Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography on the Internet

ONE Out of Control?

O N E Out of Control? In fact, extremely few persons actually get arrested and sent to jail, that is a myth really. There are thousands of vhs’s out there, many from 1999, thousands of people present at this bbs [bulletin board] and millions of loli-lovers in various countries, yet you only see a couple of persons getting arrested, and the media writes about it like they have been busting Al Capone. —Godfather Corleone, Maestro board, January 24, 2000 Over the last decade, politicians have often been agitated by the issue of Internet regulation, and they have usually couched their concerns in terms of protecting children. How can the young be kept clear of the “back alleys of the Internet,” where they might encounter disturbing adult imagery? Might children be lured online by cults or hate groups? On the other side of the debate, opponents of regulation counter that repressing overt sexual or extremist material threatens to damage access to genuinely important information or literary work. Yet throughout these charged discussions runs a consensus that regulation could work in practice ; that a law passed against, say, pornography or hate propaganda might actually sweep those materials from the World Wide Web or at least keep people away from them; that, given the chance, censorship might work. But is this idea plausible? That it is not—that regulation can, in fact, achieve remarkably little—may be suggested by the easy availability on the Internet of what is probably the most reprehensible| 1 | material of all, the most stigmatized, and the most rigidly prohibited: namely, child pornography. When hearing debates about Net regulation, we might usefully remember the case of “Helena,” probably a British girl, who, tragically, may be one of the best-known sex stars on the Web. In the late 1980s, as a little girl of seven or eight, Helena became the subject of a photo series that depicted her not only in all the familiar nude poses of hardcore pornography but also showed her in numerous sex acts with Gavin, a boy of about the same age. Both are shown having sex with an adult man, presumably Helena’s father. The images are collectively known by various names but the commonest is “hel-lo,” that is, “Helena /lolita.” Since their first appearance they have had an astonishing afterlife; probably not a day has passed without the hel-lo images appearing anew on some electronic server somewhere in the world, and they are cherished by thousands of collectors worldwide. They seem to be the standard starter kit for child porn novices. In addition, Helena’s pictures form part of a much larger series, known under titles such as hel-anal, hel-cum, and hel-louise. Hel-lo itself was recently described by a child porn enthusiast as “the greatest HC [hard-core] series ever made! She was ‘acting’ since she was a toddler until she was twelve years old, which means there are thousands of pics of her in action out there somewhere! No other series compares!!!”1 Or we might consider the more recent KG and KX series, the “kindergarten ” photos, which together represent perhaps the most prized collections currently available on the Net. KG is a series of hundreds (maybe thousands) of nude images of several very young girls, mainly between the ages of three and six years old, with each item including the girl’s name—Helga, Inga, and so on. The photographs date from the mid1990s , and they likely derive from either Germany or Scandinavia. In the words of one fan of the series, “Once upon a time. There was a chemist that had earned his Ph.D. Well, he got married and along with his wife opened up a day care center. Well, as the story goes, he managed to take pictures of lots and lots of things. Eventually he got busted.”2 The KG collection exists alongside a still more sought-after version, KX, which Out of Control?| 2 | depicts the same children in hard-core sexual situations with one or more men. Put simply, most are pictures of four- and five-year-old girls performing oral sex and masturbation on adult men. The immense popularity of the KG images ensured an enthusiastic market for KX, which entered general circulation in early 2000. The popularity of hel-lo and KX has been achieved despite the utterly illegal nature of such collections...