|
Child Porn During the 1970s sex shops from New York to Los Angeles offered explicit materials featuring bestiality, rape and children. In 1977, Dr. Judianne Densen-Gerber told a U.S. Congressional Panel probing the sexual exploitation of children that, "We are dealing with organized crime, the same group of people who filled this country with narcotics..." Dr Densen-Gerber said "kiddie porno was started...in Seattle, Washington, by a man named Tony Eboli, who headed the Genovese family." The doctor apparently refers to Tommy Eboli, also called Tommy Ryan, who was shot to death from ambush as he left the Brooklyn apartment of his mistress. He had fallen out of favor with fellow Mob leaders who invested in a heroin smuggling scheme he engineered that went sour and cost millions. Eboli briefly shared leadership of the Vito Genovese Mafia family with Gerado Catena after Genovese was sent to prison. Most of the child pornography traded in the late '60s to 1977 was photographed in Europe, Asia, and North Africa. Many photos depicted erotic nudity rather than sex, and about 10-20% of photos in child porn magazines were pirated from nudist magazines, showing children playing innocently. A number of experts who have observed the child pornography industry from its beginnings to its demise agree that the number of minors shown in commercial child pornography magazines and films did not exceed 5,000 - 7,000 worldwide. Few of the children were runaways, prostitutes or drug addicts. Most came from middle-class homes and knew the adults for whom they posed. Most were between the ages of seven and fourteen. Instances of infants being molested and photographed simultaneously are rare if they've occurred at all. Claims of child auctions in Amsterdam, toll-free numbers and mail-order houses for ordering child prostitutes, child "snuff" films, satanic molestation rituals in which animals are dismembered, "chains of [American] brothels and bordellos...where children are kept...under lock and key," and motorcycle gang rapes are touted by anti-pornography activists, law enforcement officers, prosecutors, politicians, and others without presenting persuading evidence of such occurences. (Law Professor Lawrence A. Stanley) Holland, Denmark and Germany produced kiddie porn magazines and films during the late '60s to mid '70s. Few such productions were made in the United States. The approximate number of commercial child pornography magazines produced in the United States and Europe from the late 1960s onward consist of: less than 550 magazines depicting children having sex with other children or adults,; 460 magazines depicting boys nude and less than 100 magazines depicting girls nude. "Yes, we did publish a couple of child porn mags in the mid'70s," says Rupert James, who works for Peter Theander's Rodox corporation based in Copenhagen, Denmark. "We also did animal-sex mags and films. I suppose that we must have started about 1974 or so and it was all over 1978. One of them was called Children Love, and it went about 30 issues. The original idea was that everybody else was doing it, and in any case, it was supposed to be the softer, affectionate kind of child sex - not rape and brutality... "Why did we stop? We didn't like the nature of the material coming in. Originally we published stuff mostly from enthusiasts. But, of course, we were publishing it commercially as was everyone else at that time. That encouraged people to actually make the photos and films commercially. That meant we were commercially encouraging the abuse of children. That couldn't go on. "In my opinion we shouldn't have started. That was irresponsible. And we still have problems as a result. For example, the French customs and police always give us a bad time because we are down in their files as child pornographers. They don't listen when we sat that all stopped a long time ago, they don't care." (Porn Gold, published in London in 1988 by Faber & Faber) Some magazines publicized as child pornography contained no sex or "lascivious exhibition of the genitals". Moppets, for example, was one of the better-known titles which does not qualify as child pornography despite testimony before Congress by such mendacious sources as Lloyd Martin of the Los Angeles Police Department. Bill Margold remembers receiving regular visits from Martin. "One day I queried him about snuff films and if he'd ever seen one. 'There are no such things,' was his response. 'We've created that myth to make you industry look even worse than it is. The only ways we can get the public to believe that you are really rotten is to make them believe that you make snuff films and do kiddie porn'." In 1975, Houston police found a warehouse full of child porn, including 15,000 slides of boys engaging in gay sex. In 1976, Los Angeles Police found over 260 magazines in adult bookstores that dealt with child sex. In New York City, Father Bruce Ritter, a Franciscan priest who started Covenant House, reported that "Of the 12,000 kids under 21 who come to...Covenant House for help, fully 60% have been involved in prostitution or pornography." Some of the boys who came to Covenant House for help in the 1970s featured in magazines such as Lollitots, which showed girls eight to fourteen and Moppits which supposedly showed children three to twelve. Robin Lloyd, author of the book For Money or Love: Boy Prostitution in America, claimed in the '70s that there were 300,000 boys, aged eight to sixteen, in the pornography and prostitution rackets. Dr. Judianne Densen-Gerber, whose efforts helped persuade Congress in 1977 to pass the first Sexual Exploitation of Minors Act, noted that Lloyd spoke only of boys, which led her to believe "that if there are 300,000 boys, there must be a like number of girls, but no one has bothered to count them. Lloyd postulated but cannot substantiate that only half the true number of these children is known. "That would put the figure closer to 1,200,000 nationwide - a figure that is not improbable... How many ways are there for a twelve-year-old to support himself?" LA Police Chief Daryl F. Gates told a Congressional panel that organized crime ran the child porn business. "Possibly because of fear of public outrage, they operate through intermediaries, making it difficult to directly connect them with the sale and distribution of pornography involving children." Gates said the use of children in pornography appeared to have initially been the province of child molesters turned pornographers. "However, given the enormous potential for