Twenty-five years later, these 4 different ways in which Brady and Schafer describe men using pornography in their abuse of children are not generally discussed in mainstream academic studies of ‘grooming’, which is the umbrella term that now popularly describes the tricks and techniques of child sexual abuse. When comment on grooming does occasionally broach the topic of pornography, concern coalesces around 3 things. Academics are mainly concerned about offenders’ use of pornography to pique sexual feelings or curiosity in children, their use of pornography to blackmail children into keeping quiet about abuse, and their use of pornography to create a sexualised environment conducive to abuse. Legal theorist Anne-Marie McAlinden’s following comments from 2006 are typical of how narrowly pornography is discussed in contemporary studies on grooming:
The offender will often use ‘forbidden fruit’ type activities such as cursing, telling ‘dirty jokes’ or showing the child pornography to introduce sexual themes into their conversations. This latter stage not only begins to normalize sexual behaviour but may also be used to entrap the child further. The use of pornography in particular may encourage feelings of shame and guilt which the offender may exploit by persuading the child that they were willing accomplices in their activities (McAlinden, 2006, p. 347).
The ways in which McAlinden observes men using pornography in their sexual abuse of children are certainly important and worrying. There have also been a number of good outcomes of this kind of research. In Australia, and around the world, in the last 10 years governments have amended their criminal codes to include ‘anti-grooming’ provisions (Australian Institute of Criminology, 2008), even if these provisions mostly target online offenders. The 1995 Australian Criminal Code Act, for example, now includes provisions against “[u]sing a postal or similar service to ‘groom’ persons under 16” and “[u]sing a carriage service to ‘groom’ persons under 16 years of age”, as well as a clause against “ ‘[g]rooming’ a child to engage in sexual activity outside Australia.”
Despite increased levels of public awareness of the tricks and techniques of child sexual abuse, pornography continues to be marginalised in the academic conversation on grooming. This is in spite of accounts as far back as the 1980s from women like Brady and Schafer that establish pornography as a ‘teaching tool’ and a ‘recipe book’ that facilitates child sexual abuse, as well as inspires the abuses men inflict. These accounts show that one of the harms of pornography can be seen in the way men use it, and this harm derives from its instrumental use as a tool of child sexual assault.
The understatement of the problem of pornography in contemporary discussions of grooming continues in spite of plentiful evidence of men using pornography as a ‘teaching tool’ to sexually abuse children. The records of criminal cases are an easily accessible source of evidence, and contain precise accounts of pornography being used as an instrument of child sexual assault. In a 2010 New Zealand case, for example, a father was sentenced to a term of imprisonment after sexually abusing his daughter for 13 years, including when she was in hospital for injuries sustained after a serious accident (R v H HC AK CRI 2009-092-02). In sentencing, the judge noted that ‘Mr H’ had “used pornographic films extensively” in his offending. The judge commented that “you cynically took advantage of her when you first detected the possibility of growing sexual awareness on her part at a time when she was still very young.” Mr H’s daughter had asked him about reproduction when she was 5 years old and, in response to this, he had “showed her a pornographic movie as a method of instruction.” Mr H himself acknowledged that “things simply developed from there.” He introduced pornography very literally to his daughter as a ‘teaching tool’ when she was 5 years old in order to initiate the abuse he inflicted on her for the next 13 years.
Mr H also used pornography to expand the range of his sexual abuse to the young friends his daughter brought home to stay overnight. The judge noted that, in the case of one friend who intermittently slept over at the house for a number of years, “whenever she went to your house, you showed pornographic movies and would ask [your daughter] and [her friend] to act out what was being screened.” The judge further commented that this “led to explicit touching and to masturbation on your part.” Using pornography, Mr H was able to not only expand the range of his own assaults, but also teach his daughter to offend against her young friend for his gratification.
It is worth noting the severe effects of Mr H’s crimes on his victims, in which pornography was recognised by the court as playing a large part. In a victim impact statement, Mr H’s daughter said she had been “unable to sleep during the night” during her childhood, and would “remain awake watching the bedroom door which she kept locked.” She would catch up on sleep during the day. In her teenage years she had “turned to cannabis and alcohol, but found that things just became worse”, and this led her to attempt suicide in the year before the court case.
