Why are these men downloading child pornography?

… And how much risk do they pose to a fearful public?

Teachers. Businessmen. Military members. Politicians. Every week there’s another headline about a seemingly upstanding citizen caught with child pornography. The natural assumption is that the man is a closet pedophile, hiding his deviant desires behind a façade of normalcy.

This pedophile assumption is sometimes right, and sometimes wrong. Either way, its circularity stymies deeper reflection. “He’s a pedophile so he seeks out child porn. Duh.” It is only if we step away from its micro-focus on the creep of the hour that we may detect something else going on here. Something bigger and more ominous. Something that should awaken our collective concern.

Many of us in the forensic trenches have glimpsed it: a seemingly normal guy who’s become so wrapped up in the online smorgasbord of sexual fantasy offerings that he spends every spare minute frenetically downloading massive amounts of ever-more-deviant porn, as if trying to quench an insatiable thirst.

Medical doctors are seeing another facet: teenage boys and young men with enfeebled sexual desire, who cannot maintain erections or achieve orgasms. More than half of young men ages 16-21 in one study reported such sexual dysfunctions. Unlike with the elderly or infirm, nothing is physically amiss: The problem is all in their heads.

Screenshot: Visits to PornHub in 2016

These trends are developing so fast that they've caught us off guard. With the Internet so ubiquitous, it is easy to forget its recency. “Tube” channels streaming digital video content have only been around since the mid-2000s. But in the brief decade since their emergence, video porn sites have proliferated like mushrooms in a bog: One popular site boasts 91 billion (yes, that’s billion, with a “b”) videos viewed just last year alone, or 12.5 videos per every person on earth!  

The popularity of internet porn is generally attributed to the “three A’s” – anonymity, availability and affordability. People can learn about sex and engage in experimentation without interpersonal vulnerability or fear of embarrassment. There is no responsibility for another’s satisfaction.

There is little question that the rapid proliferation of internet porn is ushering in a sea change in sexuality, especially among digital natives – those in their teens and 20s who know of no other world. Porn viewing is near-universal among male youth throughout the Western world, with average first use steadily dropping to a current average of under 13 years of age. A connection between internet porn and the sudden, unprecedented surge in sexual dysfunction is also abundantly clear: Men seeking medical help for copulatory impotence report obsessive porn use and, just as telling, they quickly recover normal functioning if they can manage to curtail their porn viewing.

With the online porn explosion so new, medical researchers are just starting to catch up to its effects. But an emergent body of neurological research paints a disturbing picture of an oversatiated evolutionary system gone haywire.

The brain is a remarkably elastic organ that readily transmutes in response to environmental and behavioral input. Take the famous taxi driver study, which demonstrated that successfully navigating London’s byzantine streets causes the memory-processing hippocampus to bulk up like a pro wrestler’s biceps. In contrast to this example of plasticity’s utility, the evidence suggests that brain plasticity is maladaptive in the case of heavy porn use.

Wearing out the reward circuitry

Credit: Discover Magazine

Evolution has hard-wired humans to feel pleasure from activities like eating and sex that increase our chances of species survival. But because the brain is not evolutionarily prepared for incessant, artificial sex, constant masturbation to video porn overstimulates the pleasure-seeking circuitry and causes both structural and functional damage. Preliminary neuroimaging research indicates that the ventral striatum (the brain’s so-called “reward center”) shrinks in size. The neurotransmitter dopamine – the “feel-good” chemical that helps animals remember experiences both good and bad – reduces its signaling. Perhaps most alarmingly, the frontal cortex -- responsible for higher-order thinking and planning -- loses grey matter. It’s as if, says researcher Simone Kuhn of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, the heavy porn user is actually wearing out his brain’s reward circuitry.

Psychologically, heavy porn use may foster a vicious cycle of avoidance and poor skills for coping with stress, much like that found in heavy drug users. People may use porn to escape their real-world stressors and anxieties, zoning out in a fantasy realm millions of miles away. Over time, this becomes a preferred strategy that is relied upon for handling stress. Experimental research suggests that such habitual pursuit of immediate sexual pleasure reduces one’s capacity to delay gratification for long-term benefit. The user becomes increasingly impulsive, spending more and more time sitting in front of his computer in a disinhibited state of chronic sexual arousal. As plans and goals are sidetracked, he feels worse about himself, leading to depression that – you guessed it – creates an even stronger urge to escape reality.

Meanwhile, habituation makes it harder and harder to achieve gratification. What was once new and exciting becomes stale and boring. To achieve the sexual release that was once so easy, the consumer must frenetically search for ever-more-exotic and novel stimuli. Today’s porn users, report the ever-helpful statisticians at the popular porn site PornHub, are no longer satisfied with “vanilla” erotica or the old “in-out, in-out”; they are searching for wilder and wilder fantasy.

With an endless menu of novel sexual stimuli available via the mere click of a mouse, this process of habituation sends heavy consumers spiraling down a rabbit hole, sampling ever-more-hardcore themes, from bestiality and bondage to myriad fetishes and – heedless of the legal risk – child pornography. About half of male porn users report that they have found themselves searching for content that they formerly considered disgusting or unappealing. Given what we know about habituation, it is not surprising that this progression to more deviant themes is predicted by the amount of time spent online, the quantity of videos viewed and the age of first porn use.

6-year-old model in fashion ad

But the progression to culturally taboo fetishes is also promoted by the industry itself, which uses the allure of the forbidden to increase its profits. Indeed, it is rather ironic – even perverse – that the very culture that condemns child pornography as the twisted fantasies of the deviant pedophile engages in the widespread eroticization of children to sell products. As British criminologist Yvonne Jewkes points out, the titillation of mass audiences via sexualized images of children can be seen as “the soft end” of a culturally pervasive continuum that at its extreme features hard-core child pornography. 

Jewkes and her colleague Maggie Wykes go so far as to call the current moral panic over child pornography a "smokescreen" that serves to divert attention from the real sexual harm to children in patriarchal societies. After all, the overwhelming majority of child sexual abuse occurs within the home and is committed by a male family member, not a teacher, doctor or even a priest.

In fact, the very term “child pornography” distracts from the incestuous nature of much of the sexual violence depicted, in which fathers callously videotape the abuse of their young daughters for profit and status within their deviant subculture.

“The images found on computers [have] led to calls for an international database of missing children, thus ignoring the evidence that most children are abused at home and so are not ‘missing,’ ” they point out. “The power of moral panic lies not in what it does address but in what it doesn’t.”

The irony doesn’t end there. In our current climate of “paranoid parenting,” in which parents are charged with neglect for letting their kids walk home from a suburban park without adult supervision, the fear of digital child images is making everyone see the world through the lens of the pedophile, thereby colluding with commercial sexual exploitation by fetishizing youthful bodies.

So, what about risk?

Broader cultural discourses aside, on an immediate practical level the questions for forensic psychologists revolve around risk: If a man is caught with illegal child pornography, what is his risk for molesting an actual child? And what is his risk of reoffending by downloading more child pornography?

The fact that reported child sexual abuse has continued to plummet in recent years despite the meteoric rise in child pornography argues against any direct causal link between child porn and hands-on offending. But direct research on child porn consumers is tricky, because such people are less than keen to step forward and reveal themselves. This has forced researchers to focus on those who have been apprehended, likely skewing data toward the more deviant and criminally oriented.

Despite this limitation, the cumulative data bring good tidings: Overall, men who have been arrested and/or convicted for child pornography offending pose a very low risk to the public.

Aggregating nine extant studies on reoffense risk using meta-analytic statistical methods, prominent pedophilia researcher Michael Seto and colleagues found that, on average, a man who has been caught with child porn has about a 3.4% chance of committing another non-contact offense. The risk he will actually molest a child is even lower, around 2%.

These extremely low risk levels -- especially for child pornography offenders with no known history of hands-on offending -- is further evidence that much of their misconduct is driven by curiosity and internet-enhanced impulsivity. Once caught, all but the most deviant learn their lesson and apparently refrain from further misconduct. 

In any body of scientific research, of course, there is always that pesky outlier. In this case, there is one loner study that reached very different conclusions from the pack (and got a substantial amount of attention in the process). That article, based on convicted offenders at a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, is regarded as an unreliable anomaly. Prisoners at the facility have alleged that they were coerced into falsely claiming that they had molested children under threat of being expelled from the treatment program and shipped off to more dangerous penitentiaries. Further, they were never informed that they were part of a research project, and did not give their consent (which if true would be a violation of the Nuremberg Code). Federal judges have been harshly critical of the study. Based on its multiple identified problems, there is even an effort underway to get the Journal of Family Violence to issue a retraction.

