Manhunt
I decided to include a lot of this chapter because most of the people who read this may end up being MAPs—because that is my community. Whether we act or not, this is our history, and we should be aware of it.
This chapter covers crime; representation in media; intentional fear mongering; the using of pedophiles to make a compelling story; the creation of crime by law enforcement to justify their jobs and funding; the spread of false information to justify the harsh treatment of sex offenders; projection; the erasure of consensual youth sexuality through fabrication and fearmongering, ultimately resulting in higher AoC laws; the satanic panic; and more censorship, particularly of anything deemed “child pornography,” whether its pornographic or involves actual children or not.
Hear the word pedophile and images and ideas flood to mind. Pedophiles are predatory and violent; the criminal codes call their acts sexual attacks and sexual assaults. Pedophiles look like every man—“a teacher, a lawyer, a judge, a scout leader, a police officer, an athletic coach, a religious counselor”—but their sexuality makes them different from the rest of us, sick: pedophilia is listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the canon of psychopathology. Pedophiles are insatiable and incurable. “Statistics show that 95% of the time, anyone who molests a child will likely do it again,” declared an Indiana senator proposing community notification laws for former sex offenders. “The only molesters who can be considered permanently cured are those who have been surgically castrated,” Ann Landers once wrote.
Pedophiles abduct and murder children, and people who abduct and murder children are likely to be pedophiles. “The pedophile who kidnapped Adam from a mall and killed him in 1981 . . .” began a feature on molesters by Boston Herald reporter J. M. Lawrence, following Jeffrey’s killing. He was referring to the still unsolved abduction-murder of six-year-old Adam Walsh, whose case helped spur the creation of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and (some say) the career of his father, John, now the host of The FBI’s Most Wanted. Even if a child survives a liaison with a pedophile, we believe, he will inevitably suffer great harm. “The predatory pedophile is as dangerous as cancer. He works quietly, and his presence becomes known only by the horrendous damage he leaves,” stated the children’s lawyer and sex-thriller writer Andrew Vachss.
… As for Adam Walsh, invoked by Boston Herald as the Ur-Victim molestation murder, no defendant was ever indicated in his disappearance. According to detectives in Hollywood, Florida, where the crime occurred, Adam’s father spread the rumor that the abductor was a pedophile, most prominently in a much-quoted book about child molesters, although there was neither suspicion nor evidence of sex in the case.
The problem with all this information about pedophiles is that most of it is not true or is so qualified to be useless as generalization. First of all, the streets and computer chat rooms are not crawling with child molesters, kidnappers, and murderers. According to police files, 95 percent of allegedly abducted children turn out to be “runaways” and “throwaways” from home or kids snatched by one of their own parents in divorce custody disputes.13 Studies commissioned under the Missing Children’s Assistance Act of 1984 estimate that between 52 and 158 children will be abducted and murdered by non family members each year.14 Extrapolating from other FBI statistics, those odds come out between 1 in 364,000 and fewer than 1 in 1 million. A child’s risk of dying in a car accident is twenty-five to seventy-five times greater.
Molestations, abductions, and murders of children by strangers are rare. And, say the FBI and social scientists, such crimes are not on the rise.18 Some researchers even believe that some forms of molestation, such as exhibitionism, might be declining.19
Criminal records do not indicate there are large or growing numbers of pedophiles. Even as the age of consent has risen and arrests for lower-level sex crimes have increased dramatically,22 arrests for rape and other sex offenses, including those against children, still constitute only about 1 percent of all arrests in 1993.23
Pedophiles are not generally violent, unless you are using the term sexual violence against children in a moral, rather than a literal, way. Its perpetrators very rarely use force or cause physical injury in a youngster.24 In fact, what most pedophiles do with children could not be further from Charles Jaynes’s alleged necrophilic abominations. Bringing themselves down to the maturity level of children rather than trying to drag the child up toward an adult level, many men who engage in sex either children tend towards kissing, mutual masturbation, or “hands-off” encounters such as voyeurism and exhibitionism.
… contrary to politicians’ claims, the recidivism rates of child sex offenders are among the lowest in the criminal population. Analyses of thousands of subjects in hundreds of studies in the United States and Canada have found that about 13 percent of sex offenders are rearrested, compared with 74 percent for all prisoners.29 With treatment, the numbers are even better. The state of Vermont, for example, reported in 1995 that its reoffense rates after treatment were only 7 percent for pedophiles, 3 percent for incest perpetrators, and 3 percent for those that had committed “hands-off” crimes such as exhibitionism.30
Why, in spite of all information to the contrary, do Americans insist on believing that pedophiles are a major peril to their children? What do people fear so formidably?