profit and any lessening of vigorous enforcement, it can be predicted that organized crime will become more deeply involved in child pornography." Soon after child pornography appeared on the shelves of adult bookstores around the country in the mid '70s, "self-appointed moral crusaders and some feminists began storming the country to decry the shameful exploitation of children by child pornographers and adults who engage or desire to engage in sexual activity with children. Articles and editorials appeared in nearly every newspaper in the United States calling for a stop to child pornography. Within a year or two, in the face of mounting public pressure, distributors and retailers of adult pornography had removed child pornography from their stocks and shelves. The federal government and state legislatures responded by enacting legislation proscribing the production and sale of child pornography and by funding law enforcement efforts to combat it. By the time the first federal child pornography law took effect in February, 1978, the production and commercial distribution of child pornography in the United States had been virtually eliminated." (Law Professor Lawrence A. Stanley in the Cardoza Arts and Entertainment Law Review, 1989, pg. 295.) Commercially child pornography was virtually eliminated by 1978 though the traffic continued on a small scale. Roland Bouldreault and Larry Nelson ran Le Salon Distributors out of San Francisco - a major shipper of child pornography along with All American Studios, also of the Bay Area. Bare Boys was one of Salon's offerings featuring children as young as eight. Joseph Jesse Espinoza, who owned distributor J-E Enterprises as well as several Los Angeles area adult book stores, was convicted in 1981 (641 F.2d 153) for trafficking in child pornography. On March 2nd, 1981, the owner of a Manhattan adult bookstore, Paul Ira Ferber, sold two films devoted to young boy masturbating to an undercover police officer. The first film shows a naked boy lying face down on a bed, rubbing against the bed. He then turns on his back and masturbates twice to ejaculation. Next, lying on his side, he places a dildo between his buttocks as if to insert it into his anus. The second film shows other naked boys, some seven and eight years old, masturbating themselves and each other. At the end of the second film, the main child performer dresses slowly, then picks up some money and holds it towards the camera. (NY v Ferber) Commercial child pornography ceased in Denmark in 1980 when Danish laws against it were passed. The last child pornography magazines out of Holland appeared in 1982. As in the U.S., videos and photos showing boys and girls have been made in Europe in recent years, but not for commercial distribution. Still, for all intents and purposes, commercial trafficking in child pornography ceased by 1978 and has played virtually no role since in the mainstream adult industry. "Despite this, the child pornography issue continued to be exploited nationwide by law enforcement officials, moral crusaders and the media. What may have begun as a legitimate concern for the well-being of children quickly turned into a "moral panic" which swept the nation. Currently, child pornography slide shows and "teach-ins" continue to be given by law enforcement personnel, religious groups, Women Against Pornography, and other groups professing the danger that child pornography poses to children and society. Thousands of news articles, exposes, editorials, books, and television programs still proliferate at an astonishing rate, warning parents and children about kidnapping or sexual advances from strangers, neighbors, and, occasionally, relatives. "School programs aimed at teaching children about "good" touch and "bad" touch have been developed and implemented. Professionals and volunteers who work with children, particularly teachers of young children, day care workers, Big Brothers, and scout leaders, are literally terrified of touching or being alone with a child, lest they be accused of abuse. Widespread fear about sexual abuse has led frantic parents, social workers, and others who work with children to look to sexual abuse as the cause of any difficulties which a child may have in growing up... "In this climate of acute social paranoia and suspicion, claims of child sexual abuse have reached epidemic proportions. Many innocent individuals...have been falsely accused of crimes involving children. Such alleged crimes include sex rings with dozens of children, animal sacrifices, satanic rituals, gang rapes, child pornography, child prostitution and child murder. Many of the accused are convicted on little or no evidence. Many are acquitted, but are left bankrupt by the costs of defending the charges against them. Often they are unable to find jobs and are left socially and emotionally ruined." (Law Professor Lawrence A. Stanley) Back in 1983, American Enterprise Institute director Douglas Besharov reported that up to 65% of all child abuse reports in the United States "may be unfounded." That percentage has probably increased. The activities of law enforcement agencies against "kiddie porn" also grew exponentially during the 1980s. United States Customs, the United States Postal Inspection Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and state and local law enforcement and social service agencies established special units to combat the child pornography industry, which hasn't existed since 1978. Two persons largely caused the explosion of the kiddie porn myth into national hysteria - Sergeant Lloyd Martin of the LAPD and Judianne Densen-Gerber, the founder of the multi-national drug rehabilitation organization Odyssey House. Martin told Congress that child porn was "worse than homicide." An investigator for the LAPD, Barbara Pruitt, claimed that "the children who die, they are the lucky ones." Densen-Gerber mailed child pornography to members of Congress and toured the country with stories of forced prostitution, drug addiction, kidnapping and murder. She made numerous unsubstantiated claims, such as one in 1979 that "by recent count...there were 264 child pornography magazines being produced monthly and sold in adult bookstores across the country." In 1977, the Illinois House of Representatives appointed the Illinois Legislative Investigating Commission (ILIC) to look into child pornography.