The first big wave of child pornography prosecutions caught forensic psychologists off guard. With little extant research and no established tools to assess risk in this emergent criminal class, some practitioners turned to instruments like the Static-99 that were designed to assess reoffense risk among hands-on sex offenders. Not surprisingly, given the obvious differences between sexual assault and online pornography viewing, these instruments turned out to greatly overestimate the risk to the public posed by pornography-only offenders.

Michael Seto has been on the forefront of trying to rectify this situation. He and his colleagues have developed a new instrument to try to distinguish between garden-variety child pornography offenders and the tiny fraction who pose a greater risk to the public. The risk factors on his Child Pornography Offender Risk Tool, or CPORT (publicly available HERE), are largely common-sensical: Men at greater risk are those with more entrenched pedophilic and/or criminal propensities, as indicated by such factors as criminal history or prior contact sex offending against minors. 

Additionally, it is sometimes possible to distinguish men with primary pedophilic attractions from those who fell down the rabbit hole by analyzing the totality of their downloaded images. The pedophiles will tend to have a preponderance of child images, often quite well organized, whereas those without fixed sexual interests in children will have a wider variety of images, including those of adults and other themes such as bestiality, bondage and the like, with child photos in the minority.

Criminologist Jewkes is correct that the current obsession with prosecuting child porn cases distracts from the bigger picture. It not only encourages a warped and ineffective approach to child sexual abuse prevention, but it also sidelines critical analysis of legal adult porn. Because it is legal and its harm is more subtle (albeit far more pervasive), adult porn doesn't generate the moral outrage of child pornography. But just as child porn promotes distorted beliefs about children and child sexuality, much mainstream adult porn promotes destructive messages about women – what they like, and how they should be treated. It fosters objectification, and legitimates violence and abuse.

Whither this social experiment?

Zooming out even further, online porn -- whether legal or illegal -- can be viewed as just one facet of a massive social experiment into completely uncharted waters.

Realdoll sex dolls rolling out this year

Echoing the sci-fi movie Ex Machina (kind of an isolationist Stepford Wives for the 21st century), the market in sex dolls and robots is booming, as “fembots” and “sexbots” become ever more realistic in appearance and feel; they're now even being programmed with "personalities" (sexual, shy, naive, brainy, etc.). As Europe’s first android brothel opens its doors in Barcelona, some predict we are on the brink of a sex-robot tourist industry. Others go so far as to predict that “sex with humans could soon be a thing of the past.”   

Although one is tempted to scoff at such alarmist predictions, in trend-setting Japan, there is much government hand-wringing over the steadily growing proportion of 18- to 34-year-olds who remain single and virgins. Whether porn’s ubiquity is a cause versus a symptom of these larger, global sea changes in sexuality and family life remains an open question. But it is certainly safe to say that online pornography will do nothing to make it easier for people to reach out and connect, either sexually or socially.

After all, there is mounting evidence that porn contributes to young people’s insecurity about their physical adequacy and attractiveness. Heavy porn consumption also weakens men’s commitment to romantic relationships. Real-life partners are mundane and flawed in comparison, incapable of living up to the idealized fantasy model. And, unlike sex-bots, they do not always obey.

Maybe I’ve been watching too much Black Mirror (my episode rankings are HERE), but in this era of increasing social isolation and alienation it doesn't take too much imagination to envision a dystopic future in which people wall themselves off in lonely cubicles, growing old alone as they desperately scour digital media for satisfaction and companionship that remains tantalizingly out of reach.

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Invitation to social media and ethics workshop June 7

Training by Keely Kolmes and Karen Franklin

Do you ever stop and think about your professional use of social media -- whether Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, email listservs, or even your own website or blog?

Hopefully, the answer is "yes."

Social media offer unprecedented professional opportunities. But maintaining one's privacy, reputation and ethical bearings can also be challenging when navigating the Internet's unpredictable currents.

Which is why my local psychological association has decided to host a training on the topic of "Ethics, Pitfalls, and Emergent Opportunities in Social Media."

I would like to issue a special invitation to all of my blog subscribers and readers to attend this continuing education workshop in the San Francisco Bay Area on Saturday, June 7. I am especially excited because I am co-presenting with Keely Kolmes, a dynamic trainer who is perhaps the foremost expert on social media for psychologists. Dr. Kolmes writes, does research, and provides consultation and training on clinical and ethical issues related to social networking and technology. Her Private Practice Social Media Policy has been internationally taught and adapted across health disciplines. She also serves on the state psychological association's ethics committee.

We will provide an introduction to digital ethics as it applies to social networking, online marketing, and other Internet activities. After reviewing research on therapist and client behavior on the Internet, we will offer guidelines for anticipating and managing problems that may arise from online activities.

We will also discuss a topic near and dear to my heart -- professional branding, and the advantages and disadvantages of websites, blogs, Twitter accounts and other types of online visibility. We plan to incorporate vignettes and encourage discussion to highlight divergent approaches to online activities in the digital age.

The event is co-sponsored by the Alameda County Psychological Association and Argosy University (the American School of Professional Psychology). It is free to members of the local chapter and Argosy students and faculty. The fee for non-members is $100 (which will be credited toward ACPA membership dues for those who join at the event) and $25 for students. Psychologists can also earn four hours of continuing education credit for this training.

The event takes places at the Argosy campus in Alameda, at 1005 Atlantic Avenue, from noon to 4:00 p.m. More information is available HERE; directions to the campus are HERE. Advance reservations are required; to reserve, email Cecelia Pena (click HERE).

Internet stings: Does the fantasy defense hold water?

Scott Ritter, the former U.N. weapons inspector, was among the most vocal in insisting that the Bush administration fabricated its claims of “weapons of mass destruction” in order to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Ritter didn’t receive much public gratitude for his efforts to avert a costly and destructive war. Instead, he lost his career and his life gradually unraveled. Sinking deeper into depression, he fled into chat rooms, where he arranged rendezvous with adult women willing to watch him masturbate. At first, the meetings took place in cars or out-of-the-way places. Later, he switched to using a webcam, according to a profile by Matt Bai in the New York Times Magazine.

Then came that fateful day in February 2009 on which, in a Yahoo chat room for adults, he conversed with “Emily.” Although she told him she was 15, Emily was actually a small-town police officer, trolling for sexual predators online.

After doing his usual thing of masturbating in front of the webcam, Ritter announced he was signing off to take a shower.

Not so fast, retorted the officer:

"U know ur in a lot of trouble, don’t you? I’m a undercover police officer. U need to call me ASAP."

"Nah," Ritter typed back. "Your not 15. Yahoo is for 18 and over. It’s all fantasy. No crime."

"I have your phone number and I will be getting your IP address from Yahoo and your carrier," the officer responded. "We can do this 2 ways call me and you can turn yourself in at a latter date or I’ll get a warrant for you and come pick you up."

Ritter turned himself in. At his trial, he testified that he never for a moment believed he was talking to a minor; he assumed he was chatting with a bored housewife pretending to be 15.

Unfortunately for Ritter, jurors were told of his two prior arrests in similar cases, for which he was never prosecuted. In both cases, undercover police had lured him into meetings with fictional teenage girls. His claim that he knew that he was actually talking to undercover police in both cases likely strained the credulity of jurors, who convicted him in the case of “Emily.”

After hearing testimony from a government evaluator who called Ritter a sexually violent predator, the judge sentenced him late last year to a prison term of 18 months to five and a half years.

Fantasy defense succeeds in Queensland

Had it not been for his two earlier cases, Ritter’s defense might not have been all that far-fetched. After all, it worked for Darryl Plumridge of Queensland, Australia back in 2007.

Just like Ritter, Plumridge engaged in online chat with an undercover police officer posing as a teenage girl, in this case a 13-year-old with the screen name of “Erin Princess Baby.”

His defense was simple, according to a forthcoming article in Psychiatry, Psychology and Law: “He claimed that he knew the person with whom he was communicating was an older male and he was simply role playing.”

At trial, he testified that the covert police operative inadvertently supplied various content cues as to his true age and gender. For example, he signed off by saying "see ya later alligator," something no self-respecting 21st-century girl would say. Even more tellingly, he accidentally said he ("she") was at the office when "she" was supposed to be home from school, a glaring error that "she" immediately corrected.

Plumridge was acquitted. 

Study: Can people see through online deception?

Criminologist Robyn Lincoln of Bond University and forensic psychologist Ian R. Coyle, a Gold Coast practitioner and associate professor of law who testified in the case, decided to conduct a study to test the plausibility of Plumridge’s defense. Given the flat nature of internet communication, lacking in physical or tonal cues, can people actually deduce the true age and gender of someone who is pretending to be someone else?

Bottom line? Yes, they often can.

