Porn Epidemic Hampers Fight Against Child Pornography

By | November 16, 2017

NEW YORK, November 17 (C-Fam) The widespread use and legality of pornography is making it harder for law enforcement to combat child pornography. Europeans opposed the term “child pornography” in UN negotiations this month because of a movement to distance child pornography from adult pornography.

Negotiators at UN headquarters were stumped when Europeans asked to delete references to “child pornography” in a draft resolution on strategies and policies to protect children. Child pornography has been addressed as such in UN resolutions for over two decades. Europeans asked to replace it with the term “sexual exploitation material” instead.

This reflects European efforts to get policymakers to “stop confusing child pornography with adult pornography,” law enforcement expert Camille Cooper told the Friday Fax.

“They hear the word pornography, and they say, ‘what’s wrong with that?’” Cooper said.

Cooper says she has had police show redacted images of infants being raped to policymakers. They don’t understand that “child pornography” does not refer to consensual adult pornography or to images of children having a bath, she says.

Pornography is a multibillion dollar global industry. The numbers in the United States alone are staggering. On any given week, 46% of men between the ages of 18 to 39 watch pornography.

European negotiators are reflecting the position of a recent guideline of an Interagency Working Group on Sexual Exploitation of Children, which relies on UN human rights experts and staff, Cooper believes. This is the culmination of a decades long process to distance child pornography from the legal pornography industry.

Experts working closely with the U.S. Department of Justice have rejected these attempts for years.

Robert Flores who prosecuted child pornography cases for two decades as federal and state prosecutor told the Friday Fax the European approach is an “attack on the U.S. definition of child pornography.” Flores was also Director of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention at the U.S. Department of Justice.

“People don’t like the fact that in the U.S. child pornography includes everyone under 18,” he explained, “The pornography industry wants a perpetual supply of 15 year olds.”

Abandoning the strict U.S. standard would create as many definitions of child pornography as there are countries and lead to more child pornography, Flores said, “Once the material has been made, there is no way to control it.”

“Because some people think ‘pornography’ is not an important issue does not justify changing from a term (child pornography) with 30 years of case law,” wrote Kenneth V. Lanning in a 2010 manual on child sexual abuse still used by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the U.S. Justice Department.

Images currently classified as child pornography would no longer be considered such, he warned. The recent Inter-Agency guidelines, for example, admit the need to criminalize images depicting children under the age of 18 regardless of the age of consent. At the same time, UN experts and agencies advocate lowering the age of consent.

“You can’t have it both ways,” Lanning objected already back then.

Attempts to distance child pornography from the pornography industry also dismiss evidence from the U.S. Department of Justice showing that pornography contributes to sex trafficking, including with child victims. And they ignore recent science connecting the genesis of pedophilia to the use of pornography.

A delegate of the European Union responded to Friday Fax inquiries about the EU position saying their preferred language is now “sexual exploitation of children, including through prostitution, pornography and other sexual abuse material.”

Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter