definitely available in England, but that he had never seen one" (p. 9). Tate makes it clear that he believes in the reality of Snuff movies. For example, he emphasizes that: "The fact that such material is produced and available means that not only is there a market for it, but in order to produce it children must be tortured and possibly killed" (p. 177). Tate's use of the phrase "possibly killed" suggests that he includes simulated murder in his conception of Snuff movies.

In 1994, I interviewed two sisters who were both incestuously abused by their stepfather in Cape Town, South Africa. The younger sister, Deborah Hoffman (her real name), disclosed that,

Judy Bester (her real name), Deborah's slightly older sister, reported the following experience with her stepfather and his close buddy. yes"

"One of the first things Hoffie and Pieter did together was to make me watch movies when I was 9 years old. Today I know that they were videos, not television, but I didn't know that then, and I believed that whatever was shown on television must be true. The news was real, so how could these rapes not be real? I remember a young Indian girl being raped by three cowboys in one movie.

"In the other [movie], a woman was cut up with an electric saw after she was raped. I vomited after I saw that, and I was very sick for a couple of days afterwards. I was sure that she really was cut up and that the Indian girl really was raped. I believed that these things happened in everybody's lives. If it happened in a movie and it was happening in my home, how could I say it was wrong? I became very doubtful about what was right and what was wrong, and what was allowed and what was not. Today I can still picture the way those women were raped, and how one of them was cut up after the rape." (Russell, date, page).

There is no way of knowing whether or not Hoffie's snuff movie was authentic. However, it is clear that the young girls believed it was.

Artistic portrayals of torture and death have also been used in pornographic magazines to obscure the horror of the images depicted. For example, Gucionne, owner of Penthouse, hired Japanese artist Ishigaki to do a series on bondage and death portrayals that included several pictures that appear to be of young girls under 18.  The main focus of one of the photographs is on the naked buttocks and legs of a teenage girl who is lying face down, hands tied behind her back, her legs close together with the bare soles of her feet toward the viewer and her genitals partially exposed. Her lifeless-looking body lying on a rocky cliff by the sea conveys the impression of a corpse. The bondage element conveys that she was murdered. (get date)

Ishigaki used his excellent photography skills to glamorize and eroticize the buttocks of a teenaged girl's corpse in this photo. The effect is chilling and macabre; the frozen posture conveys the impression of rigor mortis. This photo eroticizes necrophilia and/or intensifies the erotic response to it in those males who are already sexually excited by this idea or practice.

Another photograph in this series shows a girl in a harness, her arms bound behind her back, suspended from a tall tree by a rope that is tied to the harness. She is dressed in a long Japanese outfit and short white booties, one leg exposed to her thigh, and one bare breast protruding between two tight ropes. She appears to be dead or unconscious, her body limp, her head slumped forward. Around her are many tall trees with leafless branches. The photo's ambience is bleak and menacing.

This picture evokes recollections of the lynching of African Americans who, after being tortured and murdered, were typically left hanging from trees. Two months after this issue of Penthouse magazine appeared on the stands, Jean Kar-Har Fewel, an eight-year-old Chinese girl living in North Carolina, was found raped and murdered, tied to a tree with ropes around her neck. Many feminists believe that Penthouse magazine owner Bob Guccione is in part responsible for her horrifying death.

2. Child Pornography Involving Sadistic Torture

According to Tate (1990), "As the investigation of child sexual abuse and child pornography took on an ever-increasing urgency during the late 1960s and early 1970s in America, more and more cases combining molestation and torture came to light" (pp. 171-72). He cites the case of a 48-year-old grandfather called Al who sexually abused his two granddaughters and one grandson aged six and younger:

"The oldest granddaughter appeared in numerous pictures with a substance that seemed to be a great amount of blood covering her genitals.  Agony and pain featured in the facial expression of this six-year-old. It is believed this was simulated and not real. Other photographs of the same girl depicted her in bondage, with Al holding a lighted candle near her genitals, the girl screaming in fear.  Again, this was believed to be simulated, although the candle was real. The hanging of the children and the sexual conduct with the children was, in fact, real.

"The children had been sworn to such secrecy that, even after seeing the pictures, the children still denied the sexual abuse. Gradually and tearfully the grand-children told what their grandfather had done to them. Al was also an artist and had sketched several representations of his fantasies, which included his granddaughters.... One drawing featured her bound and gagged while rats chewed on her genitals." (footnote). (pp. 172-173)

Tate noted that sadistic child pornography was not confined to homemade material.