Martin's and Densen-Gerber's crusading ended in 1982, but others swiftly replaced them. A social worker with Children's Institute International in California, Kee MacFarlane, told the following to Congress in 1984 without providing any evidence to support her theories. "I believe we're dealing with an organized operation of child predators designed to prevent detection... The preschool, in such a case, serves as a ruse for a larger, unthinkable network of crimes against children. If such an operation involves child pornography or the selling of children, as is frequently alleged, it may have greater financial, legal and community resources at its disposal than those attempting to expose it." Kee McWilliams and Children's Institute International (CII) drove the hysterical McMartin Preschool molestation case which turned out to be a fraud. In the last 20 years, far more people have been hurt by the hysteria generated by such radical feminists as McWilliams, C.I.I. and Densen-Gerber than by child pornography. "...Frantic parents, an overeager social worker, an overzealous prosecutorial force and a gullible and complicitous news media combined to make life a living hell for innocent little children and the entire staff of the McMartin school. In the end - after two trials based on the most lurid, heinous charges imaginable - not one person was convicted. But the frenzy ignited by McMartin triggered similar child-molestation scares across the country." (David Shaw) In January 1982, New York State Attorney General Robert Abrams accused Densen-Gerber of using public monies targeted to Odyssey House for her personal use. Other charges against the crusader included that she forced an inmate to kneel and wash her feet; that she forced a black man to sit in a chair while white women spat on him; and that once when an inmate died at Odyssey House, she ordered other inmates to dance around the deceased while singing Jinging Bells. A federal team analyzed Densen-Gerber's Odyssey operation and cited her program for its "punitive and coercive orientation" and "misuse" of children. The crusader against child abuse turned out to be an abuser. According to journalist Lucy Komisar, "a member of New York City's police runaway unit said he stopped taking young prostitutes to Odyssey. 'I'm afraid I would have only negative things to say,'...said Detective Warren McGinniss of the Youth Aid division. 'Every kid we put in there walked right back out'." Densen-Gerber used humiliation as a treatment tactic. Residents who committed infractions were forced to wear costumes with paper ears and tails. "If you act like a jackass, you might as well look like a jackass," they were told. Judianne's husband is the former Chief Medical Officer of New York - Dr. Michael Baden. He testified at the O.J. trial. Both are friends with political extremist Lyndon LaRouche. One of America's most popular magazines, the Ladies Home Journal, claimed in its April 1983 issue that child pornography generates between 500 million dollars and one billion dollars annually, exploiting several million children. The Albany Times Union reported that child pornography is a "$46 billion national industry - a loose network involving 2.4 million youngsters, according to federal statistics." In 1988, Senator Dennis De Concini told Congress that "child pornography has become a highly organized multimillion-dollar industry..." These sources offered no evidence to back up their sensational claims. In the 1980s, as fear over child pornography merged with the "missing children" scare, public hysteria reached new heights. Child pornography and the deeds of "pedophiles" were claimed to be directly responsible for the disappearance of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of children, despite the fact that the FBI, in 1985, reported that there were a total of 67 cases of children abducted by strangers. An August 1984 NBC documentary The Silent Shame repeated many of the lies listed above, and added their own, such as the existence of extensive child pornography exports from Denmark. After the documentary aired, Danish officials conducted a thorough investigation. Berl Kutchinsky, Professor of Criminology at the University of Copenhagen, and Denmark's leading expert on porn, reported in 1985 that: "allegations of a large export of child pornography from Denmark to the United States caused great alarm in Denmark... When the two NBC reporters came back to Denmark to give evidence about their under-cover sessions with Danish porn dealers, they also handed over specimens of what they claimed to be Danish produced child pornography. Examination of these specimens showed, however, that no children were involved..." Kurchinsky also noted that none of the addresses supplied by American law enforcement personnel to Danish investigators belonged to businesses engaged in child pornography. But as with the coming scare over heterosexual AIDS, facts proved irrelevant through the 1980s and 1990s to those with ideological agendas greater than truth. The biggest domestic trafficker in child pornography is federal government sting operations, which encourage suspects to place ads seeking child porn. These government-created publications are the only publications in the U.S. today which solicit, advertise, sell or offer to purchase or exchange child porn. Government agents also operate "confidential" film laboratories which claim to provide confidential developing services. The Postal Inspection Service and Customs have solicited thousands of people who've bought from them child pornography videos, magazines and photos. These activities have resulted in few arrests. Four targets of a 1987 sting - Thomas Cleasby, Roger Brase, Dale Riva and Gary Benson - committed suicide. A person seeking child sex through magazines will probably only find a vast network of postal inspectors and police. There are no sexually oriented publications in the U.S. today which contain ads for child porn. There are no toll-free numbers to order child prostitutes. There are no large networks of individuals, other than public authorities, exchanging child pornography. A world expert on pedophilia and incest, Dr. Ron Langevin, has been researching sex offenders for 20 years. He says the rate of association between consumption of pornography of any type including child pornography and the commission of sex offenses is low. "I have recently tabulated the frequency of pornography use among sex offenders seen in our clinic... We did so a few years ago and decided to abandon the question because of the low incidence of such behavior, i.e. it seemed unimportant. In light of the current popular debate on the role of pornography