Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography on the Internet

TWO Child Pornography

T W O Child Pornography Where were most of you twenty years ago? It was an exciting time online. —Kindred, Maestro board, March 18, 2000 For most observers, child pornography is not only repulsive but genuinely baffling, which may explain the reluctance to believe it is so widespread on the Internet, except as a kind of sick joke. Surely so many people cannot be so very disturbed as this phenomenon would suggest? In fact, there is abundant evidence of adults being sexually interested in, even obsessed with, children, which accounts for an enduring market in pornographic materials. Though far removed from any kind of social mainstream, a sexual interest in children is not confined to a tiny segment of hard-core individuals who are demonized under some such damning label as “perverts” or “pedophiles.” Child pornography has a substantial, if murky, history, and in recent times individuals have always been able to find materials of this kind, often by resorting to creative subterfuges and new technologies. The Internet merely marks the latest phase in this story. “Barely Legal” The prohibition on sex between adults and minors is neither absolute nor universal. A basic biological instinct mandates the protection of the young, which explains the common taboo against intercourse with very small children. Having said this, many societies both past and present are| 25 | far more tolerant of sexual play with children than modern Western standards would permit. In addition, the definition of childhood varies greatly according to time and location. “Minority” is a legal concept profoundly shaped by political pressures and interactions in any given society. While virtually all societies define a five-year-old as a child, only in relatively recent times would a fifteen-year-old be placed in a comparable category and subject to the same kind of legal restraints and protections. The concept of “adolescence” dates only to the early twentieth century.1 In most traditional societies, the transition from girlhood to womanhood is linked to puberty, and the assumption is that at this point the young woman is able to participate legally in sexual activity, subject to the moral codes of the community in question. Nor is even puberty necessarily a hard and fast dividing line. In the United States, the age of consent for girls stood at ten years from colonial times until the 1880s, when it was raised in response to heightened sensitivity to sexual dangers. Over the next century, the American age of legal consent rose steadily, commonly to sixteen or eighteen, while the physical age of sexual maturity fell equally dramatically, from fifteen to twelve or thirteen. During the twentieth century, therefore, young teenage girls were far more likely to be sexually active than their predecessors, though virtually all such behaviors were newly defined as seriously illegal. Only as recently as 1984 was the age at which individuals could legally be depicted in a sexual or pornographic context raised from sixteen to eighteen. The notion that a seventeen-year-old girl is legally a “child” has thus been legislated within very recent memory. The historically contingent nature of the notion of “childhood” was emphasized in a recent Canadian child pornography case, in which a senior judge took issue with that nation’s current definition of the age of sexual majority: In this judgment, when I myself use the word “child” . . . I mean those below the age of puberty. At common law, these ages were deemed to be twelve for a girl and fourteen for a boy. As, however, fourteen is the age of consent in Canada and has been, for girls, for over one hundred years, I define a “child” as anyone under the age of fourteen years. I appreciate that in the latter part of this century, fifteen, sixteen and sevChild Pornography| 26 | enteen-year-olds have been considered barely more than children. Our forebears thought no such thing. Boys were sent to sea at thirteen or fourteen and girls could be apprenticed to domestic service, with their consent, at twelve. Boys under eighteen, by lying about their age, fought in the forces in both wars.2 Rather than imagining a fundamental gulf dividing “child-lovers” from “normal” people, we should rather speak of a continuum, in which popular condemnation of behavior is inversely proportionate to the age of the subject. If an adult man is sexually interested in younger teenage girls, then...