Tate also pointed out that, "Prior to the final clean-up of child pornography in Times Square, New York, the mechanised film 'peep-show' booths contained several such films" (p. 174). He cited the example of a peep-show film called First Communion, in which

Davies (1994) describes a video about the torture of

The personal experience of torture of a woman who reported having been sexually abused by her stepfather since infancy was cited as follows by the Attorney General's Government Commission on Pornograpy:

"That night that I was filmed for a pornographic movie my stepfather tortured me both physically and sexually because I did not perform adequately enough to be convincing." (Gov. Comm. Vol. 1, p. 787)

Another woman, whose father had sexually abused her from the age of three, testified:

In the late 1990s, there was a notorious case in Belgium involving the starvation of young girls incarcerated for years as sex slaves and victims of child pornography in the home of Gerald Ulrich, the leader of a group of sadistic pedophiles. Several of the girls starved to death. This tragic case rocked the Belgian government because of their poor handling of the case and the collusion of some of their members in it.

According to Nordland and Bartholet (2001), when

Grant, David, & Grabosky (1999), describe the Wonderland Club as "an international network with members in at least 14 nations ranging from Europe, to North America, to Australia. Access to the group was password protected, and content was encrypted" (p. 179). Nordland and Bartholet (2001) report that "(S)pecialists identified 1,263 different victims, all of them under the age of puberty" (March 19, p. 47). The pictures "mostly featured American, European and Russian children" (?pp. 51-52). While rules excluded the killing of children, depictions of children being tortured were permissable.

Police investigation of the Wonderland Club "resulted in approximately 100 arrests, and the seizure of over 100,000 images in September 1998" (Grant et al., p. 179). The police "could hear little girls being sexually abused and begging for mercy" on "a sound file on the hard drive of Wonderland's key organizer" (pp. 51-52).

Although it is not known if sadistic pedophile and pornographer Peter Sotos produced any snuff movies or photographs, he clearly supports snuff actions and tape recordings of such murders. For example, he described himself in an interview as an admirer of Ian Brady, a notorious British serial murderer, pornography collector, and child molester who bragged about his sadistic murders of several children (Birch, 1994; Cameron and Frazer, 1987). More specifically, Sotos declared that his tastes are "very similar to those of Ian Brady," and that he enjoyed his [Brady's] work "because it is 100 per cent honest and self-concerned. He fucked and tortured little Lesley Downey every way imaginable before smashing her tiny skull in half" (p. 170). (Sotos description of Brady's murderous action does not fit any of the descriptions that I have read ( ).)

At the age of 25, Sotos started publishing a magazine in Chicago which he titled Pure.  The police believe Sotos started producing this publication in 1984 (Tate, p. 170). It was "distributed worldwide through agents in Sweden and Italy," and according to Sotos, "the response has been very favourable and growing... rapidly" (Tate, p. 171). More specifically, Sotos reported that the magazine has achieved a substantial market in the United States and also "does very well in Europe (Tate, p. 171).

According to Sotos advertising, each issue contained many sexually explicit photos, as well as "reports on murderous geniuses like Josef Mengele and Ian Brady. Plus as an extra masturbatory bonus, the pleasures of kiddie torture'" (p. 169).

Following is an excerpt from the text of Pure that accompanied pornographic photos of small girls being sexually abused by a man's erect penis (Tate, p. 169). Referring to Brady's sexual murder briefly described above,* [*Footnote: Sotos appears to ignore the accessory role of Brady's lover, Mary Hindley] Sotos wrote:

According to Tate, Sotos and others for whom he speaks, find "the combination of child sexual abuse and torture particularly erotic" (p. 170). Chat groups about Sotos ideas can be found on the Internet at the following addresses:

The American police were informed about Pure by British police after a copy of Pure 2 was found in the home of a man "suspected of being responsible for a series of brutal child abductions, murders and grave-robbing" (Tate, p. 171). This led to Sotos arrest. Sotos ended up receiving only two years of probation despite the fact that, according to Tate, Sotos had hinted in his interview that "he had been actively involved in the sexual abuse and torture of young children" (p. 171).

