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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Dylann Roof: How to make a rampage murderer

As the penalty-phase trial of young white supremacist Dylann Roof gets underway this week, reporters have asked me to explain the psychological dynamics that trigger deadly rampages like Roof’s at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. My answer: Although the specifics such as locale and target shift, the broad contours of such spree killings remain remarkably constant. Here is my recipe of key ingredients:

1. Alienation

We humans are tribal animals. For millennia, we lived in tightly knit, cooperative societies where individuals were rarely alone. As author Sebastian Junger explores in Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, tribal identity motivates individuals to sacrifice for the collective good. In stark contrast, modern society deprives people of that essential sense of connection or belonging. Our current technological atomization is “deeply brutalizing to the human spirit,” writes Junger. Cast adrift, people feel meaningless and superfluous. Social alienation is producing epidemic rates of depression and suicide. But it is in spree killings that we see the ultimate expression of malignant alienation: Embracing nihilism, the killer finds meaning via symbolically destroying not just himself, but also the social order that rebuffed and humiliated him.

Mark Ames, author of the meticulously researched Going Postal, goes so far as to argue that mass shootings are a form of doomed rebellion against a toxic culture: Otherwise-normal people snap when pushed to the breaking point within decollectivized, militarized and ruthless settings. Workplace sprees occur in oppressive institutional settings rife with surveillance, mandatory unpaid overtime, and humiliating and degrading layoff rituals. Sites of school shootings, meanwhile, are often brutal places where students undergo chronic torment. The more endemic alienation becomes, the more people will snap.

2. Failure

This is perhaps obvious, but setting the stage for a spree killing is cataclysmic failure. Except in warfare, satisfied people don’t suddenly morph into killing machines. The killer has failed a life-stage transition, and his life has gone off track. Dylann Roof had a troubled childhood, marked by abuse, neglect, severe anxiety and academic failure, according to published accounts. He dropped out of high school. As a young adult, he couldn’t get a job or even a driver’s license. He coped by drinking heavily. The lives of other recent mass killers were similarly catastrophic, marked by failures on academic, vocational and/or relationship fronts. Adam Lanza (Sandy Hook) and Elliot Rodger (Isla Vista) had autism-spectrum conditions that left them incapable of forming intimate relationships. Omar Mateen (The Pulse nightclub) was a socially awkward loser: he flunked out of police training, got fired as a prison guard, and ended up doing lowly security work; his wife fled after he beat her.

3. Entitlement

Dylann Roof posing in his bedroom.

Failure alone is insufficient. The failure must be perceived as unfair. Like Roof, whose grandfather was a prominent attorney, the killer often has middle-class roots, inculcating the American mythology of success. Mass shooters often have higher aspirations than are realistic for their station in life. In Hunting Humans, pioneering anthropologist Elliott Leyton argues that the modern mass murderer tends to be especially socially conservative, class-conscious, and obsessed with power and status. Yet in our increasingly fragmented, alienating and high-stress world, a high-quality life is difficult for many a young American to achieve. Recognizing that he is on a dead-end trajectory and that his class aspirations will not be realized produces profound disappointment, personal shame and – ultimately - despair. To reduce cognitive dissonance, he needs someone to blame.

4. Projection

By the time he explodes, the spree killer has amassed an enormous reservoir of bitterness. He feels unfairly victimized. Through a scarcity lens, he perceives less deserving people as stealing away his opportunities and robbing him of his right to happiness. Those perceived as undeserving typically include lower-status or socially stigmatized groups such as people of color, women, sexual minorities or immigrants. This is the politics of resentment that Trump has milked so effectively.

Also feeding into the potent fury of many mass murderers are childhood histories of being bullied and socially rejected. In Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings, Katherine Newman and colleagues chronicle the tormented lives of infamous school shooters. Many were incessantly harassed, with antigay epithets a common refrain. In high school, Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech) was relentlessly bullied over his social awkwardness, speech impediment and immigrant background. Dylann Roof was described as a “bug-eyed boy” with a bowl haircut who struggled academically; we can only guess at his social travails.

5. Masculinity

Spree killings are exceedingly rare (making them impossible to predict). Not every alienated, bitter loner picks up an assault rifle. But those who do are invariably male. Women are more likely to blame themselves for their misery. As journalist Jamie Bartlett reveals in The Dark Net, hundreds of thousands of young women ages 13-25 flock to the myriad “pro-cutting” and “pro-ana” (anorexia) Internet sites that have sprung up in response to demand from alienated young women.

