PEE-WEE'S BIG HOUSE ADVENTURE:

Persecuting Pee-wee: A Child-Porn Case That Threatens Us All (Richard Goldstein, January 15 - 21, 2003, Village Voice)

The sexual exploitation of children became a major cause in the '70s-appropriately, to say the least. But the focus soon shifted from sex acts to erotic imagery. In 1982, the Supreme Court declared child pornography unprotected by the First Amendment. Redeeming social value was no defense, and the contraband didn't have to be obscene. Even clothed images of children could be porn if they seemed arousing. And the courts defined a child as anyone under 18.

In this environment, an FBI unit code-named Innocent Images began to concentrate on consumers, and arrests tripled over the '90s. Many pedophiles were nabbed, along with artists and even parents who made photos of their naked kids. The Internet was well suited to entrapment, since hard drives archive e-mailed images even if they're unwanted and promptly deleted. Sweeping laws have led to bizarre and tragic cases, but it's also true that incidents of child abuse have dropped sharply (the priesthood notwithstanding). Yet the fixation on erotic images as opposed to criminal behavior may have unintended consequences.

Is our obsession with child porn creating a climate where kids are commonly regarded as sex objects? Amy Adler, a professor at New York University Law School, suspects so. "The legal tool that we designed to liberate children from sexual abuse," she wrote in the Columbia Law Review, "threatens to enslave us all by constructing a world in which we are enthralled-anguished, enticed, bombarded-by the spectacle of the sexual child."

Consider the photo of a beaming, bare-bottomed 12-year-old boy holding a pole that appeared in the July 1963 issue of Manorama. Back then, it would have seemed charming to many viewers and arousing to a few. Today this same image would make most people faintly nauseous. An image that once seemed tender, since its sexual meaning was repressed, is now terrifying because it reads as explicitly erotic. The process of sensitizing us to child porn also forces us to eroticize children. Whether we intend to or not, we begin to see the world from a pedophile's perspective.

That's pretty priceless: the problem isn't that paedophiles exploit children and images of children but that the society at-large finally realized the extent of the problem and tried putting an end to it. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 16, 2003 7:37 PM