Political CV

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DO NOT QUOTE WITHOUT OBTAINING MY PERMISSION.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 4: The Prevalence of Child Pornography

"(T)he use of prepubescent children is almost nonexistent." -- The National Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, 1970* [*Footnote: cited by Rush, 1980, p. 167].)

Hughes (1999, March) notes that "The actual number of sex predators online, the number [of] children they have contacted, ... or the number of cases of sexual exploitation [pornography-related sexual abuse] is impossible to know and very difficult to estimate" (p. 28). However, various scholars attempt to make these difficult estimates in the passages below.

Because "non-electronic child pornography has been very difficult to obtain for the last 20 years" (Jenkins, 2001, p. 9), it is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to estimate its prevalence off the Internet. Kelly, Regan and Sheila Burton (2000) (in Itzin) also attribute the lack of information on the prevalence of non-electronic child pornography in part to the fact that most child sexual abuse researchers have not asked questions about child pornography "either as a factor in ongoing sexual abuse or as separate from it" (p. 74). As a researcher on the prevalence of child sexual abuse myself (e.g., Russell, 1986), this criticism applies to my work as well as all the other United States studies I have reviewed (see Russell and Bolen, 2000). In addition, Kelly et al., note that in the UK, "Official statistics also fail to record sexual exploitation as a category" (p. 74). This is certainly true in the United States as well.

Because the Internet has become the preferred haven for child pornography producers, distributors, collectors, and users, few researchers today would likely have any interest in conducting a study to try to ascertain the prevalence of non-electronic child pornography.

The higher the number of adult Internet users, the higher the potential number of males on the Internet who already are sexually attracted to children, and the higher the number who may become attracted to them. Whether adult surfers who are ignorant about child pornography seek it out or come across it accidently, a certain percentage can be expected to respond to their exposure to portrayal of sexualized children by becoming sexually aroused to children for the first time. In addition, those who are already attracted to children may become more intensely aroused by child pornography on the Internet (see Chapter 9 for an explication of my theory of why this occurs).

The number of Internet users "has grown massively since its origins in 1969" (Carlos Arnaldo, 2001, p. 55). Wells (2000) estimated Internet usage "at about 67.5 million persons worldwide," and maintained that "By the year 2003, researchers expect that there will be roughly 350 million Internet users" (p. 99). Whatever the precise figures are, it is widely believed that there is a massive increase in the number of users on the Internet over time.

Although the percentage of users "is expected to increase rapidly," Von Feilitzen (1999, p. 3) suggests "that less than 5 per cent of the world's population accesses the Internet" at the time of her publication (p. 3). This provides some idea of the gigantic size of the potential number of Internet users who remain to be recruited.

Estimating the prevalence of child pornography on the Internet is impossible. Besides the obstacles posed by the illegality of looking at child pornography pictures on the Internet, there are innumerable private pedophile groups that trade photographs with each other that are impossible for researchers to access. Hence, most of the following estimates of the volume of child pornography on the Internet only provide impressions of small segments of the whole prevalence picture. For example, limiting his observations to the number of child pornography pictures in child sex-related newsgroups, O'Connell (2001) comments that:

"The volume of material posted is enormous: in a two-week period in January 1998, a total of 6,034 child erotica (sic) and child pornography pictures were posted in child sex related newsgroups -- and this figure does not take into account the number of pictures available on CDs." (p. 73)

Rod Nordland and Jeffrey Bartholet (2001) report that when the international Wonderland Internet sex abuse ring was busted in 1998, police "discovered computer files with three quarters of a million images of child pornography in Britain alone" (p. 47). In order to be a member of the Wonderland Internet relay chat group, an individual "had to provide 10,000 images." Since there were 200 members, this amounts to 2,000,000 child pornography photos. Nordland also notes that "specialists identified 1,263 different victims, all of them under the age of puberty" (p. 47).

When the Apollo sex ring of pedophiles was broken up in the Netherlands in 1998, CD-ROM duplicating facilities were found in the home of Gerald Ulrich -- the leader of this ring. "On the first Ulrich disc alone, Dutch police identified more than 200 victims -- and 16 more such discs have yet to be fully cataloged. Many of the images on the Ulrich CD-ROMs and Wonderland computer tapes showed children as young as 3 months subjected to explicit sex acts" (Nordland and Bartholet (2001), p. 47).

One year later on Sept 8, 1999, the police succeeded in busting one of the largest child pornography businesses in the U.S. Owners Thomas and Janice Reedys' business "provided access to a suspected 300 child-pornography Web sites, reached thousands of people in dozens of states and netted the couple as much as $1.4 million a month" (Tresniowski et. al., 2001, p. 119). The company's computer database listed 320,000 clients worldwide (p. 120). Lt. Bill Walsh concluded that "the Reedys are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Internet child pornography, and there's no telling how big the iceberg is" (cited by Alex Tresniowski et. al., 2001, p. 122). Jenkins expresses his alarm that "even the vast quantity of images that are now publicly available represents only a fraction of the true repertoire" on the Internet (p. 77).

Jenkins contends that because law enforcement officials have focused their efforts on dealing with "online seduction, or pedophiles stalking victims via computers," while neglecting the far more serious problem of child pornography, collectors and producers of child pornography on the Internet are being left to continue their work uninterrupted.

Jenkins (2000) cites the international police agency Interpol as reporting "that over 30,000 pedophiles are involved in organized child pornography rings in Europe" (p. 74). He notes that these pedophiles are "core activists" and that "casual browsers may be much more numerous" (p. 74). Furthermore, child pornography rings are just one manifestation of the child pornography industry as a whole.

Jenkins offers the following estimate of the prevalence of child pornography users on the Internet:

"The core population [presumably he is referring to pedophiles] as of 2001, should be counted somewhere in the range of fifty to a hundred thousand individuals, though that is a very loose figure. It is also a global number: perhaps a third of these are located in the United States. Given the phenomenal expansion of the Internet since the mid-1990s, we can assume that this figure is changing very rapidly, and certainly expanding." (p. 74; emphasis added)

Elsewhere, Jenkins refers to there being a maximum of "a hundred thousand people in the child porn subculture" who are users of child pornography on the Internet (p. 211).

Hughes notes that "the number of children online has grown as rapidly as the whole Internet" (p. 26). In 1995, there were an estimated 1.1 million children on the Internet. By the beginning of 1997, the estimated number of children had risen to 6 million; and by the end of 1997, the estimated number had increased to 10 million children online (p. 26). Linz & Imrich (2001) also cite an estimate of 10 million children online, but without specifying the year (p. 1000).

"In the late 1980s," according to Kimberly McCabe (2000), "it was estimated that child pornography exploited some 1.2 million children" (citing Campagna & Poffenberger, 1988; Garcia, 1987, p. 73). Several years later in 1992, Tim Tate quoted the U.S. Department of Justice's assessment that child pornography producers had "filmed the abuse of more than one million children in the United States alone" (in Itzin, p. 208).

Hughes offers the following explanation for the increase in child victimization by child pornography on the Internet:

"The movement of the sex industry to the Internet has increased the demand for new and more extreme images of the sexual exploitation of women and children.... Buyers demand new images with the scenes of sexual exploitation and abuse that are in fashion among predators. The result is increased abuse and exploitation of women and children." (p. 45)

Similarly, Jenkins refers to "the constant infusion of new material," noting that "the [child pornography] images now coming online are ever more explicit and hardcore" (p. 4).

Despite the impossibility of arriving at a sound basis for estimating the prevalence of child pornography on the Internet, many researchers and other investigators have noted the enormous increase in child pornography over time. For example, British feminist researcher Liz Kelly states that, "like other forms of porn its [child pornography's] availability and acceptability have increased significantly in the latter part of the twentieth century" (in Itzin, (1992) p. 116). In addition, Hughes (1999) reports that, "Through the mid-1990s citizens of Western Europe and the United States observed that the problems of child pornography and predators on the Internet were escalating rapidly" (p. 60). She also maintains that:

"Although descriptions and depictions of the sexual abuse of children have existed for centuries, the number and availability of images, especially photographs and videos that require the actual sexual abuse of a child, have increased exponentially." (1999, p. ?35)

