Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography on the Internet

EIGHT A Global Community

E I G H T A Global Community Q: If most of the postings are illegal, why is this group still up? A: The Internet is not subject to any national jurisdiction. Participating (i.e. posting and downloading) is. —abpep-t FAQ New communication technologies have often been extolled for promoting the unification of humanity and the reduction of international tensions ; when radio first developed in the 1920s, the BBC adopted the idealistic motto “And nation shall speak peace unto nation.” The Internet has accelerated the process of globalization at a breathtaking pace, but a side effect of this has been to pose wholly novel problems for the enforcement of laws. Effective policing presupposes the existence of some clear jurisdiction. In cyberspace, issues of law and jurisdiction are often very cloudy indeed, and in large measure, the child pornography subculture exists because it is beyond the boundaries of any particular state or legal jurisdiction. Certainly, police agencies have cooperated across borders in order to share information and make arrests: the Wonderland affair demonstrates that. Having said this, the gaps in international policing remain obvious.1 Understandably, legislators believe firmly in notions of jurisdiction and national sovereignty, ideas that presuppose the existence of the nation -state in the form in which it has existed since the Renaissance. Now nation-states have never possessed the total imperial authority within their own boundaries that governments and political thinkers have af-| 184 | fected to believe. No country could control its domestic affairs in total isolation as long as it engaged in international trade or other transactions , signed treaties, and entered alliances. National independence was massively eroded during the nineteenth century by the rapid growth of technology, media, and, above all, financial structures. Except for the most remote fastnesses utterly cut off from the global community, complete domestic autonomy was as much of a dream as economic autarchy. Perhaps the last truly autonomous nations on the planet ceased to exist when the British invaded Tibet in 1904 and the Italians seized Ethiopia in the 1930s. Still, the coming of the Internet has made the reduction of national sovereignty glaringly obvious by demonstrating the irrelevance of national boundaries and the extreme difficulty of national efforts at regulation, commercial or moral. Attempts to regulate the child porn trade have thus forced a new degree of international cooperation and an unprecedented harmonization of morality legislation and police procedures . The problem in coming years will be in attempting to project any such consensus to the whole globe, for only in this way can the electronic child porn culture be denied a home base.2 Global Community A glimpse at any of the boards will demonstrate the thoroughly globalized nature of the child pornography trade. The whole child porn underworld survives and flourishes by exploiting differences between the legal systems of different countries, between countries that have radically different attitudes toward childhood sexuality. Also crucial are seemingly marginal distinctions over the age of consent and the definition of obscenity . Through the early 1980s, child pornography magazines were still legally and publicly accessible in the Netherlands, posing severe difficulties for police in other European nations, who fought hard against importation . Though hard-core child porn had largely moved underground by the 1990s, several countries retained relatively relaxed attitudes about child sexuality, which affected their views of what could legitimately be portrayed on the Web. While U.S. law strictly prohibits A Global Community| 185 | all depictions of nude or suggestively clad children, European countries tend to be more liberal about showing simple nudity in a non-sexual context , as in a nudist camp. Naturist magazines such as the German Jung und Frei and the French Jeune et Naturel circulated freely in Europe through the late 1990s. At least until recently, there was no reason why a Swedish server could not present a picture of a group of naked tenyear -old girls on a beach playing volleyball, though this picture would be strictly contraband when it was received on American soil. Nor did most European countries share the American horror of the art photographs of naked children by David Hamilton and others.3 In addition, many of the hard-core images circulated on the Net are the incidental products of “sex tourism.” These portray white men having sex with young Asian or Latina girls and are presumably souvenirs taken by tourists visiting third world countries during...