in sexual offenses we started to collect the data again. The results are essentially the same... To predict a predisposition to pedophilia or to the commission of child abuse based on the possession of pornography would be a futile effort." Many of the politicians, law enforcement officials, and anti-pornography groups who have myths about child pornography found the 1986 Attorney General's Commmission on Pornography receptive to their goals of suppressing sexually oriented materials. The Commission said that "The sexual exploitation of children is the basis for the production and distribution of child pornography... The U.S. is the largest consumer of internationally produced child pornography." Commissioner, anti-porn activist and Franciscan friar Bruce Ritter received laudatory press coverage for years, including this 11/27/85 article in the Chicago Tribune, headlined "Haven From The Hell Of New York Streets." In more innocent times, the worst of the furies that awaited a youngster abandoned to cruel big-city streets were hunger, loneliness, crime, and freezing weather… Now, a deadlier predator is abroad, one that Father Bruce Ritter, founder of New York City`s Covenant House, says is growing fat upon ready prey. The predator is the pimp with the videotape camera, and his prey are the 500,000 children a year who have run or been driven from their homes. Ritter`s Covenant House is a fortress island in the polluted sea of sleaze that is New York`s Times Square, where hookers hawk their wares to visiting businessmen and Triple-X theaters compete with ``adult`` video outlets to excite and titillate the jaded. As many as 13,000 youngsters seek asylum from that urban hell every year at Covenant House, and Ritter said many of them, already conditioned to the lure of sex for cash, have been its ready victims. ``In the last 20 years,`` Ritter said. ``we`ve seen the development of an enormous multi-multi-multi-billion-dollar sex industry. We live in a sex-for-sale society that shows kids it`s okay to become sexual objects; it`s okay to become the merchandise in the sex industry, of which we are the patrons. ``Everybody who watches a hardcore porno film has to know that they`re part of the problem,`` he said. ``They are just as responsible for the moral murder of the people who make that film… If you`re buying these hardcore porno films, you`re part of that chain of corruption and violence and lust and prostitution..." During the late '80s and early '90s, numerous boys testified that the good father had loved them too deeply. After a flurry of embarrassing revelations about his molestations, Father Ritter resigned from Covenant House and disappeared from public view. Sorting out the truth of recent reports about child porn is difficult. Child porn activists, like many anti-porn activists, routinely exaggerate and lie to induce people to follow their hatred of sexual entertainment in general and male sexuality in particular. Law enforcement has a mixed record telling the truth about porn. But this can be relied upon - At the end of the 20th century there is no commercial child pornography industry in America and probably the world - if children are defined as being under the age of 13. Japan and other countries do traffic in explicit materials featuring teens. The increasing use of the internet has made it easier for consumers of child porn to swap material. While the industry was stamped out in America by 1978, pictures from that era are being scanned or digitized and re-released via the net. "The ability to mass market child pornography with little or no overhead to huge populations has created an environment where pressures for new material exist," Kevin V. Di Gregory, deputy assistant attorney general in the United States Justice Department, testified before Congress in June, 1996. "This demand is being met by new material from sources which include the Pacific Rim countries..." A popular practice on the net is to splice children's pictures (or pictures of famous people) into a pornographic image to create a fictional scene. Under President Clinton, Attorney General Janet Reno has frequently fought against tougher prosecution of child porn. In the case of Knox v. the United States, the Justice Department argued that tapes of girls clothed in bathing suits and panties, spreading their legs in lascivious ways, were not pornographic. Reno tried to narrow and weaken interpretation of the 1984 Child Protection Act but the federal appeals court in Philadelphia, in the Knox case, disagreed, ruling that "the child is treated as a sexual object, and the permanent record of this embarrassing and humiliating experiences produces the same detrimental effects to the mental health of the child as a nude portrayal." Disturbing trends about child porn include the following: According to a 1991 study done by the frequently mendacious Los Angeles Police Department, child molestors used pornography to seduce their victims in two-thirds of the Department's child molestation cases over a ten-year period. London, Ontario has been called the "kiddie porn capital" of Canada. In June 1994, 30 men were charged with more than 1300 counts of sexual crimes against 50 boys. The pedophiles include social workers, school teachers and a politician. Some of the victims were as young as eight years old. Police confiscated more than 1200 homemade videos and hundreds of Polaroid photos and child-porn magazines. In the summer of 1996, San Bernadino County Sheriff's deputies arrested two convicted sex offenders for molesting as many as 100 children. Investigators said they seized "hundreds of thousands" of pornographic photographs and about 800 pornographic videos and films, many of which show the two men, Don Stephenson, 52, and Donald Collins, 48, have sex with kids. Sergeant R. P. Tyler is one of five investigators who track child porn for the San Bernadino County Sheriff's department. He says that the Japanese child pornography market is the largest in the world. The quantity of teen porn available in Japan far exceeds the amount produced by Europeans during their peak years in the 1970s. Made-in-Japan schoolgirl material is available internationally on the Internet. Tyler says that most on-line discussion of where to get such porn focuses on Japan. The country has no laws against child porn. Japanese police say there are about 1,200 commercial child pornography Internet sites in Japan. In April 1997, the Christian Science Monitor printed its latest investigation into the worldwide sexual