Hughes (1999) attributes this increase to the mainstream acceptance of pornography in general as well as the growth in the prostitution industry over the past several decades (p. ?35). She maintains that these developments have "increased the demand and supply of child pornography" (1999, p. ?35). Another factor, according to Hughes, is that "the Internet has enabled the globalization of the production and distribution of all types of pornography, including child pornography" (1999, p. 60). On the other hand, O'Connell (2001) suggests that:

"Perhaps the most significant factor influencing the growth of child pornography on the Internet is the ease of dissemination and collection. Such anonymity and convenience, eliminating the need to expose identity in a transaction, has revealed quite an extraordinary level of adult sexual interest in children. Presumably this interest was either dormant or latent on this scale in the past." (p. 68)

Carlsson (2001) refers to "the rapidity, economy and simplicity" of the Internet as responsible for expanding "the distribution of child pornography immensely" (p. 62).

Another source of the increase in child pornography is due to the Internet's facilitation of the "globalization of the production and distribution of all types of pornography, including child pornography" (Hughes, 1999, March, ?p. 35). Similarly, Carlsson (2001) maintains that, "the Net's global reach implies unprecedented potential for effectively spreading illegal images" (p. 62).

South African researcher Anne Mayne (2000) offers the following very different explanation for the escalation in child pornography over time:

"It is linked to an expansion in the production of adult pornography. Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler ... are powerful promoters of the libertarianism that began to gain wide popularity in the 1960s and 1970s. They also covertly normalise and promote sex with children." (p. 25)

Mayne explains that the libertarian movement has encouraged an increase in child pornography because it fosters "the attitude that anything that turns you on sexually is acceptable" (p. 25). Chapter 14 provides numerous descriptions of cartoons and child pornography pictures published in these well-known pornography magazines that promote adult-child sex (i.e., abuse).

Nordland and Bartholet (2001) provide additional evidence of the escalation claimed by so many researchers i.e., that "In 1998 the FBI opened up 700 cases dealing with online pedophilia, most for posting child pornography. By 2000 that figure had quadrupled to 2,856 cases" (p. 47).

Jenkins cites U.S. Customs authorities who "claimed to have found child porn sites that scored literally millions of hits in a given month" (p. 74). And Nordland and Bartholet (2001) refer to a website known to U.S. Customs as the Tajik Express that

"recorded 4,107 hits from different Internet user addresses in the first month, as well as 95,450 downloads of images. In its third month, the site recorded an astounding 147,776 hits from individual users, and the download of 3.2 million images." (p. 47)

Santos (2001) notes that "Surveys ... suggest that pornographic sites in general are among those most often visited on the Internet" (p. 58).

The piecemeal estimates of the prevalence of child pornography on the Internet cited above are exceedingly unsatisfactory. Because figures are given without any explanation of how they are arrived at, there is no way to assess their accuracy. The fact that most child pornography on the Internet is illegal is probably the biggest obstacle to estimating prevalence; but many others have been described in this chapter. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to conclude with the following observations:

1. The number of Internet users keeps increasing exponentially, both in the United States and internationally. Hence the number of individuals who are potential new viewers of child pornography, is also increasing exponentially;

2. The number of pedophiles and non-pedophilic child molesters who gain access to the Internet internationally is increasing very fast, and will continue to do so;

5. Because the child pornography sought by users typically becomes more extreme over time, this factor accounts for an ever-growing demand for child pornography that is more injurious to the victims used in it;

6. The increasing division into the haves and the havenots within and between countries, creates ever-growing populations of very vulnerable and exploitable children who can be recruited, tricked, manipulated, coerced, drugged, raped, beaten, and/or tortured into becoming victims of child pornography;

7. All the advantages of being a child pornography user on the Internet, as opposed to off the Internet, have encouraged many new users who now feel safe to pursue their sexual arousal to child pornography for the first time.

8. Because of the massive level of adult sexual arousal to children now evident on the Internet, it appears that there are many new users whose "interest was either dormant or latent ... in the past" (O'Connell, 2001, p. 68).

9. Whereas previously most child pornography users were not financially motivated to trade in child pornographic pictures between themselves, there are increasing numbers of users who are motivated by money to take photos of pre-pubescent and post-pubescent children. Presumably, there are some financially-motivated users who sexually abuse children to obtain fresh merchandise that is more profitable than recycling old material.