In contrast to this turning inward, many young men regard violence against others as a way to gain status and respect. Our cultural glorification of male violence is evidenced by the enormous popularity of first-person shooter and warfare games. It is evidenced by the lack of meaningful protest over our government’s modeling of killing as a solution to problems: U.S. military drone strikes in the Middle East have ended the lives of many hundreds of civilians, with little fanfare. After all, we are the good guys, protecting the world against evil. As boys grow up, writes masculinity scholar Michael Kimmel, “they learn that they are entitled to feel like a real man, and that they have the right to annihilate anyone who challenges that sense of entitlement.”

Mass shootings are a quintessentially American theatrical production, the ultimate display of alienated hypermasculinity inside the world's leading imperial power. The production is carefully planned and staged, often accompanied by websites, online manifestos and photos that will help it propagate and endure in the cultural imagination. Embittered young men seize upon the restorative potential of violence, which enables them to extract vengeance for a litany of wrongs both real and imagined. Even more powerfully, violence offers the lure of immortality: Rack up enough dead bodies, and you become infamous. You are no longer a nobody; you are a warrior.

6. Ideology

To become a warrior, one needs a cause. There is no shortage of alienated young men like Roof, reared on a diet of masculine entitlement and believing that they have been treated unfairly. In another time, they might be like dying trees in a parched forest, standing alone and unnoticed until their eventual collapse. But in the age of the enchanted Internet, such men can simultaneously retreat from humanity yet plug into like-minded online communities where their diffuse rage can find a focus.

Elliot Rodger (Isla Vista) in pre-production selfie: "I am gorgeous"

Take Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista killer. A flop with women despite his self-proclaimed “gorgeous” looks, he immersed himself in the misogynist realm of the “manosphere,” where “men’s rights” proponents and “pickup artists” rail against power-mad feminists who are denying men their natural-born right to supremacy (and sex). Such insular communities are like echo chambers, validating and amplifying warped ideologies. Within the manosphere, Rodger transformed himself from an invisible nobody -- a "beta male," in man-speak -- into a “true alpha male,” in his words, a heroic warrior standing up for oppressed “incels,” or involuntary celibates.

“Women are like a plague,” he repeats several times in an online manifesto. “The mere sight of them enjoying their happy lives was an insult to me, because I deserve it more than them…. They don’t deserve to have any rights. Their wickedness must be contained in order to prevent future generations from falling to degeneracy. Women are vicious, evil, barbaric animals, and they need to be treated as such.”

Like Rodger, Dylann Roof retreated into the Web. But instead of the manosphere, his search for meaning led him to the white supremacist channel. Specifically, the Council of Conservative Citizens, aka the “uptown Klan,” which devotes a lot of energy to disseminating propaganda about the menace of black-on-white crime. The atomization of culture into discreet identities has left many white men feeling abandoned and scapegoated, and racist ideology is quick to fill this vacuum. Roof eagerly soaked up the ideology of a white race under siege; like Rodger, he also grew frustrated with the preponderance of rhetoric over action. “[S]omeone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me,” he wrote. “I have no choice.”

Reducing the world to a stark black and white furthers the killer's self-image as a heroic warrior battling the forces of evil. In Terrorist’s Creed: Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning, fascism scholar Roger Griffin calls this “heroic doubling”: fanatics deploy violence as a call to arms to defend an idealized in-group against perceived threat by a demonized Other. Ideologically motivated killers like Roof, Rodger or the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik may act alone in the moment, but they see themselves as soldiers in a larger movement. The growing popularity of online manifestos – Roof had one, too, although at four pages it paled in comparison to Rodger’s 141-page tome – attests to the narcissistic fervor with which spree killers cling to their adopted ideologies as rationale for bloodshed.

What makes the ascendancy of extremist rhetoric so dangerous is this capacity to activate the alienated loner. A direct cause-and-effect relationship is readily observable: Donald Trump spews anti-Muslim vitriol, and in short order attacks on U.S. Muslims spike. Public figures can produce random lone-wolf violence via repeatedly demonizing an out-group, while maintaining plausible disavowal of responsibility. This practice -- most well-known for its contribution to abortion clinic bombings -- has a scholarly term, "stochastic terrorism.” In Roof's case, the Council of Conservative Citizens whose ideology Roof parroted in his manifesto was quick to issue a statement deploring the massacre, even while defending Roof's racist belief system as correct.