Lincoln and Coyle randomly assigned 46 students as either "deceivers" or "receivers." Each volunteer participant was met off-site and individually led to one of several private study locations, to preclude chance encounters with other participants. Deceivers were instructed to play the role of a 13-year-old girl. Receivers, in contrast, were misled to believe that they might be talking with individuals ranging in age from young children to the elderly. The pairs then chatted with each other for 30 minutes.

Despite the deceivers' best efforts, the majority of receivers were able to correctly identify the age and gender of the person with whom they were chatting, within a five-year bandwidth. None of the receivers believed they were talking to someone under the age of 16.

Thus, the claims of Plumridge and Ritter, that they knew they were chatting with adults but ignored that reality for purposes of fantasy role-playing, appear to have some scientific basis.

As law enforcement officers increasingly partake in trolling the internet for sexual predators in their spare time, it is probably only a matter of time before the Bond University study is introduced into court as evidence.

The study, "No one Knows you’re a Dog on the Internet: Implications for Proactive Police Investigation of Sexual Offenders," has been accepted for publication in Psychiatry, Psychology and Law. Correspondence may be directed to the first author, Robyn Lincoln.

Russell Banks' new novel explores sex offender banishment

The Kid is all alone in the world, hiding in the shadows under the freeway, part of an ever-growing mass of exiles electronically shackled to a society that despises and shuns them.

But who are these modern-day lepers? And why are there so many of them? What if sex offending is a symptom of a malfunctioning society, and these men are just the canaries in the coal mine, carrying the burden of society' shame? What if the Internet is the snake in the Garden of Eden, and pornography is the forbidden fruit?

In Lost Memory of Skin, best-selling novelist Russell Banks explores the deeper ironies of a culture that condemns pedophiles even while turning its children into dehumanized sexual commodities. But on a deeper level, the novel is about the profound loneliness and alienation of the digital age, the inability of people to get beyond false facades to truly trust and connect with each other.

My review continues HERE.

(As always, if you appreciate the book review, please click "yes" at the Amazon site, to boost the placement of my Amazon reviews.)

Justice Perverted: Critical primer on sex offender policy

At a time when many U.S. states are teetering on the verge of bankruptcy and essential public services are being slashed and burned, does it make sense to spend billions and billions of dollars on largely symbolic laws that do little or nothing to prevent or deter sex offending?

Not according to Charles Patrick Ewing, a forensic psychologist and law professor at the University at Buffalo Law School.

I plan to say more about this book's implications for forensic psychologists in an upcoming post. For now, suffice it to say that I highly recommend this timely book to my readers; my review at Amazon is HERE.

Websites worth checking out

• Psychology and Crime News is B-A-C-K! Emma B. was hosting this excellent source of news and information in the United Kindom back when I began blogging in 2007. She went on hiatus for a while, so I am happy to see she is back on the Web, even if in a somewhat abbreviated form. (She recommends you follow her on Twitter.) She's got especially strong resources in the area of lie deception research. Check her out (HERE). Welcome back, Emma!

• Sex offender laws are becoming so out of proportion in terms of their financial cost and the number of people they are ensnaring, including teens and even children, that calls for reason are mounting. Among the more interesting sites of this counter-movement is Citizens for Change, which is jam-packed with news stories, links, and other resources. I recommend that anyone working in the sex offender field give it a look-see (HERE).

• Finally, as I've mentioned before, if you want to keep up with psychological science and be entertained at the same time, Mind Hacks is the place to go. Psychologist Vaughan Bell's weekly "spike activity" columns give comprehensive lists of new research, while his in-depth daily reports provide eclectic perspectives on select news (e.g., new research on the "booty call" and the "poker face").
  

New entry in porn-rape debate

With the controversy raging over whether pornography encourages sexual aggression, an important article has gone to press. Based on a review of the existing evidence, the authors say it is time to discard the hypothesis that pornography leads to sexual violence. Despite the theory's inherent appeal, the evidence to back it up just isn't there.

That's according to Christopher Ferguson of the Criminal Justice Department at Texas A&M and Richard D. Hartley of the University of Texas in San Antonio. As they summarize it in their Abstract:

The effects of pornography, whether violent or non-violent, on sexual aggression have been debated for decades. The current review examines evidence about the influence of pornography on sexual aggression in correlational and experimental studies and in real world violent crime data. Evidence for a causal relationship between exposure to pornography and sexual aggression is slim and may, at certain times, have been exaggerated by politicians, pressure groups and some social scientists. Some of the debate has focused on violent pornography, but evidence of any negative effects is inconsistent, and violent pornography is comparatively rare in the real world. Victimization rates for rape in the United States demonstrate an inverse relationship between pornography consumption and rape rates. Data from other nations have suggested similar relationships. Although these data cannot be used to determine that pornography has a cathartic effect on rape behavior, combined with the weak evidence in support of negative causal hypotheses from the scientific literature, it is concluded that it is time to discard the hypothesis that pornography contributes to increased sexual assault behavior.