exploitation of children. It said that Japanese convenience stores and bookshops sell pornographic magazines, comic books and novels featuring teenagers. Porn shops sell picture books, videos and novels featuring children of all ages. Girls are depicted more often than boys. Alice Club, a bimonthly magazine whose title refers to the works of Lewis Carroll who enjoyed shooting pictures of naked girls, devotes itself to the sexual appreciation of prepubescent girls. Alice Club sells about 50,000 copies of each issue. The Monitor says that child porn in Japan was initially imported from the West and did not gain popularity until the early 1980s. At the time Japanese police enforced obscenity laws by banning all displays of pubic hair, but pornography publishers discovered that explicit pictures of prepubescent children could be sold without punishment. Like most pioneering visual pornography, child porn in Japan first appeared in art books. Japanese sex shops frequently devote space to "Lolita" videos, a label inspired by Vladimir Nabokov's book of the same name. Japanese law does not prohibit individuals from owning or buying child porn. One popular video, Teenage Story, features a man raping a ten year old girl. History helps explain Japan's lack of specific laws against child porn. The militarists who ruled the country through the Second World War strictly controlled expression, so freedom of speech today is prized. The Japanese generally don't object to the publishing of nude pictures of foreign girls. Because the Asian country lacks religious notions of sexual sin, it has a free attitude about physical pleasure. The Japanese feel comfortable with child sexuality. Until the end of WWII, girls were given or sold into marriage at the age of 12 and 13. Japan's penal code, passed into law in 1908, puts the age of sexual consent at 13, even though Japanese must be 20 to vote and 18 to drive a car. In 1988 and 1989, a printing plant employee, Tsutomo Miyazaki, raped and killed four girls aged between four and seven. In his apartment, police and reporters found thousands of videotape, many of which included child porn. Hong Kong's 1997 campaign against child porn brought about 100 arrests and seizures of about 10,000 obscene articles including videotapes and CD ROMs. Many child porn videos and photographs that circulate on the internet come from Mexico City and Guadalajara. Two U.S. pornographers who ran the "International Male" group recruited 300 Mexican children from 7-11 to appear in their explicit productions. Some of the children are still missing. Russia remains on the fringes of the electronic child pornography trade because the Internet is not accessible to most Russians. Fewer than 1% of the country's 150 million person population can go on line. Still, the Interior Ministry has a child porn investigation squad that works with the FBI. A British TV documentary, "The Boy Business" says a British pedophile ring in Hoofddorp, Holland, made a series of child snuff movies in the early 1990s. The ring supposedly abducted homeless teenage boys from Britain and Eastern Europe and literally fucked them to death on videotape. Dutch police can't confirm the allegations. "From the steamy brothels of Bangkok and Bombay to the beaches of Cartagena, the sidewalks of Manila and the dingy train stations of Moscow, the world is teaming with children who have been kidnapped, sold, lured or forced to become the sex objects of unscrupulous adults," said Time International 9/2/96. "The child-sex trade has traditionally been identified with underdeveloped countries, particularly in Southeast Asia, where cheap prices, the ready availability of underage prostitutes and the lax law enforcement have attracted Western sex tourists. Not that local customers are lacking: many men in Thailand, for example, are accustomed to visiting prostitutes, including anywhere from 20,000 to 200,000 young ones. "Along with Thailand, other popular Asian destinations for sex tourists are Cambodia, Sri Lanka and the Philippines - countries where widespread poverty pushes youths to sell their bodies, often at their parents prodding, to help support their families." According to an official with the group Save the Children, "Europe is the heart of the problem. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism have brought the development of a market in Eastern Europe, but also in Russian and in the Baltic republics." In Moscow alone there are about 1000 child prostitutes. Hundreds more ply the trade in Warsaw, Prague, Bucharest, Budapest and the Baltic capitals. The child sex trade booms in Eastern Europe because of severe poverty, the power of organized crime and the death of organized religion. "Pedophiles are generally not violent aggressors," says a specialist for Interpol, the international police organization. "They are charmers, good fathers, people above all suspicion. They are more likely to be consumers of child pornography than rapists." The Belgium monster Marc Dutroux shocked the world in mid 1996 when his rape, torture and murder of several young children became known. Marc videotaped his captives. Dutroux financed the construction of secret prisons for his captives through the sale of guns and pornography. Marc owned a huge porn collection. According to the Berlin daily Bild, a video showing the mass rape of young girls during the war in Bosnia has become the most expensive tape on the German market, with a price tag of $10,000. Possession of child porn is legal in such countries as Sweden, Mexico, Japan and Hungary. Advertising that borders on child porn pervades America and much of the world. In 1988, fashion designer Calvin Klein told Vogue magazine that "I've done everything [in my ads] I could do in a provocative sense without being arrested." One of Calvin's favorite models is Kate Moss, born about 1974. The emaciated girl's vacant stare, unsmiling lips and nude 105-pound body appear in dozens of magazines and billboards. Flirting with themes of bestiality, incest and violence, her photos suggest a compliant child, stripped for sexual use. One Obsession Ad shows her bare-breasted, with bruised eyes, holding her hand over her mouth and looking upset. In response to concern about child porn, the U.S. Congress since 1978 has passed four separate bills banning it. Washington Post, 1/20/77 THEY ARE in the usual explicit pornographic poses.