7. Contagion

In late-18th century Germany, groups of young men could be seen strolling about in identical outfits of blue tailcoats, yellow trousers and high boots. They were imitating Werther, the romantic hero of the sensational novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which the idealistic protagonist kills himself over unrequited love. Blamed for a rash of copycat suicides among the impressionable and mentally ill, the novel was banned in Italy and Denmark.

This so-called Werther Fever is an early example of what we now refer to as a cultural meme – an idea, fashion or behavior transmitted like a virus from person to person, often via mass media, that takes on a life of its own as it propagates.

Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech) poses in pre-production selfie

Spree killings seem to have morphed into just such a cultural meme. Especially with the spread of social media, they often go viral, tempting the next angry and alienated man with the tantalizing promise of infamy and immortality – especially if the body count is high enough.

In truth, however, this immortality is illusory, as the very ubiquity of the mass shooter meme is numbing the public; one killer’s fame lasts only for the brief interval until another pushes him aside. Dylann Roof will have his moment in the spotlight this week, and then it will be on to the next case.

Instead of just dissecting each individual act in this never-ending drama (and emphasizing singular elements such as untreated mental illness, gun accessibility, social media, violent video games, bad parenting, law enforcement failures of prediction, and the like), we might do well to regard young men like Roof as canaries in the coal mine. It is only when the air in the mine is poisonous that the canary will die.

In the award-winning TV show Mr. Robot, there are these ninja assassins who, when cornered, put a bullet in their own brain. A computer-crimes detective refers to this as “erasing their histories.” In orchestrating a dramatic last stand, mass shooters like Roof are doing precisely this, erasing their heretofore empty and meaningless lives and replacing them with a meme.

Related blog posts:

• Newtown, CT: Latest massacre brings more hand-wringing (Dec. 18, 2012) 
• Aurora massacre: To speak or not to speak? (July 22, 2012) 
• Arizona rampage: Analyzing the analyzers (Jan. 23, 2011) 
• Systems failure or black swan? New frame needed to stop memorial crime control frenzy (Oct. 19, 2010) 
• Virginia Tech: Can school shootings be prevented? (April 19, 2007) 

Dylann Roof's full manifesto is HERE; Elliot Rodger's is HERE.

“In the Dark” shines brilliant light on bungled Jacob Wetterling case

Long-dormant case spawned today's sex offender registries. But would these laws have made a difference? 

Twenty-seven years ago, a perfect storm struck a small town in central Minnesota, when a stranger jumped out of the shadows and snatched an 11-year-old boy out bicycle-riding with friends.

It was the rarest of crimes. But the Oct. 22, 1989 abduction of Jacob Wetterling struck at a pivotal moment in U.S. history, igniting a conflagration that still burns today. Stranger-danger hysteria was sweeping the nation. Day care providers were being rounded up and accused of Satanic ritual abuse of children. And in that potent milieu, an unprecedented national manhunt came up empty.

Embarrassed by their failure, law enforcement spokesmen claimed they were hamstrung by lax tracking of known sex offenders. Jacob’s distraught mother, Patty Wetterling, led a successful crusade that culminated in the Wetterling Act of 1994, requiring all U.S. states to collect and publicly disseminate information on convicted sex offenders.

But 27 years later, with an estimated 850,000 Americans on public sex offender databases, Patty Wetterling is no longer enamored of the opportunistic missing-child movement and its crass media stars, who used her to promote their own agendas. In an interview with award-winning investigative reporter Madeleine Baran, she said she regrets her role in creating a public registry that is counterproductive, in shaming and ostracizing individuals rather than helping them reintegrate into society.

That interview is just one of many remarkable segments in the serial In the Dark, a nine-part podcast from American Public Media that forces us to rethink everything we thought we knew about both the Wetterling abduction and the broader landscape of how police investigate serious crimes.

Danny Heinrich today and sketch of abductor in 1989

Coincidentally, Episode One of the meticulously researched series was just set to premiere when police announced last month that they had finally cracked the case. Daniel Heinrich, who lived about half an hour down the road from his victim, had confessed and led police to Jacob’s remains, in exchange for a plea deal in an unrelated child pornography case and an admission that he abducted and assaulted another boy nine months before killing Jacob.

Baran set out to answer the question of why it took the local police more than a quarter of a century to catch a small-town pervert who was right under their noses the whole time. But in the process, she learned something far more troubling: that police across the country lack any meaningful oversight, and inept agencies with crime-solving rates as low as zero percent face no accountability.