Our culture fears the pedophile, say some social critics, not because he is deviant, but because he is ordinary. And I don’t mean because he is the ice-cream man or Father Patrick. No, we fear him because he is us. In his elegant study of “the culture of child-molesting,” the literary critic James Kincaid traced this terror back to the middle of the nineteenth century. Then, he said, Anglo-American culture conjured childhood innocence, defining it as desireless subjectivity, at the same time as it constructed a new ideal of the sexually desirable object. The two had identical attributes—softness, cuteness, docility, passivity—and this simultaneous cultural invention has presented us with a wicked psychosocial problem ever since. We relish our erotic attraction to children, says Kincaid (witness the child beauty pageants in which JonBenet Ramsey was entered). But we also find that attraction abhorrent (witness the public shock and disgust at JonBenéts “serialization” in those pageants). So we project that eroticized desire outward, creating a monster to hate, hunt down, and punish.31
In her classic 1981 study, Father-Daughter Incest, feminist psychologist Judith Lewis Herman suggested another source of self-revulsion that might lead us to project outward. Child abuse, she said, is close to home, built into the structure of the “normal,” “traditional” family. Take the family’s paternal authority enforced through violence, along with its feminine and child submission, its prohibitions against sexual talk and touch, and its privacy sanctified and inviolable, she said. Add repressed desire, and the potential of incest festers, waiting to happen.32
Herman’s work was at the front edge of a horrifying suspicion, the truth of which is now firmly established. Even if child-sex crimes against strangers are rare, incest is not. Like pedophilia, it’s hard to say how common it is, since incest figures are almost muddied as those of adult-child sex outside the family. On one hand, child abuse statistics are notoriously unreliable; for example, of the 319,000 reports of sexual abuse of children in 1993, two-thirds were unsubstantiated. The expansion of the definitions of family members, the ages of people considered children, and the types of interactions labeled abuse have jacked up incest figures. So has the popular suspicion of incest as an invisible source of later psychological distress, especially among women. Since the 1980s, self-help authors have claimed that you don’t even have to remember a sexual event to know it occurred. “If you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were,” wrote Ellen Bass in The Courage to Heal.34 The symptoms of past molestation listed in such books range from asthma to neglect of one’s teeth.
… At any rate, reliable sources show that more than half, and some say almost all, of sexual abuse is visited upon children by their own family members or parental substitutes.
The vast majority of so-called pedophiles do not go out and ravage small children. So-called criminals are most often caught not touching but looking at something called child pornography. And their desired objects are not “children” but adolescents, about the age of model Kate Moss at the start of her modeling career.39 “The clients are usually white, suburban, married businessmen who want a blowjob from a teenage boy but don’t consider themselves gay, and heterosexual men who seek out young girls,” said Edith Springer, who worked for many years with teenage prostitutes in New York’s Time Square. “I have never in all my years of therapy and counseling come across what the media advertises as a ‘pedophile.’”
Psychologists and law enforcers call the man who loves teenagers a hebephile. That’s a psychiatric term, denoting pathological sexual deviance. But if we were to diagnose every American man for whom Miss (or Mr.) Teenage America was the optimal sex object, we’d have to call ourselves a nation of perverts. If the teenage body were not the culture’s ideal of sexiness, junior high school girls probably would not start starving themselves as soon as they notice a secondary sex characteristic, and the leading lady (on-screen or in life) would not customarily be twenty to forty years younger than the leading man. I asked Meg Kaplan, a widely respected clinician who treats sex offenders at the New York State Psychiatric Institute’s Sexual Behavior Clinic, about the medicalization and criminalization of the taste for adolescents flesh. “Show me a heterosexual male who’s not attracted to teenagers,” she snorted. “Puh-leeze.”
Rather than indict our Monday night football buddies, rather than indict the family, though, we circle the wagons and project danger outward.
Days after Jeffrey Curley’s murder, the Boston Herald was fulfilling its public duty to provide sound-bite cultural analysis. “[S]exually oriented Internet chat rooms, the proliferation of sexual situations on TV, and easy access to hard-core pornography are creating more damaged children and possibly the next generation of pedophiles,” opined one “expert.” Another blamed welfare reform, which sent single mothers to work, leaving their kids to fend on their own. “And there are always child molesters looking for these kids.”
As we saw in chapter 1, dire assessments of a morally anarchic world are not new. But they tend to crop up in times of social transformation, when the economy trembles or when social institutions crumble and many people feel they’re losing control of their jobs, their futures, or their children’s lives. At times like these, the child-molesting monster can be counted on to creep from the rubble.