Turning to the Internet, a web site (www.teentart.com/23/enter.html) opens with the statement: "Slice the Bitch to Pieces!!"  Viewers are then encouraged to "visit a few of our special galleries: MURDER! DECAPITATION! RAPE! INCEST! TORTURE! AMPUTATION! GENITAL MUTILATION!" With the exception of the incest gallery, the word "teentart" in the web site address is the only indication that the other galleries focus on teens.

Viewers are then informed that: "Due to the intensively offensive nature of our pictures no previews are available ...." Viewers are finally invited to click "to pay money to enter" the web site and informed that the price for a 3-month membership costs $19.95.

Because I believe it is illegal to find out what paying customers actually see on the website, there is no way of knowing how authentic the pictures of murder, decapitation, etc. appear to be. However, it is very clear that the ad for the website is designed to attract sadistic misogynist pedophiles.

Conclusion

Lanning declares that, "I've not found one single documented case of a snuff film anywhere in the world. I've been searching for 20 years, [and] talked to hundreds of people [about this]" (p. 8). Many scholars and law enforcement officers concur with Lanning's statement.  Perhaps some of them are still looking for replicas of the first one to be shown in mainstream theaters (described at the beginning of this chapter).

Applying a broader concept of snuff as pornographic photographs, film, or video showing the murder of a child(ren) for the purposes of sexual arousal, I believe that the material in this chapter makes a convincing case for the existence of authentic snuff media involving child victims. While of course it is vital to distinguish between snuff movies that involve the real murder of a child and those that are only simulated, the latter type of movies should not be dismissed because their impact on the viewer who perceives them as authentic, will be the same as those that are authentic.

One of the reasons I am convinced that child snuff videos exist is the evidence provided by Wyre, among others, that some sadistic pedophiles have desires and fantasies for this kind of material. Many of the children who are used in pornography in both the national and international market place are totally vulnerable, isolated, and easy to dispose of. The risk entailed in killing some children can be very small. Although child pornography is irrelevant to the following case, it highlights the vulnerability of the child and the sadism and sense of entitlement of the would-be perpetrator. Unbeknownst to him, he was actually talking to an FBI officer who was recording the telephone call.

Sadistic pedophile Alesandro Moncini ordered "a ten-year-old Mexican girl to be made ready for him to molest during his stay" in Los Angeles (Tate, p. 166). The conversation went as follows:

Moncini: "What can I do to this little animal?"
Answer: "Everything."
Moncini: "Can I chain her?"
Answer: "Sure."
Moncini: "Whip her?"
Answer: "Yes."
Moncini: "Can I make her eat shit?"
Answer: "I don't know."
Moncini: "Can I piss in her mouth?"
Answer: "I think so." ...
Moncini: "And if the little animal gets broken or hurt?"
Answer: "Just make the traces and the body disappear."
Moncini: "What will it cost me?"
Answer: "$5,000." (Tate, pp. 166/7)

A New York Times reporter referred to child pornography as being "a burning issue in Europe, particularly in Belgium and France, where abused and slain children have been the focus of scandals in the last few years" ("Dutch say a sex ring used infants on Internet", July 19, 1998). Although it is known that two eight-year-old girls were starved to death in Belgium by a notorious pedophile child rapist called Marc Dutroux, and his associates in crime* [*Footnote: Alan Cowell, New York Times, September 8, 1996], I have been unable to find out about the cause of deaths in France. However, this and the previous case convey how far some sadistic pedophiles are willing to go to satisfy their lethal sexual desires.

Parents kill their children; strangers kill children (consider all the deaths of homeless street children in Latin America); our media are repeatedly informing us about cases of pedophiles who abduct, rape, sometimes torture and kill young children. What is the likelihood that none of these men ever videotape their acts either to keep a record of it to restimulate themselves in the future, or to sell or trade as child pornography?

San Francisco Chronicle reporter Stacy Finz (1998) described Daniel DePew and Dean Lambey's scheme to "kidnap a young boy, sexually abuse him and ultimately kill him during the making of a snuff film" (p. A21). According to Finz, "Police and FBI agents believe that the two would have carried out their scheme had it not been for several San Jose cops going undercover in cyberspace" (Finz, SFC, Dec 7, 1998, p. A21).

Home | About Diana Russell | Pornography As a Cause of Rape (book excerpt) | Publications | Other links |