Child's Garden of Perversity

Lollitots magazine is one of the milder examples. It features preteen girls showing off their genitals in the gynecological style popularized by Penthouse and Playboy. Other periodicals, with names such as Naughty Horny Imps, Children-Love and Child Discipline, portray moppets in sex acts with adults or other kids. The films are even raunchier. An 8-mm. movie shows a ten-year-old girl and her eight-year-old brother in fellatio and intercourse. In another film, members of a bike gang break into a church during a First Communion service and rape six little girls.

These and a host of other equally shocking products are becoming increasingly common fare at porn shops and sex-oriented mail-order houses across the nation. They are part of the newest growth area pushed by the booming, billion-dollar pornography industry: child porn.

"I just found out about these magazines and films this summer, and I've become a raving banshee over it," says Dr. Judianne Densen-Gerber, a Manhattan psychiatrist who has been barnstorming around the country in a crusade against this abuse of minors. Her effort is only one part of a new campaign against child porn. New York City has cracked down, and police have at least temporarily forced kiddy-sex periodicals and films out of the tawdry Times Square area. Some twenty states are considering child-porn laws. Last week the Illinois house of representatives approved a bill setting stiff penalties for producing and selling child porn. The bill is expected to pass the senate and become state law.

Child porn is hardly new, but according to police in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, sales began to surge a year or two ago and are still climbing. Years ago much child pornography was fake--young-looking women dressed as Lolitas. Now the use of real children is startlingly common. Cook County State's Attorney Bernard Carey says porno pictures of children as young as five and six are now generally available throughout Chicago. Adds Richard Kopeikin, a state's attorney investigator: "They are even spreading to the suburbs, where they are now considered rare items, delicacies."

Among recent developments:

> Underground sex magazines are heavily stressing incest and pedophilia. One current West Coast periodical ran ten pages of photos, cartoons and articles on sex with children.

> In San Francisco hard-core child-porn films were shown in a moviehouse for five weeks before police seized the films last February. Even San Francisco's Mitchell brothers, the national porn-film kings, were outraged. Says Brother Jimmy: "We think obscenity laws should start with child porn."

> An Episcopal priest, the Rev. Claudius I. Vermilye Jr., who ran a farm for wayward teens in Winchester, Tenn., is awaiting trial on charges that he staged homosexual orgies with boys on the farm and mailed pictures of activities to donors around the country.

Until recently, much child porn sold in America was smuggled in from abroad. Now most of it appears to be home grown, with the steady stream of bewildered, broke runaways serving as a ready pool of "acting talent" for photographers. Pornographers who stalk children at big-city bus stations find many victims eager to pose for $5 or $10--or simply for a meal and a friendly word. Says Lloyd Martin, head of the Los Angeles police department's sexually abused child unit: "Sometimes for the price of an ice-cream cone a kid of eight will pose for a producer. He usually trusts the guy because he's getting from him what he can't get from his parents--love." In many cases, the porn is a byproduct of child prostitution. Pimps invite children to parties, photograph them in sex acts, and circulate the pictures as advertisements to men seeking young sex partners. Frequently, the pictures are then sold to porn magazines.

Even worse, some parents are volunteering their own children to pornographers, or producing the sex pictures themselves. Last year a Rockford, Ill., social worker was sent to jail for allowing his three foster sons to perform sex acts before a camera for $150 each. In January, a couple in Security, Colo., was charged with selling their twelve-year-old son for sexual purposes to a Texas man for $3,000.

Some children in porn photos are victims of incest. Parents will have intercourse with a son or daughter, then swap pictures with other incestuous parents, or send the photos to a sex publisher. Sex periodicals, particularly on the West Coast, publish graphic letters on parents' sexual exploits with their own children. Says Los Angeles' Martin: "We had one kid in here the other day who is eleven years old. His father started on him when he was six, then sold him twice as a sex slave. The kid had been in movies, pictures, magazines and swap clubs. After a while, he broke down and cried and said how grateful he was to have been pulled out of it."

Such experiences can of course scar a child for life. Warns New York Psychoanalyst Herbert Freudenberger: "Children who pose for pictures begin to see themselves as objects to be sold. They cut off their feelings of affection, finally responding like objects rather than people." Some psychiatrists believe that children who pose in porn pictures are often unable to find sexual fulfillment as adults. Another danger, says Los Angeles Psychiatrist Roland Summit, "is that sexually abused children may become sexually abusing adults."

Child porn poses fewer hazards for the pornographers. Producers of child porn can be prosecuted for sexual abuse of children, but the children are hard to identify and locate. So are the producers, who often hide behind a welter of dummy corporations. Thus most prosecutions are under the obscenity laws, which generally make no distinction between children and adults as porn models. One result: many lawyers believe that the genital pictures in Lollitots, however offensive, might be judged no more obscene under the law than similar photos of adult women routinely published in most men's magazines.

To make prosecutions easier, angry legislators in several states and Congress are proposing a kind of end run around the obscenity laws--a ban on sexually explicit pictures of children, whether legally obscene or not. One bill introduced into the House of Representatives by Democrats John Murphy of New York and Dale Kildee of Michigan already has 103 cosponsors. It would make any proven involvement with the production and sale of explicit sex pictures of children a felony. Says a Kildee aide: "Our bill is clearly enough directed toward child abuse so that the First Amendment should not arise. This is why we defined child pornography as a form of abuse, rather than a form of obscenity."

Under this approach, a salesman in an adult bookstore could be prosecuted as an active participant in the crime of sexually exploiting the children pictured in the store's magazines. New York Lawyer Charles Rembar, who successfully defended Lady Chatterley's Lover and Fanny Hill against obscenity charges, thinks the seller of child porn is a suitable target: "It is totally unrealistic to say that the people who sell these magazines and films are not involved in the act themselves." Yet other lawyers consider a broad child-abuse law a form of backdoor censorship. Says Ira Glasser of the New York Civil Liberties Union: "I assume if you put your mind to it, you could come up with an acceptable statute prohibiting adults from using children in explicit sex films and photos, but controlling what people see or read is another matter. Everything published ought to be absolutely protected by the First Amendment."

Despite First Amendment problems, public pressure for some kind of law is likely to grow. Many Americans battling against child porn view their efforts as a last stand against the tide of pornography. Says California State Senator Newton Russell: "This is a reflection of the social and spiritual morality of this nation. If there is to be any reversal in the trend, the place to start is child porn."

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