He first showed his grizzly face in modern Anglo-American history at the height of industrialization, the late nineteenth century. In the cities and mill towns, poor and working-class children and adolescents left their homes and went out to work, where they met new opportunities for sexual pleasure and new sources of sexual and economic pain. The young working girl’s pleasures—to dance, flirt, or engage in casual prostitution to augment her meager wages—offended Victorian and religious morals. Her pains—exploitation and harassment in the factories, rape, disease, and unwed motherhood—outraged feminists and socioeconomic reformers. The English writer Henry Worsely called the factory a “school of iniquity” producing in the child an unseemly “precocity” about “the adult world and its pleasures.” The press, eager to heat up these simmering sensitivities, “discovered” in the gutters a marketplace in which venal capitalism fornicated with sexual license. This commerce was called white slavery.
In 1885, the popular tabloid Pall Mall Gazette introduced London’s readers to the “white slaver.” It’s sensationalist series “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” one of the most successful “exposes” in journalistic history, told of a black market in which virgin girls were sold by their hapless mothers to wicked neighborhood procuresses, who in turn prostituted them to eager, amoral “gentlemen.” The article ignited one of the greatest moral panics in modern British history.43
When a similar panic took hold in America a decade or so later, it had literally a different complexion. Waves of immigrants from China, southern Europe, and Ireland, as well as blacks from the South, were pouring into cities. And while African chattel slavery had been abolished, racism was hardly dead. “White slavery” was so named to denote that its alleged victims were of Northern European descent. Meanwhile, the sexual salesmen described in almost all accounts of “white slavery” were swarthy—sinister almost by definition—Jews, Italians, and Greeks.
Although adult prostitution did flourish in the new industrial cities, the trade in children on either side of the Atlantic was virtually an invitation. The Gazette’s editor, it turned out, had engineered the abduction of the “five-pound virgin” (referring to her price, not her weight) around whom his expose was built;46 “the throngs of child prostitutes” claimed by London’s anti-white-slavery campaigners were “imaginary products of sensational journalism intended to capture the attention of a prurient Victorian public,” according to historian Judith Walkowitz.47 Rates of American prostitution were also hugely inflated: one figure reported in the New York suffragist press was multiplied tenfold from probable reality.48 Nevertheless, both moral campaigns led to a spate of sex-restrictive legislation. Following the “Maiden Tribute” articles, the British age of consent rose from thirteen to sixteen.49 In America, between 1886 and 1895, twenty-nine states raised theirs from as low as seven to as high as eighteen. Some of the laws, like the British criminalization of homosexuality, stayed on the books into the late twentieth century.
As the twentieth century progressed, the sex monster went into hibernation. He was briefly roused during the depression, when widespread financial failure threatened an epidemic of foundering masculine confidence that sparked suspicion of a compensatory “hypermasculinity” that would burst out in pathological desires for young bodies.51 The child molester slumbered again, however, when World War II gave America a real enemy, and no little debauchery was tolerated both stateside, between women and and high schoolers left to run the factories, and near the front, where single and married men took R&R with the residents of the war’s scarred cities.
When the war ended, however, it was time to get gender and the family back to “normal.” Men had to resume breadwinning and women the bread baking. The homosexual culture that had seen its first sparks in the barracks and soldiers’ bars had to be extinguished. And teenagers, who had enjoyed a taste of adult wage earning and adult sexual license during the wars and the Depression, had to be dispatched back to childhood. Lingering resistance required an antidote: a social menace to make the renewed old order more attractive. And before FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy begin painting that menace red, they set their sites on pink: the first targets of their inquests were homosexuals in the State Department. The hounded homosexuals in high places stood as public example of (and to) perverts allegedly on the loose everywhere. The photomontage running beside Hoover’s famous 1947 article “How Safe Is Your Daughter?” Announced the return of the sex monster: three white girls in fluffy dresses and ankle socks fleeing from a huge, hovering masculine hand. “The nation’s women and children will never be secure,” the caption read, inserting a heart-stopping ellipsis “. . . So long as degenerates run wild.”
During this time, psychology was establishing itself as a profession, the apex of a centuries-long process by which the management of social deviance shifted from the purview of preachers to that of clinicians. Modern case books gave the monster a new name: the “sexual psychopath,” compelled to molest children by “uncontrolled and uncontrollable desires.” By the mid-1950s, prewar anxieties about masculinity had zeroed in on sex between men, and in both the academy and the public imagination the psychopath took on the stereotypic characteristics of the homosexual, and vice versa. Boys were alerted to never enter public toilets alone. And after every grisly crime against a child, the gay bars were sure to be raided. As they had half a century earlier, the headlines rang out alarms of a crime wave against children … But also like the panic of that earlier era, this one reflected no actual increase in violent sex crimes against children. Nevertheless, commissions were empaneled, new laws passed, and arrests increased.
