Reach Out and Touch Someone

By Richard Lacayo

"Hi," says the recorded female voice on the telephone. "Come and join us nasty sluts in 6,900 kinky taboos." This is dial-a-porn, sex over the phone wires, now as available in many states as the correct time. For a cost that can range from 20 cents to several dollars, callers can listen to recorded fantasies, some of them merely purple, some filled with the darker colors of sadomasochism, rape and bestiality. Since they first appeared in 1983, the dial-a-porn services have grown quickly. So has the frustration of parents who discover that their children have become clandestine callers, often running up sizable phone bills in the process.

That frustration is leading to angry action. One day last June in Hayward, Calif., Brian Thompson, 12, spent more than two hours listening to dial-a-porn recitals. Two weeks later he sexually assaulted a four-year-old girl. The parents of both children joined in suing the Pacific Bell telephone company for $10 million, charging that dial-a-porn was responsible. "The phone company and the pornographers took away from us our rights as parents to train our child in what is right and wrong," says Brian's father Ronald Thompson. "You can't police your kids 24 hours a day." Last week a judge declined to shut down the services pending a trial, but the state public-utilities commission ordered the phone company to block such calls from individual phones upon the customer's request. Two weeks ago an official at Georgia's public-service commission issued a similar ruling.

Another assault on phone porn came last week from the Federal Communications Commission. In its first such action, the FCC began moving against two California companies it believes are violating its regulations limiting the access of minors to dial-a-porn messages. Those rules, which many porn services ignore, seek to make it necessary for callers to use a credit card or a special access code. The targeted California companies could eventually face fines of up to $50,000 a day and criminal prosecution. Critics charge that antiregulatory zeal has hitherto led the FCC to take a laissez-faire approach to phone porn. "This signifies that the commission will enforce the rules it has adopted," says FCC General Counsel Diane Killory. This month the Senate adopted a provision that would ban the services. It now goes to the House of Representatives.

Phone companies contend that state regulations prevent them from censoring messages carried over their wires, and many courts have agreed, striking down various efforts to restrict the services. But there have been two rulings that give hope to the antiporn forces. In Arizona and Florida cases, federal appeals courts drew a distinction: government action against dial-a-porn might violate the First Amendment, they said, but as a matter of private policy, phone companies could turn away purveyors of such services.

The X-rated phone business is hugely profitable, to both the porn merchant and the phone company. Overhead is low: with a single machine, porn peddlers can simultaneously handle thousands of calls. In 1985, federal investigators told Congress recently, New York City-based Carlin Communications was raking in about $130,000 a month on 6 million to 7 million calls. And in the twelve months after June 1986, Pacific Bell made an estimated $13.5 million in profits from dial-a-porn. Some prosecutors charge that the majority of customers are children, who pass the numbers along on their grapevine. The results have some psychologists worried about later sexual maladjustment. "Kids are listening to this stuff at a very vulnerable time of their lives," says Victor Cline, a University of Utah clinical psychologist who has studied 21 such children. Maybe the spate of recent actions will get them off the line.

With reporting by Dennis Wyss/San Francisco