The article, forthcoming in Aggression and Violent Behavior, is available online pending print publication, but it requires a subscription.

Report: Online threat to children overblown

The Internet may not be such a dangerous place for children after all.

A task force created by 49 state attorneys general to look into the problem of sexual solicitation of children online has concluded that there really is not a significant problem.

The findings ran counter to popular perceptions of online dangers as reinforced by depictions in the news media like NBC's "To Catch a Predator" series….

The panel, the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, was charged with examining the extent of the threats children face on social networks like MySpace and Facebook, amid widespread fears that adults were using these popular Web sites to deceive and prey on children.

But the report concluded that the problem of bullying among children, both online and offline, poses a far more serious challenge than the sexual solicitation of minors by adults.

So reports Brad Stone in today's New York Times. The news report is here. The full report is here.

Related articles from this blog:

• Experts debunk myths about online youth victimization
• More research debunking Internet predator myth
• Unintended consequences: Is predator hysteria fueling phobia of men?
• 'Predator' caught in its own trappings (Steven Winn essay)
• Cyberbullying verdict raises legal questions

Hat tip: Jane

New journal issue loaded with hot topics

The current (December) issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law has a slew of interesting articles on sex offender civil commitment, forensic brain imaging, religion and the death penalty, forensic assessment of problematic Internet use, psychotherapy with prisoners, competency case law, school shooter motivations, and other timely topics. Highlights include:

Use of DSM Paraphilia Diagnoses in Sexually Violent Predator Commitment Cases
This is the long-awaited article by DSM-III editors Michael B. First and Robert L. Halon, addressing diagnostic controversies in SVP civil commitment cases.

It is accompanied by two commentaries:

• In Muddy Diagnostic Waters in the SVP Courtroom, forensic psychologist Robert Prentky and colleagues essentially agree with First and Halon’s critique. They state that misuse of the DSM in SVP cases is a serious form of "pretextuality."

• In Inventing Diagnosis for Civil Commitment of Rapists, forensic psychologist and attorney Thomas K. Zander traces the history and ethics implications of using DSM diagnoses that lack reliability or validity in order to civilly confine rapists.

Next comes a similar point-counterpoint series of three articles on functional brain imaging in court:

• Functional MRI Lie Detection: Too Good to be True? by Joseph R. Simpson

• Commentary: Functional MRI Lie Detection by James R. Merikangas

• Commentary: The Future of Forensic Functional Brain Imaging by Daniel D. Langleben and Frank M. Dattilio

The full Table of Contents, with links to full-text pdf files, is here.

Sex offender laws criminalizing children

Unintentional wrinkle in sex offender hysteria

A 15-year-old Ohio girl may have to register as a sex offender for the next 20 years – until she is 35 years old! - because she had the bad judgment to share with her friends some nude photos of herself that she took with her cell phone.

The girl's friends may also be charged in the case.

Under the federal Adam Walsh Act, which I blogged about yesterday, judges lost much of their ability to exercise common-sense discretion in cases like this. Instead, crimes must be punished based on fixed offense categories or "tiers."

The law under which the girl is charged makes it a 5th-degree felony to possess material showing a minor in a state of nudity. There is an exemption for parents or guardians who take nude photos of their own children, but no exemption for a child herself.

The legislator who wrote Ohio's Megan's Law, Republican Jay Hottinger, said this type of case was not what the legislature had in mind.

Maybe, instead of just thinking about getting votes, legislators should have been thinking a bit more carefully and deeply when they drafted all these laws, because this high school girl is far from a fluke.

As an expert on child pornography pointed out at a recent forensic psychology conference in Ireland, much of the sexually explicit imagery on the Internet is uploaded by the youngsters themselves, through such sites as Facebook, YouTube and Bebo; other images, as in this case, are sent from friend to friend via mobile phones.

Dr. Ethel Quayle, director of Europe's Combating Paedophile Information Networks in Europe (COPINE) and author of a book on Internet Child Pornography, estimated that about half of all online sexual solicitation involving children is done by the children themselves.