During the 1960s and 1970s, sex panic gave way to sexual liberation, including, for a brief moment, the notion that children had a right to sexual expression. “Sex is a natural appetite,” wrote Heidi Handman and Peter Brennan in 1974, in Sex Handbook: Information and Help for Minors. “If you’re old enough to want sex, you’re old enough to have it.”60 But as women’s and children’s sexual options were proclaimed, their experiences of coercion were also thrown into relief. Feminists started speaking out against sexual violence under the cloak of family and romantic intimacy; suspicion grew that child sexual abuse was epidemic. An industry of therapists specializing in unearthing past abuse and curing its purported effects began to prosper.
The child pornographer, when he first came to public light in 1976, was a feeble beast and an even worse businessman. In fact, he was almost bankrupt. Raids aimed at cleaning up Times Square for the Democratic Convention uncovered only a miniscule cache of kiddie porn. But those few stacks of dusty, decades old black-and-white rags, already illegal, were enough to launch a crusade. It was led by a team that would epitomize the anti-child-porn forces: a child psychiatrist, Judianne Densen-Gerber, who founded the drug rehabilitation empire Odyssey House in New York, and a vice cop, Sergeant Lloyd Martin, of the Los Angles Police Department.
The two careened from sea to sea, stoking outsized claims. Before a congressional committee in 1977, Densen-Gerber estimated that 1.2 million children were victims of child prostitution and and pornography, including “snuff” films in which they were killed for viewers’ titillation. Martin traveled the country orating speeches of evangelical fervor, warning America on one Christian television show, for instance, that “pedophiles actually wait for babies to be born so that, just minutes after birth, they can grab post-fetuses and sexually victimize them.” At that 1977 congressional committee, he declared that the sexual exploitation of children was “worse than homicide.”
Within a few years, police testified that child porn had never been more than a boutique business even in its modern heyday in the late 1960s. The first law wiped out what little kiddie porn remained on the street, and by the early 1980s, the head of the New York Police Department’s Public Morals Division proclaimed the stuff “as rare as the Dead Sea Scrolls.” The 1.2 million figure, which Densen-Gerber subsequently doubled,66 was revealed to be the arbitrarily quadrupled estimate of an unsubstantiated number one author said he’d “thrown out” to get a reaction from the law enforcement community.67 Densen-Gerber would soon disappear from the public eye under suspicions of embezzling public monies and employing coercive and humiliating methods at Odyssey House.68 Martin would later be removed from his post at the LAPD for harassing witnesses and falsifying evidence.69
But their work had been accomplished. The press continued to broadcast their bogus statistics. Hardly a year after Densen-Gerber’s first press conference, Congress passed the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation Act of 1977, prohibiting the production and commercial distribution of obscene depictions of children younger than sixteen. One of the first causalities was Show Me!, a sex education book for prepubescent children featuring explicit photographs of children, from around six to their early teens, engaged in sex play. When it was published in 1970, the book was showered with awards. Under the new restrictions on “child pornography,” it became illegal to publish, distribute, and eventually, to own anywhere in the United States.
Then, in 1979, a six-year-old middle-class white boy named Ethan Patz turned the corner on his way to school in lower Manhattan and was never seen again. Two years later, six-year-old Adam Walsh’s head was found floating in the Florida canal. Federal and private money began funneling toward a newly named victim, the Missing and Exploited Child. Soon, hundreds of “missing children” were beseeching would-be rescuers from the containers of that quintessentially maternal food, milk. Local police departments set up child-finding units, which distributed pamphlets and dispatched trainers and speakers. Parents and teachers were getting the message: the molester-kidnapper was everywhere.
In 1984, the media started following breathlessly as the trial unfolded in southern California of Peggy Buckey, the elderly proprietor of the McMartin Preschool, and her son Ray, a beloved teacher. The two had been accused by three-year-olds of bizarre tortures—anal rape with knives and pencils, animal mutilation, oral sex performed on clowns—”satanic ritual abuse” allegedly carried out in broad daylight in open-door classrooms, where parents and other teachers could walk in at any time.
