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Boston Globe article Sunday



Online at:
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/033/focus/Going_mobile+.shtml

Going mobile

Pete Townshend got caught. But most online child
pornography goes undetected.

By Emily Nussbaum, 2/2/2003

WHEN ROCK LEGEND Pete Townshend was arrested on Jan.
13, "on suspicion of possessing indecent images of
children" on his personal computer, he was merely the
latest public figure caught up in the tangled
relationship between pedophilia and technology. In
1998, Harvard Divinity School dean Ronald Thiemann
stepped down after similar images were discovered on
his computer's hard drive. 

Ideas hashed out the story behind these scandals with
Penn State history and religion professor Philip
Jenkins. In 2001, Jenkins published "Beyond Tolerance:
Child Pornography Online," a study of the Internet
child pornography community. 

IDEAS:As an expert on child pornography, what was your
first reaction when you heard that Pete Townshend had
been arrested?

JENKINS:Not so much as an expert on child pornography,
but as a baby boomer, I was very depressed. You know:
"Say it ain't so, Pete!"

IDEAS:What misconceptions do people have about child
pornography?

JENKINS:Until recently, there's been an academic myth
that it no longer really exists-that what is out there
is old stuff, recycled from magazines of the 1970s.
And then there are those people who think child
pornography is everywhere. Is it there? Yes. Is a lot
of it being made afresh? Yes. Does it represent 30
percent of everything published on the Internet? No.
It's a fringe phenomenon, but it's a genuine
phenomenon.

IDEAS:You've talked about the importance of making a
distinction between people who look at child
pornography and actual pedophiles.

JENKINS:There's an assumption that anyone who looks at
child pornography molests children, but that's based
on the way people are caught. Until a few years ago,
the only way you'd get caught for possessing child
pornography was if you'd been arrested for having
committed molestation-police would then search your
computer. So by definition, most criminal cases
involving child pornography also involved other
serious felonies. But by that logic, since rapists
often watch adult pornography, men who watch dirty
videos must be rapists.

IDEAS:That's Andrea Dworkin's argument: Pornography is
the theory, and rape is the practice.

JENKINS:And that idea is widely accepted when it comes
to child pornography. But if you follow that
conclusion to its logical extreme, everyone in Japan
should be dead, because Japan has the most incredibly
violent pornography in the world. The generic form of
Japanese pornography involves the rape of schoolgirls.
Yet the rape and murder rate there is low. I'm not
saying there's never a connection between these
things, but there isn't a necessary connection.

IDEAS:Do you think the police crackdown is an
effective way of fighting the distribution of child
sex photos? They are, after all, visual portrayals of
a crime.

JENKINS:At this point, I don't know what would be
effective. The one thing law enforcement has
accomplished is to reintroduce a level of deterrence.
But it strikes me that there's a misunderstanding
here. If you seize a kilo of cocaine, then you've
taken that cocaine out of the illicit market. But if
you seize 10,000 child pornography images, there are
still a million other copies. So what have you
actually done? You've taken somebody who may be an
actual threat, or who may instead just need therapy,
and you've put them into the criminal justice system.
And that's a question of values.

But really, this is part of a general problem of
criminality on the Net. The best efforts of child porn
suppression have a limited time frame, because of
peer-to-peer networks-the kind that distribute MP3s.
And when child porn moves into that world, which it
seems to be doing, then it really becomes impossible
to eradicate.

Emily Nussbaum writes the Summary Judgment column for
the online magazine Slate.

For comments and suggestions, email ideas@globe.com

This story ran on page D5 of the Boston Globe on
2/2/2003.


=====
-Brian in Atlanta
The Who This Month!
http://www.thewhothismonth.com
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