Dr. Quayle said the stereotype of middle-aged men grooming children for sexual exploitation is way off the mark; laws predicated on this bogeyman image are resulting in the increased criminalization of children like the Ohio girl.

The Newark (Ohio) Advocate has more on the Ohio case. The Irish Examiner reported on the forensic conference at University College Cork in Ireland. Photo credit: Hialean (Creative Commons license).

Prosecuting Internet-based sex crimes

Can expert witnesses play a role?

The following facts come from a court case much like several that I have been involved in:

Dennis Joseph is a 40-year-old married man with a 6-year-old daughter. He spends a lot of time on the Internet. Indeed, one might say he is addicted. Once upon a time, he entered the online chat room "I Love Older Men," and began chatting with "Teen2Hot4U."

"Teen2Hot4U" identified herself as "Lorie," a 13-year-old girl. Lori eventually introduced him to her friend Julie, also 13. Eventually, after lots of back-and-forth chatting, Joseph and Julie arranged to meet.

Joseph later said he was not planning to have sex with an underage girl, he just wanted to see if Julie was a real teen or an adult woman engaged in role-playing.

He got his answer when he showed up at the Franklin Street Station Cafe in Manhattan for the meeting. Instead of a teenage girl, the real Julie was a grown man by the name of Austin Berglas who happened to be an FBI agent and who promptly arrested him. "Teen2Hot4U,"meanwhile, turned out to be a 55-year-old crusader named Stephanie Good who made her reputation surfing the Internet looking for sexual predators to report to Berglas; she even wrote a book on her exploits, grandiosely titled "Exposed: The Harrowing Story of a Mother's Undercover Work with the FBI to Save Children from Internet Sex Predators."

At his federal district court trial in New York, Joseph said he had thought all along that Lorie and Julie were probably adults, based on their sexual knowledge, but he played along as part of his practice of online fantasy role-playing.

His wife backed him up. She testified that Joseph liked muscular woman and was addicted to sexual fantasy role-playing. He even belonged to an Internet group called "Muscleteens," she testified, that solicits pictures of young female bodybuilders.

In his defense, Joseph had also planned to call an expert witness, Dr. James Herriot. Not the James Herriot of veterinary fame, but a professor at the Institute of Advanced Human Sexuality in San Francisco who has researched sexual communication on the Internet. Dr. Herriot would have testified about the fantasy role-playing that takes place in Internet chat rooms.

The trial judge barred Herriot's expert testimony. Joseph was convicted and sentenced to eight years in federal prison. This week, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the conviction. Although the reversal was on unrelated grounds, the appellate opinion includes a lengthy plea for the judge to reconsider that exclusionary ruling.

"Although the admission or exclusion of expert testimony is [at] the discretion of the court, we urge the District Court to give a more thorough consideration to the defendant's claim to present Dr. Herriot's testimony…. Dr. Herriot's field of study and experience qualified him to offer relevant testimony…. Dr. Herriot's opinions appear to be highly likely to assist the jury to 'understand the evidence.' … Although some jurors may have familiarity with Internet messaging, it is unlikely that the average juror is familiar with the role-playing activity that Dr. Herriot was prepared to explain in the specific context of sexually oriented conversation in cyberspace…. Obviously a jury would not have to accept Joseph's claim that he planned only to meet 'Julie' to learn who she was and that he lacked any intention to engage in sexual conduct with her, but the frequent occurrence of such 'de-masking' of chat-room participants might provide support for the defense."

In a case similar to Joseph's, Dr. Herriot was allowed to testify and the defendant was acquitted, the appellate ruling noted. (That case is U.S. v. Wragg, 01 Cr. 6107.)

The ruling, United States v. Joseph, 2008 WL 4137900 (2nd Cir. 2008), is online here.

Hat tip: Colin Miller (EvidenceProf Blog). Photo credit: Kim Dench ("Temple Dancer"), Creative Commons License.

More research debunking Internet predator myth

American Psychologist, the flagship journal of the 150,000-strong American Psychological Association, is tackling the hysteria surrounding sexual predation on the Internet.

This week's issue highlights new research showing that the risk to children - especially young children - of surfing online is greatly exaggerated. Those adults who do interact sexually with minors online generally target adolescents who are confused about their sexuality and interested in sex. In general, the adults are frank with the teens about both their own age and their sexual intentions.