No child had volunteered any such story until being interviewed by Kee McFarlane and her team of social workers at the Children’s Institute International in Los Angeles, and the videotapes of these interviews revealed bewildered and resistant babies being hectored into assenting to the narratives fed them by their interrogators. Indeed, by the end of the longest and most expensive criminal history in U.S. history, it was the tapes themselves that exonerated the Buckeys. But eerily identical tales began to surface in schools across the nation.70 In 1994, the U.S. government’s National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect reported on it’s five-year survey of eleven thousand psychiatric and police workers nationwide, covering more than twelve thousand accusations of satanic ritual abuse. The investigation found “not a single case where there was clear corroborating evidence,” not a single snapshot or negative of the alleged rolls and rolls of child pornography produced by the deviants.71 But new accusations, all unsupported, kept coming. The latest were in Wenatchee, Washington, in 1995, where forty-three people were accused of some twenty-nine thousand counts of sexual abuse involving sixty children, all without a shred of evidence.72 At the beginning of the new millennium, many innocents are still behind bars.73
Debbie Nathan and Micheal Snedeker argued in Satan’s Silence that the day-care abuse scare tapped popular anxieties about women working outside the home and leaving their children with others. But these fears were given shape by a certain world view, which was attached to a certain political agenda. It was of the religious Right (who believed that Satan literally walked the earth), with the cautious endorsement of feminist sexual conservatives—the same bedfellows who would lie down together in the 1986 Meese commission.
… the Meese commission was not inclined to recommend any policies that feminists would champion, such as aid to women who wanted to leave abusive men or legal protections of sex workers from violence and economic exploitation. Rather, it erected a broad federal network to chase and prosecute symbolic assaults on its own ideas of morality, that is, on smut peddlers.
Right-wing organizations that had long fought for censorship of erotica were determined to stay the course. Shrewdly, they abandoned their old maiden in distress, “decency,” and took up the cause of “families and children.” Citizens for Decency Through Law became the Children’s Legal Foundation, which metamorphosed into the National Family Legal Foundation. Reverend Donald Wildmon’s National Federation for Decency became the American Family Association, and the National Coalition Against Pornography (N-CAP) spun off the National Law Center for Children and Families. The Justice Department’s National Obscenity Enforcement Unit, set up after the Meese commission, was rechristened the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section. The wide, fat enemy of “pornography” began to fade from view. Now, both antiporn feminist and conservative propaganda aimed at a sleeker “hard-core,” scarier “child pornography.”
Aficionados and vice cops concede that practically all the sexually explicit images of children circulating cybernetically are the same stack of yellowing pages found at the back of those X-rated shops, only digitized. These pictures tend to be twenty to fifty years old, made overseas, badly reproduced, and for the most part pretty chaste. That may be why federal agents almost never show journalists the contraband. But when I got a peek at a stash downloaded by Don Huycke, the national program manager for child pornography at the U.S. Customs Service, in 1995, I was underwhelmed. Losing count after fifty photos, I’d put aside three that could be called pornographic: a couple of shots of adolescents masturbating and one half-dressed twelve-year-old spreading her legs in a position more like a gymnast’s split than split beaver. The rest tended to be like the fifteen-year-old with a 1950s bob and an Ipana grin, sitting up straight, naked but demure, or the two towheaded six-year-olds in underpants, astride their bikes.
So when these old pictures show up on the Net, who’s putting them there? Attorney Lawrence Stanley, who published in the Benjamin A. Cardozo Law Review what is widely considered the most thorough research of child pornography in the 1980s, concluded that the pornographers were almost exclusively cops. In 1990 at a southern California police seminar, the LAPD’s R. P. “Toby” Tyler proudly announced as much. The government had shellshacked competition, he said; now law enforcement agencies were the sole reproducers and distributors of child pornography.75 Virtually all advertising, distribution, and sales to people considered potential lawbreakers were done by the federal government, in sting operations against people who have demonstrated (through, for instance, membership in NAMBLA) what agents regard as a predisposition to commit a crime. These solicitations were usually numerous and did not cease until the recipient took the bait. “In other words, there was no crime until the government seduced people into committing one,” Stanley wrote.76
If, as police claim, looking at child porn inspires molesters to go out and seduce living children, why were the feds doing the equivalent of distributing matches to arsonists? Their answer is: to stop the molesters before they strike again … But another logical answer to the almost exclusive use of stings to arrest would-be criminals is that the government, frustrated with the paucity of the crime they claim is epidemic and around which huge networks of enforcement operations have been built, have to stir the action to justify their jobs.
The same logic can explain why the volume of anti-child-porn legislation has increased annually. From relatively simple criminalization of production and distribution, the law eventually went after possession and then even viewing of child-erotic images at somebody else’s house. It raised the age of a “child” from sixteen to eighteen and defined as pornography pictures in which the subject is neither naked, nor doing anything sexual, nor, under the 1996 Child Pornography Prevention Act, is even an actual child. Legislation that was first justified as a protection of real children has evolved to statutes criminalizing the depiction of any person engaged in sexual activity who is intended to look like a minor.
Such bills have almost invariably been sponsored by conservative Republicans with support from right-wing and fundamentalist Christian organizations and antipornography feminists. And even while some legislators privately express doubts they protect children, these proposals are unstoppable. “When the senate votes on child issues, they’re all on one side,” Patrick Trueman, a lobbyist for the American Family Association and former head of Justice Department’s National Obscenity Enforcement Unit, told me in 1989. “We got the toughest law in 1988″—the Child Protection and Enforcement Act—”because it had the words child exploitation in it, though most of it was directed to adult pornography.”
The federal governments biggest success to date concluded in August 2001, with the arrest of two owners of Landslide Productions Inc., and one hundred of their customers in Fort Worth, Texas. Landslide maintained a profitable pornography Web site that offered, in addition to adult porn, links to foreign sites that contain images considered child pornography under U.S. law. The two owners were arrested for possession and distribution, not production, of child pornography, and the subscribers were arrested for possession. While one of these customers was identified as a “registered sex offender” and another as having been convicted of four “sex crimes” in the past, none arrested in this operation was indicted for abuse of an actual child. To draw out the child-porn afficionados among the site’s 250,000 mostly law-abiding subscribers, the government advertised sales of child-pornographic tapes and CD-ROMS under the name of the company, which it had seized in 1999. When a person placed an order, a package was sent and the buyer arrested on its delivery.
Were these customers predisposed to crime, besides the illegal act of looking at images of minors who might or might not be engaging in sex? According to FBI’s Gullotta when he spoke to Kincaid, the typical catch has no previous criminal record. Almost no such case goes to trial; the defendants plead guilty. The government calls this more evidence of guilt. But, again, closer examination of such cases (in fact, of most child abuse charges) reveals that pleas are often taken under advice of counsel to eliminate the chance of a long prison sentence and also to limit the personal destruction that publicity wreaks even if the accused is exonerated.
Statistics that I got from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 1996 indicated that the feared eventuality that motivates all this activity rarely comes to pass. Only twenty-three minors were enticed to malls and hotel rooms by their adult suitors between 1994 and 1996, none of these “children” was under thirteen, and most were at least a couple of years older than that. A 2001 survey conducted by the University of New Hampshire found that almost a fifth of ten-to seventeen-year-olds who went online received sexual solicitations from “strangers,” an unspecified number of whom may have been adults. However, it would be hard to impute widespread harm to these experiences. Three-quarters of the youth said they were not distressed by the posts. And, wrote the researchers, “no youth in the sample was actually assaulted as a result of contacts made over the internet.”87
After the passage of the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996, Oklahoma police seized a copy of the film of Gunter Grass’s Nobel Prize-winning The Tin Drum from a video rental store because of an inexplicit scene in the movie in which a man who refuses to grow out of his child body (to avoid participating in fascism) performs what some constitute as oral sex on an adult woman. And in the 1990s, cases proliferated in which clerks in photo-developing shops, instructed to alert the police of any “suspicious” pictures, flagged such classic “bear rug” shots as moms in the tub with their babies, which led to the arrests of the photographers, and worse.90 In New York, Fotomat employees reported nude shots of a six-year-old son taken by a photography student. The father was handcuffed and taken from his home, while his children were rushed out in their pajamas to be examined for sexual abuse. No evidence of abuse was found, and the man was not brought to trial. But he was barred from his home for two months and forbidden to see his youngest daughter. Cynthia Stewart, an Oberlin, Ohio, mother, was nabbed when a photograph of her eight-year-old daughter in the bath was fingered as “pornographic” by a photo shop clerk. Stewart escaped prosecution (and potential imprisonment) only after agreeing to state publicly that two of her pictures could be interpreted as “sexually oriented” and allowing prosecutors to destroy them; she also consented to participate in six months of anti-abuse counseling.91
Civil libertarians have called these laws unconstitutionally vague: a reasonable person can’t know in advance if he is breaking them. They’ve diverted millions of taxpayer dollars from real child welfare and created an atmosphere of puritanical surveillance over all U.S. citizens in the dubious name of catching a small number of people who, if left alone, might do nothing more harmful to minors than sit around and masturbate to pictures of ten-year-olds in bathing suits.