And they are young - 11.9 years of age. Some appear younger. From a conversation with porner Lynne Lopatin 10/19/99: Lynne: "I remember Lollitots. I remember a story on TV... I thought it [Lollitots] was exclusively sold in Southern California. "I remember going by Circus of Books in Hollywood and seeing child pornography for sale in the front door. "I joined Parliament News in 1977. [Milton] Luros was not active in the sense of coming in and spending an eight hour day there. But he came in every few days. He looked at the books and picked up the receipts... He and his wife were in poor health." Luke: Stanley Fleischman says that Parliament News was not Lollitots publisher. Lynne: "Untrue. Actually, American Arts Enterprise was the graphic arts shop that built the magazine but Parliament News was its distributor. And American Art was owned by the same people who owned Parliament News even though they may have wives rather than husbands on the paperwork. That was my first job for Parliament News, shredding those photos [of child pornography]. Shredding all the 8x10s that were in the files because we were getting ready to move from Chatsworth to North Hollywood. And they had me shred thousands of photos. All the nudist photos [fo kids]. All the Lollitots photos. I saved a few at the time but I got rid of them by 1979." Luke: So just in case there's any doubt, here's a small list of pornographers who created and distributed child pornography: Paul Wisner, Milton Luros, Reuben Sturman, Parliament News which morphed into Gourmet Video, Circus of Books and the list goes on and on and on. And folks like the revered late Stanley Fleischman led the charge defending child pornography and obfuscating the issue of child porn. The only reason that pornographers do not create and sell child pornography today is that they can no longer get away with it. Lynne: "As far as I remember from the news reports on TV at the time, it [Lollitots] was all shot here in Southern California and it was definitely printed on Parliament presses and it was definitely distributed by Parliament. And today I don't think you will find anybody to cop to it. "I was 14 when I started having sex. And if you had told me then that I shouldn't have sex, I would've been really upset. So 14 is one thing, but Lollitots was people who were five and six [years of age]. And they cannot give consent. So what was happening was that the moms were giving consent and back then $500 was a lot of money." Lynne: "When I was 17, in 1972, I was a runaway hanging out in Hollywood. And you could buy kiddie porn at any of the newsstands. And the kiddie porn I am referring to is Lollitots and Moppets [distributed by Paul Wisner's Parliament News]. And there were others, and most of them were from Mexico and most of them were from India. And then a couple of years later, when I went to work for the LA Star, I got a better handle on what was out there and what was available and what the attitude was toward it. And the first thing we noticed was a story on TV that there were five year old being paid to do these magazines. And it was all over the news. "So they [Parliament News] were probably told to cease and desist. We were approached... Mickey Leblovik (Dr. Susan Block's husband) knows this stuff intimately. He was getting busted. They came to us and said stop. But I don't remember anybody being threatened or prosecutions..." CHRONOLOGY of Belgian child murder scandal BRUSSELS, April 23 (Reuters) - The escape and swift recapture on Thursday of convicted Belgian child rapist Marc Dutroux provided the latest twist in a saga dating back to the a child sex scandal uncovered in 1996. Dutroux, whom the interior ministry said was rearrested after escaping from custody, stands accused of murdering four children and an accomplice in a paedophile ring. Following is a chronology of the child sex scandal which has rocked Belgium to its core. August 1992: Nine-year-old Loubna Benaissa disappears on the way to a shop near her home in Brussels suburb of Ixelles. June 1995: Eight-year-olds Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo disappear while on a short walk by a motorway bridge near their home in Grace-Hollogne, near Liege in eastern Belgium. Aug 22, 1995: An Marchal, 17, and Eefje Lambrecks 19, disappear in Ostend after seeing hypnotist's show while on holiday. Police visit convicted child rapist Marc Dutroux at house where it is later discovered that the girls are held. Dec 1995: Police investigating theft visit Dutroux at home, hear children's' voices but find nothing. Dutroux later arrested on car theft and related charges, spends almost four months in jail. Dutroux was released from jail in 1992 after serving three years of a 13 year sentence for multiple child rape. Feb/March 1996: Around this time Melissa Russo and Julie Lejeune, held in one of Dutroux's houses, die of starvation. May 28: Sabine Dardenne, 12, disappears. Aug 9: Laetitia Delhez, 14, disappears. Aug 13: Dutroux, accomplice Michel Lelievre, and Dutroux's second wife Michelle Martin held as police search for Laetitia. Aug 15: Dutroux leads police to makeshift dungeon in terraced house in Marcinelles, a suburb of Charleroi and one of six houses he owns in and around the city where they find Laetitia and Sabine. Both have been drugged and sexually abused. Aug 16: Dutroux and Lelievre charged with abduction and illegal imprisonment of children. Aug 17: Dutroux takes police to bodies of Julie and Melissa, buried in garden of his house in Sars-La-Buissiere along with body of accomplice Bernard Weinstein. Dutroux admits killing Weinstein and kidnapping An and Eefje. Police start searches at Dutroux's five other houses, uncover 300 child porn videos, magazines, children's' clothes, gun and soporific drugs. Aug 19: Martin charged as an accomplice in kidnappings. Aug 20: Police find more cells in a Dutroux house in Charleroi suburb Marchienne-au-Pont. Brussels businessman Jean-Michel Nihoul charged with criminal association. Aug 22: Julie and Melissa buried in virtually state funeral in Liege. Michael Diakostavrianos, of Greek origin, arrested and charged with criminal association. Sept 3: Police find remains of An Marchal and Eefje Lambrecks under shed in garden of house in Charleroi suburb of Jumet formerly occupied by Weinstein. Sept 7: An and Eefje buried separately in Hasselt. Sept 24: Dutroux charged with Weinstein murder. Sept 13: Nihoul charged with abduction. Oct 20: More than 250,000 people stage ``White March'' through Brussels in support of parents of abused and dead children and to show disgust at political and legal system. Prime Minister Dehaene promises reforms. Dec 13: Police start excavating