In other words, most adult-child sexual encounters initiated online are consensual interactions and are illegal solely due to the minor's age. Youths with histories of sexual abuse, concerns about their sexual orientation, and patterns of risk-taking are especially vulnerable.

The data come from national surveys of children ages 10 to 17 augmented by hundreds of interviews with Internet sex crimes investigators.

The latest findings echo research presented last year by a panel of leading experts to the Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus. See my blog post of June 27, 2007; that research is also available online (here), as is a video of the panel's presentation.

"There's been some overreaction to the new technology, especially when it comes to the danger that strangers represent," said lead researcher Janis Wolak, a sociologist at the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.

The full article, "Online 'Predators' and Their Victims," is available here. An APA press release summarizing the research is here. More information on the research project is available at the Crimes against Children Research Center website.

Experts Debunk Myths About Online Youth Victimization

Are your kids in danger from online Internet predators?

Children do get preyed on, but the reality is far different from the popular perception, according to a panel of leading experts who presented their research to the Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus.

Here are some of the realities as presented by these researchers:

Almost no victims are under the age of 13.

The predominant scenario does not involve violence or abduction. Rather, it is a criminal seduction that takes advantage of common teen vulnerabilities.

The predominant scenario does not involve deception. Only 5% of Internet offenders concealed their age from their teen victim. “Eighty percent were quite explicit about their sexual intentions with the youth that they were communicating with.”

Here is what really happens in the typical scenario, according to panelist David Finkelhor, who is probably the most widely recognized expert in this field:

“The offenders lure teens after weeks of conversations with them, they play on teens’ desires for romance, adventure, sexual information, understanding, and they lure them to encounters that the teens know are sexual in nature with people who are considerably older than themselves.”

For a full transcript, including the options of video or audio, go to:

http://www.netcaucus.org/events/2007/youth/

Panelist Danah Boyd has also made available a YouTube video of the panel presentation. See her blog: http://shurl.org/Internet+Panel .

Predator show slammed

Might mounting criticisms of NBC's "To Catch a Predator" signal a turning point in the cultural hysteria surrounding “sexual predators”?

Criticism is mounting on multiple fronts against the show, which features vigilantes trolling the Web to lure men into sexual liaisons with children.

On the civil front, the show’s former producer claims she was fired after complaining about flagrant violations of journalistic ethics. Marsha Bartel lost her 21-year career with NBC. She alleged in a U.S. District Court lawsuit that NBC provides financial incentives to the shadowy vigilante group Perverted Justice to use trickery and to humiliate targets to “enhance the comedic effect of the[ir] public exposure." She said that in some cases the vigilantes resorted to begging individuals to come to sting locations. Additionally, she charged that police behaved improperly off-camera, for instance “waving rubber chickens in the faces of sting targets while forcing them to the ground and handcuffing them." NBC responded by calling the lawsuit “without merit.” The lawsuit is on-line at: http://shurl.org/predator

On the criminal front, prosecutors have lambasted the series as an unethical blending of law enforcement and show business that does nothing to curtail sexual violence. In Collin County, Texas, for example, the District Attorney said none of 24 recent sting arrests were adequate for prosecution.

"This whole scenario is garbage-in-garbage-out, and here we sit with a pile of garbage,” commented one legal observer. "It's a prosecutor's worst nightmare. The last thing you want is the news media or reality TV shows to be involved in the prosecution or the investigation of the case."

Last fall, the show came under scrutiny when a target shot and killed himself as police stormed his house outside Dallas, Texas. The man, an assistant district attorney, was to be To Catch a Predator's most notorious target. "These people were acting not only as police, but judge, jury and executioner," said the deceased’s sister. "It was about headlines. Making a splash. Making a story. Jumping to conclusions.”

TV news coverage of the Texas cases is on-line at: http://www.wfaa.com/video/?nvid=148433&shu=1

Comedic criticism of the show can be found on YouTube. My favorite of these is the “auditions” for the job of teenage lure. See: http://shurl.org/auditions.

On a more serious note, a Baptist minister has analyzed the high financial costs of the current hysteria. These include not just the obvious costs of incarceration, but such lesser-knowns as declining property values when a registered sex offender moves into a neighborhood. David Hess of New York argues that lawmakers are throwing billions of dollars at a mythological problem, while doing nothing to deter real sexual abusers, mostly family members and friends of their child victims. His analysis is on-line at: http://shurl.org/economic+costs.