But the legislative legacy of the child-abuse panic has done more than abridge the First Amendment. For Americans convicted of any sex crime, legislation passed in the 1990s arguably constitutes cruel and unusual, often perpetual, punishment. By 1999, according to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, all fifty states had enacted “Megan’s laws,” requiring paroled sex offender registration and community notification; more stringent laws win states more federal crime-fighting funds.92 In many states, parolees are required to register regardless of the nature of their crime. In 2001, a judge in Corpus Christi, Texas, ordered twenty-one registered offenders to post “DANGER: Registered Sex Offender” notices on their homes and cars.93
Following Kansas’s lead in 1994, “sexually violent predator” laws spread across the states, which allowed the indefinite incarceration in psychiatric facilities of sex criminals who had completed prison sentences but were deemed likely to commit another crime. To qualify as a sexually violent predator, the convict had to manifest a “mental abnormality” or “personality disorder,” diagnosis about as exact as “a real fruitcake” and as common as compulsive eating. They were also remarkably reminiscent of the “uncontrollable desires” of the 1950s.
Those who work with sex offenders have warned that such policies might do no good and could even do harm. For one thing, former sex offenders are at far lower risk of committing new crimes than those released from prison after serving time for other crimes. Nevertheless, rage against sex criminals is often far greater, and community notification laws serve to focus that rage. Since their inception, such programs have fueled harassment and vigilantism, which further isolate and unnerve the parolee, leading to the exact opposite of the law’s intended effect. “You ban somebody from the community, he has no friends, he feels bad about himself, and you reinforce the very problems that contribute to the sex abuse behavior in the first place,” Robert Freeman-Longo, former director of the Safer Society Program and president of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, told me, “You make him a better sex offender.”
Some criminal-justice practices, moreover, seem to have no other intent but to keep the public on the edge of its seats. During the summer of 1997, California’s Justice Department set up a sort of side-show booth at state fairs featuring an LED screen that endlessly scrolled the names of the state’s sex offenders, along with their addresses—sixty-four thousand in all. What the shocked viewers did not know was that because of registration in that state covered crimes committed as far back as the 1940s, many of the “predators” on the list had been arrested for victimless misdemeanors like soliciting a prostitute or cruising a man in a gay bar.98 Tom Masters, program director of correctional treatment services at Oregon State Hospital, described such policymaking succinctly: “A lot of crime legislation is a function of politics, and not rehabilitation or community safety.”
Nor, I would add, is it a function of community sanity. In 1984, at the beginning of the sex-lawmaking frenzy, the authors of the final report on U.S. Senator William V. Roth’s Child Pornography and Pedophilia hearings noted what they called a paradox. “Good laws often lead to more arrests,” they wrote, “thus making it appear that more new laws are needed to curb what the public perceives as an increase in crime.”99 Nevertheless, the commissioners recommend more laws, which led to more bureaucracy, more agents, and more investigations, and more arrests. And that, said Eric Lotke of the National Center for Institutions and Alternatives, created another paradox: the public felt falsely safer and also more fearful.
Trying to fortify the nuclear family by fermenting suspicion of strangers fractures the community of adults and children; it can leave children defenseless in abusive homes. Projecting sexual menace onto a cardboard monster and pouring money and energy into vanquishing him distract adults from teaching children the subtle skills of loving with both trust and discrimination. Ultimately, children are rendered more vulnerable both at home and in the world.
13 – Laliberre, “Missing Children,” 77.
14 – J. M. Lawrence, “Molesters Hide Evil behind Image of the Normal Guy,” Boston Herald, October 12, 1997, 30.
18 – Laliberre, “Missing Children,” 78.
19 – Anne C. Salter, “Epidemiology of Child Sexual Abuse,” The Sexual Abuse of Children: Theory and Research, vol. 1, ed. William O’Donoghue and James H. Geer (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1992), 129-130.
22 – More than eight times more people were incarcerated for low-level sex offenses in 1992 than in 1980. Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Correctional Populations in the United States,” report, Washington, D.C., 1992, 53.
23 – Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Uniform Crime Reports: Crime in the U.S.,” report Washington D.C., 1993, 217.
24 – Okami and Goldberg, “Personality Correlates,” 317-20.
29 – Margaret A. Alexander, “Quasi-Meta-Analysis II, Oshko Correctional Institution,” State of Wisconsin Department of Corrections/Oshkosh Correctional Institution report, Oshkosh, 1994; Lita Furby et al., “Sex Offender Recidivism: A Review,” Psychological Bulletin 3 (1989); R. Karl Hanson and Monique T. Bussière, “Predictors of Sexual Offender Recidivism: A Meta Analysis,” Department of Solicitor General of Canada, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 66, no. 2 (1996).