at abandoned mining complex in Jumet suburb of Charleroi. Dec 22: Police raid headquarters of Abrasax Satanic sect on suspicion of link to Dutroux through Weinstein. January 1997: Dutroux charged with murder of Julie, Melissa, An and Eefje. March 5: Police find rotting corpse of Loubna Benaissa in steel trunk under garage in Ixelles. Suspect Patrick Derochette, convicted in 1984 of child molesting and attempted rape, questioned. No link has been established between Dutroux and Derochette. March 8 - Estimated 15,000 people attend Loubna memorial service in Brussels. A further 30,000 attend her funeral in Tangier on March 9. March 14 - Belgian government proposes amending parole rules in reforms to legal system. April 9 - Parliamentary report into child murders says police were ``inhumane, inept, inefficient and ill-equipped.'' Sept 26 - Psychiatrist's report says Derochette ``may not have been responsible for his actions.'' Oct 7 - Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene outlines plans to streamline Belgian police system which is divided into three separate forces. Oct 12 - Thousands of police and magistrates march to protest proposed reforms. Nov 7 - Pope John Paul urges Belgian bishops to help nation stamp out paedophilia. Nov 21 - Dutroux protests his innocence in letter to La Derniere Heure newspaper. Dec 24 - Paul Marchal, father of one of the murdered girls, founds new political party -- the Party for New Politics (PNP) to contest general elections due in mid-1999. Feb 15, 1998 - 25,000 march in Brussels to protest ``blanket of silence'' on investigations into child murders. Feb 17 - All-party parliamentary report blames bungling for Dutroux failures but says no evidence of high-level protection. Feb 18 - Government announces sweeping police reforms. March 13 - Lawyer for two of the dead girls' families resigns citing unspecified pressure. April 23 - Dutroux escapes custody and is swiftly recaptured. 14:50 04-23-98 Dutch porn company Video Art Holland (VAH) uses girls 16-20 in their production, and hence their product is banned in most countries. The films of the Seventeen label like Teeners From Holland, Seventeen Special or Schoolgirl frequently appear on the black market. The age of consent in Holland is 16. Thus while foreigner producers promise teenie girls but deliver much older women, VAH delivers the real thing. While most American, German and French pornographers dress up their women in two hair-braids, white socks and a pout, often combined with a childish voice and a red lollipop, girls of VAH's Seventeen label retire before 20. (Journalist Clifford Cremer) VAH director Arthur Martin, 48, told Cremer: "The idea behind 17 is that we want to show women who are at their most beautiful. And when is a woman at her prettiest? When she's young of course, when she's a girl." Martin began his porn career in the early '70s, operating a chain of sex shops in Amsterdam. He began working for VAH in 1979. Martin told Cremer in 1997: "Eighteen years ago we started with Seventeen, a sex magazine which featured only teenagers. That way we not only catered to the traditional porn consumer, but to teenagers as well. Because young people buy sex magazines too, if only out of curiosity. Our magazines for example circulate a lot around high schools. The perception that porn only caters to dirty old men is not true. "Video Art doesn't have foreign competitors. All foreign producers of teenersex come to us, for we're the largest name in that field. We buy everything from them and they know it." As far as the models, "Reality, that's important. No plastic. We don't work with expensive glamour models. We don't even have our own make-up girls; the models can do that for themselves. We produce playful rather than professional sex films. "To recruit models is easy. Hundreds of girls want to join. Mainly out of curiosity. The girls who do this work were raised very liberal-minded, and most of the time even their parents know what they do in our studios. You can't say they're from a certain background, because we get girls from all walks of life. High school or university, the runaway kid of the daughter of the dentist… "Most of the girls like the idea that later on thousands of boys and men will see their naked bodies. It's a kick for them to undress in our studios. Sometimes they do it out of a spontaneous impulse, just to undergo the experience. "Biologically, women are exhibitionistic and men are voyeuristic. Look at girls and young women: they like to dress provocatively, to show their bodies. "Maybe once in ten years a girl regrets what she did. If possible, we try not to use her pictures or films again. But in the last 25 years, that has only happened three times. "It's unimagineable how sexual freedom changed among young people. In my time you were fast when you bedded a girl when you were 18. Now it's completely normal for a 14-year old to have sex. Last month, I was on a house party with my friend, who is over 30. I've never been to such a party. Some of the girls walked around only wearing slips. Once, a 16-year old girl gave us a big smile while she stuck three fingers at us. I didn't know what she meant. My friend explained: she wanted to have threeway sex with us. "But most of the girls in our films only have sex with their partners. They don't want anyone else, partly out of fear of AIDS." Clifford Cremer says that the Seventeen films distinguish themselves by their realism. There's virtually no acting and no story line. Harder material is available with such titles as Teenage Perversions and Extreme. VAH's newest series, Shocking Teens, was exclusively shot in the former Eastern block, in countries like Yugoslavia, Hungary and Poland. Slavic girls will shed all taboos for hard cash, says Cremer. Over 100 antiporn cybercops patrol the internet looking for child porn, frequently entrapping each other. An internet web page secretly set up by U.S. Customs received over 70,000 hits in its first two weeks. The explosion of the net and the proliferation of inexpensive scanners has allowed a proliferation in intimate photos of children between collectors. "Almost all the work we did was undone within two years," the head of the Justice Department's anti-childporn section told the 5/26/97 US NEWS. "The internet is the new distribution system." Cops frequently pose as a young girls in internet chat rooms, to lure suspects. The typical offenders are middle-aged white males who live alone. Many men charged with distributing child porn across the internet