No New Child Smut Laws Needed

Washington and other governments have voiced revulsion over the proliferation of child pornography on the Internet. The first World Congress Against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, which drew officials from 130 nations to Stockholm this summer, called for a crackdown on abuse of the medium. In October, a European commission discussed new measures to curb the circulation of child smut. But in the United States, the Clinton administration has remained wedded to the Communications Decency Act, an ill-conceived blunderbuss law that assaults free speech, amounts to broad censorship and has been viewed by the courts as unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, child pornography purveyors and recipients, though they know that it is illegal to possess this aberrant material in most parts of the world, also realize that the ease of access and the hundreds of thousands of Web sites on the Internet provide unparalleled camouflage. So governmental edicts are unlikely to send them scurrying back under their rocks.

Many national governments, including ours, would do well to realize that the battle has already been joined at the most advantageous place. That is at the levels of local, state, federal and international police and intelligence agencies, where cooperation and existing law is already being put to the test in new kinds of investigations, prosecutions and convictions.

One of the worst cases of this sort involves the bust, in October, of an alleged child porn ring with computer connections in California, Illinois, Kansas, Finland, Australia and Canada. This password-protected “chat room” was alleged to have used a real-time computer camera hookup in which participants made requests and a 10-year-old Monterey County girl was forced to comply.

This case, initiated by California police officials, eventually involved the FBI and Canada’s Ontario Provincial Police Force’s state-of-the-art child porn unit. It led to the largest confiscation of child porn computer files to date (20,000 of them), allegedly from a video store employee in northern Ontario.

Cases like this suggest the best thing that governments can do is to provide law enforcement agencies with more of the personnel and computer resources needed to conduct investigations. Exploitation of children via computer, a relatively new development, has to be fought there, not by politicians in high dudgeon.