30 – These numbers are inflated by reoffenses by adult rapists. A fifth of men who rape adult women rape again whether they undergo a treatment program or not. Men arrested for having sex with children are usually ashamed and want to stop. Since 1943, 11 percent of “child molesters” who were treated ended up back in prison, compared to 32 percent of those who didn’t take part in treatment. Margarete A. Alexander, “Sexual Offender Treatment Efficacy Revisited,” State of Wisconsin Department of Corrections/Oshkosh Correctional Institution report, Oshkosh, May, 1998. There’s also evidence better treatment is more successful. Before 1980, recidivism among treated sex offenders was almost 30 percent, after 1980 it dropped to 8.4 percent. Eric Lotke, “Sex Offenders: Does Treatment Work?” National Center for Institutions and Alternatives report, Washington, D.C., 1996, 5.
31 – James R. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992); James R. Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child-Molesting (Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 1998).
32 – Judith Lewis Herman, Father-Daughter Incest (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).
34 – Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (New York: Harper Perennial, 1988): 22.
39 – “By far the largest group of defendants [in child pornography cases] seems to be white males between 30 and 50 who are interested in teenage boys, usually between 14 and 17,” quote from Bruce Selcraig, a government investigator of child pornography during the 1980s. “Chasing Computer Perverts,” 53. Judith Levine also states the majority of men in jail for consensual sex with minors had had sex with teenagers, concluded from her own surveys over ten years, police sources, and defense attorneys.
43 – Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
46 – Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 81-120.
47 – Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980): 17.
48 – DuBois and Gordon, “Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield,” 33.
49 – Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 82.
51 – Estelle Freedman, “‘Uncontrollable Desires’: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920-1960,” Journal of American History 71, no. 1 (1987): 83-106.
60 – Heidi Handman and Peter Brennan, Sex Handbook: Information and Help for Minors (New York: Putnam, 1974).
66 – Joel Best, “Dark Figures and Child Victims: Statistical Claims about Missing Children,” Images of Issues: Typifying Contemporary Social Problems, ed. Joel Best (New York: Adeline de Gruyter, 1989), 21-37.
67 – Stanley, “The Child Porn Myth,” 313.
68 – Lucy Komisar, “The Mysterious Mistress of Odyssey House,” New York Magazine, November 1979, 43-50.
69 – “‘Child Sex’ Cop Transferred.”
70 – Nathan and Snedeker, Satan’s Silence.
71 – Daniel Goleman, “Proof Lacking in Ritual Abuse by Satanists,” New York Times, October 31, 1994.
72 – Kathryn Lyons, Witch Hunt: A True Story of Social Hysteria and Abused Justice (New York: Avon, 1998).
73 – Documented by the Justice Committee, San Diego, Calif.; Boston Coalition for Freedom of Expression, Boston, Mass., Nathan and Snedeker (Satan’s Silence).
75 – Seminar conducted at the University of Southern California by R. P. Tyler (reported by James R. Kincaid, author interview).
76 – Lawrence A. Stanley, “The Child-Porn Myth,” Playboy, September 1988, 41.
87 – Kimberly J. Mitchell, David Finkelhor, and Janis Wolak, “Risk Factors for and Impact of Online Sexual Solicitation of Youth,” Journal of the American Medical Association 285 (June 20, 2001): 3011-14 (unpaginated online); “Teenage Life Online,” the Pew Internet and American Life Project; John Schwartz, “Studies Detail Solicitation of Children for Sex Online,” New York Times, June 20, 2001.
90 – James R. Kincaid, “Is This Child Pornography?” salon.com, January 31, 2000. This source can no longer be found on the site, but could probably be obtained by contacting Kincaid directly.
91 – Katha Pollitt, “Subject to Debate,” Nation (December 13, 1999); “Cynthia Stewart’s Ordeal”; Cynthia Stewart and David Perrotta, “Thank You, Nation Family,” letters, Nation (May 1, 2000).
92 – Matt Golec, “Bill Would Expand Sex Offender Notification Law,” Burlington Free Press, January 30, 2000, A1.
93 – Ross E. Milloy, “Texas Judge Orders Notices Warning of Sex Offenders,” New York Times, May 29, 2001.
98 – Todd Purdum, “Registry Laws Tax Sex-Crimes Convicts with Broad Brush,” New York Times, July 1, 1997. Later that year the names of men who were convicted for consensual homosexuality were removed from the list. “Gay Exception Made to Registration Law,” New York Times, November 11, 1997.
99 – U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, “Child Pornography and Pedophilia,” report 99-537, October 6, 1986, 3.
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