have also been arrested for sexually abusing children. An ongoing pan-European investigation into internet porn has produced several arrests in the last few months, including more than 30 in France in mid-March. French TV reports the group organized "sexual encounters" between adults and children. Michael Moore, head of information technology at Little Hulton community school in Manchester, said sixth-formers at one school in the North-west had been targeted by paedophiles soon after the introduction of e-mail. He said: "A paedophile ring in Sheffield discovered the system and invited students to take part. They suggested friendships with other males. When schools get involved in the Internet they seek publicity because it's good for the school and people with the wrong intentions certainly can easily identify students at the school and use e-mail." (Independent) Los Angeles Times Saturday April 25, 1998 A 44-year-old Sun Valley man was arrested Friday for allegedly downloading child pornography via the Internet. David Luera, who is currently in custody in lieu of $30,000 bail at the LAPD's Sexually Exploited Child Unit, could face up to six years in prison if convicted. It is the second time Luera has been arrested for allegedly possessing child pornography videos and still photographs. In 1995, Luera became the first person in Los Angeles charged with possessing child pornography obtained via the Internet, said Det. Lina Pirro, an investigator on the case. He pleaded no contest in June 1995 to a misdemeanor in the first case and was sentenced to three years of probation, fined $1,350 and ordered to perform 240 hours of community service. In addition, the judge ordered Luera to register as a sex offender and forfeit his home computer equipment. The fact that Luera is being charged with a second offense makes it a felony case, Pirro said. "Pedophiles are always repeat offenders," she said. "They'll always brag about their acts with other pedophiles." Pirro said the unit was notified by a citizen informant that Luera had downloaded the material. Pirro said that Luera had corresponded extensively with other pedophiles describing his possessions. "It was more than enough probable cause to write a search warrant," Pirro said. Since Luera made Los Angeles criminal history with the first Internet-child pornography case in 1995, there have been several hundred similar cases in the city, Pirro said. Along with those cases, the unit investigates child prostitution rings and other cases involving sexually exploited children. 1/6/01 VancouverSun.com reports: A longtime Vancouver pornography importer and distributor is now exporting to the U.S. a potentially deadly chemical that is widely thought to enhance sexual pleasure but is illegal in both Canada and the States if sold for that purpose. Tony Perry is one of two directors of AAA Packaging of Delta, which has shipped hundreds of thousands of units of isobutyl nitrite to customers in almost every state in the United States, according to documents obtained by The Vancouver Sun. A [1973?] report prepared by CLEU -- the now-defunct Coordinated Law Enforcement Unit, a joint operation of the RCMP and municipal forces formed to fight organized crime -- noted that sex stores were selling magazines grouped according to such subject areas as "bondage," "homosexual," "heterosexual," and "kiddie porn." It was the latter that caused then-Vancouver Mayor Jack Volrich to take matters in his own hands. Magazines called Moppets and Nudist Moppets were being displayed in city stores, and Volrich said those magazines crossed the line. The Moppets magazines were distributed by Johnson and Franklin. Volrich said at the time it was difficult for the city to deal with magazines that contained adult nudity. "But this (Moppets) can only be designed for people who have perverse habits," the mayor said. Volrich went downtown, visited the stores selling Moppets and ordered the store owners to remove the offending books from their shelves, using as his leverage provisions of the city charter that prohibit businesses from "gross misconduct." Moppets, the mayor said, "depict children in a very gross manner." The store-keepers complied. Contacted by reporters, Perry said all his product was cleared by Canada Customs. "But if somebody in authority at the local level has any objection, they should just let us know and we'll withdraw it," Perry said at the time. "I'm just trying to make a living, not break the law." He added: "I order from catalogues -- it's not up to me and neither is it proper for me to check the validity of my suppliers." The suppliers of Moppets would not have appreciated being "checked out." The Moppets magazines were published and distributed by a company called Lynden Distributors of Van Nuys, California, a CLEU investigation determined. The company was controlled by the late Reuben Sturman, a mobster from Cleveland with ties to New York crime families. Sturman is also credited with inventing the peep booth, by enclosing coin-operated projectors in a small booth with a screen and a door that could be locked. Tony Perry had several peep booths in his stores. Sturman, according to several U.S. crime probes, supplied booths to adult-book store owners free of charge, in return for half the receipts. A never-before- published report by the Middle Atlantic-Great Lakes Organized crime law enforcement network showed Sturman's empire spanned the U.S., Europe, South America and Africa. Sturman reached into Canada through his ownership of Bret Distributors Inc. of Toronto, a connection that has never before been published. Organized crime commissions in the U.S. heard repeated testimony that Sturman took orders from -- or at least paid kickbacks to -- leaders of the Gambino crime family in New York. Convicted of tax evasion in 1992, Sturman died in a U.S. prison in 1997. In a brief to a House of Commons committee on crime in 1978, B.C. police agencies said of Perry's company: "Johnson and Franklin were the major distributors of this material in British Columbia and have been shown to obtain the majority of their material through their organized crime contacts." The brief continued: "A prior investigation by the Vancouver police department and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police established that seizures of pornographic material by police were written off by the organized crime concerns and not charged to Johnson and Franklin." 2/3/01 Dr William Pierce, a white nationalist with Nazi-like views, writes for Natvan.com:
|