Baran reached this shocking conclusion after more than nine months of painstaking digging. In a monument to investigative reporting, she and her colleagues delved deep into archival records, conducted contemporary interviews with dozens of witnesses and experts, and reconstructed events to determine what went wrong.

What Baran found was missteps at every turn. Police didn’t thoroughly canvass the neighborhood immediately after the crime. They glossed over a rash of stranger molests of preteen boys in the nearby hamlet of Paynesville where killer Danny Heinrich – already known to police – resided. Ultimately, in the type of tunnel vision that we see all too often in cases of wrongful conviction, they set their sights on the wrong guy altogether, a quirky local music teacher, and hunkered down to build a case against him – destroying his life in the process.

Diving deeper, Baran found more systemic problems.

At the time of Jacob’s abduction, the media portrayed Stearns County, Minnesota, as an idyllic place where crimes like this didn’t happen: indeed, went the narrative, that’s why the local sheriff’s department was caught off guard.

But that wasn’t true. The Stearns County Sheriff’s Department had investigated crimes even more heinous, and had botched it every time.

There was the case of the Reker sisters, ages 12 and 15, who disappeared one day in 1974. Police shrugged it off as girls on a lark, until the bodies were found in a quarry a month later with multiple stab wounds. The case was never solved. And there was the mass murder of a woman and three children, shotgunned to death in their beds in 1978. Police questioned the killer, Joseph Ture, but released him to wreak carnage across Minnesota; he ended up raping numerous women and killing at least two before he was finally apprehended by Minneapolis police.

Baran’s delivery is masterful. In a pleasant and measured cadence, she methodically weaves together the micro strands of the flawed Wetterling investigation with the macro threads of an entire police system gone wrong, to create an eye-opening tapestry with profound implications for all Americans.

* * * * *

It’s hard not to be dubious about the prospects for any expose, even the most brilliant, to produce genuine systemic change. On the other hand, there is no question that podcasts can change the fates of those lucky few whom they spotlight.

Take Adnan Syed. Many will remember the viral popularity of Serial's debut season in 2014, with host Sarah Koenig recounting Syed's prosecution in the killing of his former high school girlfriend. Syed’s conviction was subsequently overturned and he was granted a new trial, much to the dismay of Maryland state attorneys, who are protesting that the appeal is "meritless" and a product of "sensationalized attention" that gave a legitimately convicted murderer the status of international superstar.

That was certainly the case for convicted killer Steven Avery after Netflix’s Making a Murderer, which spawned a large and vocal fan base insisting that he is innocent despite substantial evidence to the contrary. As I noted in my critical review of that spectacle, by cherry-picking which facts to air, a producer can energize an ignorant populism fueled by illusory knowledge. 

So, podcasters walk a fine line between educating the public about the realities of the criminal justice system -- as In the Dark does so well -- and pandering to the prurient, devolving into true-crime entertainment spectacles like “48 Hours Mystery." Or worse. The dangers of true-crime populism were perhaps best illustrated by the 2013 murder trial of Jodi Arias, where media corporations intent on audience titillation fomented a digital lynch mob.

Hewing to the educational function is Breakdown, an Atlanta Journal Constitution podcast that unabashedly acknowledges itself as a Serial knockoff. In Season One, “Railroad Justice in a Railroad Town,” reporter Bill Rankin plays on his experience as a senior legal affairs reporter, using the case of a small-town meth-head convicted of arson to illustrate how an underfunded public defense system is set up to fail poor Americans.

Season Two of Breakdown, Death in a Hot Car -- Mistake or Murder?, swings more toward the sensationalist side, presenting the case of a man who was so distracted by his sexting obsession that he left his toddler son strapped into a car seat on a hot June day in Georgia. The boy died. Justin Harris's case is generating major media interest, with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution hosting a dedicated web page with "minute-by-minute updates," and another site live-streaming the trial.

The PTA mom who was framed

Again going for the high road, some reporters are also adapting the popular serial format to the quaint, endangered medium of print journalism. A nice example is the recent L.A. Times series Framed: A Mystery in Six Parts, in which award-winning reporter and author Christopher Goffard tells the fascinating story of a PTA mother who was framed by a high-powered professional couple. Whereas most such series aim to expose justice gone wrong, Framed does the opposite, showcasing a refreshing example of a police investigation that went above and beyond the call of duty to get it right.

As you can see, there’s a lot out there to sample. But if you’ve only got time to check out one podcast series, I recommend In the Dark. It’s the cream of the crop, an edge-of-your-seat thriller and a compelling cautionary tale that deserves the ear of every American.