The Melbourne case of R v FVK (2002) further shows a man using pornography to commission his sexual abuse of a girl. A father was charged with twelve counts of sexual and physical assault of his daughter. As a 15-year-old, the girl testified in court that, when she was 10, her father showed her
… pictures of naked women and guys having sex and then he showed me this lady sucking this other guy’s dick. And I went to have a bath and he came in as well and started undressing and he got in, and he said, “Why don’t you suck my dick like you saw in the picture?”
The girl recalled that, “I had to put his dick in my mouth[,] … but I didn’t suck it … [h]e kept on urging me to suck it but I didn’t.” The incomplete success of pornography as a ‘teaching tool’ in this instance was only due to the girl’s exceptional bravery. At the same time her father was using pornography as a ‘teaching tool’ against her, he was also enforcing its ‘lessons’ through brutal violence. In one instance he “made her bend over a chair and whipped her,” and in court the girl testified that “sometimes I fall to the ground and he keeps on kicking me … he’s kicked me in the ribs and legs and he has given me a black eye before …”
Not surprisingly, this physical violence consolidating the father’s pornographic ‘teachings’ generally secured the girl’s acquiescence to sexual abuse. In relation to a later instance, she recalled that,
[w]hile he was sucking my private part, he was asking me, “Does it feel good?” and that I didn’t respond ’cos it didn’t feel good and I didn’t want to say that ’cos then he might have hit me or something.
In this girl’s case, obedience secured through physical violence gradually came to replace the use of pornography as a ‘teaching tool’, but pornography nonetheless featured prominently in her initial victimisation.
Even with this kind of direct and recent evidence of men relying on pornography to orchestrate child sexual assault, the Australian government recognises this particular harm of pornography in only the most limited of terms. In 2008, it legislated against the carriage of pornography into a number of “vulnerable [Aboriginal] communities” (Emergency Response Consolidation Bill, 2008) on the basis of the publication of the ‘Little Children are Sacred’ Report (Northern Territory Government, 2007), which contained discussion of pornography being used in the sexual abuse of children in Aboriginal communities. The report prompted the government to legislate against pornography as an instrument of child sexual abuse, but only in very narrow and racially-defined terms. The government chose to ignore evidence, like that circulating in Australia’s criminal courts, of men from a range of backgrounds using pornography in a similar way. It also chose to overlook the sex industry businesses that had been profiting from the trafficking of pornography into Aboriginal communities for many years, as Melinda Tankard Reist points out:
The government needs not only to ban pornography in the Northern Territory but to stop it being shipped out of Canberra. If the ACT Government will not take responsibility for its porn trade, it is time for the Federal Government to show even greater resolve
and override the territory’s laws (Tankard Reist, 2007).
In limiting its pornography suppression order to only a small number of remote Aboriginal communities, the government also ignored concerns raised by Aboriginal women leaders outside of the Northern Territory that pornography was escalating rates of child sexual abuse in their communities (see Queensland Government, 1999, p. 100). One of these leaders, Gracelyn Smallwood, spoke out 18 years before the enactment of the legislation, in 1990, about her experience as a nurse in a remote Queensland community in Cape York. She told a newspaper reporter at the time that:
… videos are being sold by the same unscrupulous individuals who make a fortune out of peddling sly grog on communities. The people who watch them think, if it’s in the movie, it must be all right to go out and do it … [As a result,] [l]ittle kids are brought into hospital with heavy sweating and other symptoms … [a]t first it was baffling until syphilis and gonorrhoea were diagnosed (in Roberts, 1990).
Feminist insights like this from the 1990s, and those from earlier in the 1980s, articulating the fact that men rely on pornography as a ‘teaching tool’ and ‘recipe book’ to sexually assault children do not feature within the conceptual frame of ‘grooming’ that currently conveys mainstream public concern about male sexual behaviour. However, as a publicly palatable way of naming and problematising this behaviour, the discourse of grooming currently presents feminists with an opportunity to have one of pornography’s harms more widely recognised. Through highlighting the central role of pornography in all of the tricks and techniques men use to groom their victims, whether online or in real life, feminists can capitalise on the grooming discourse to show pornography to be a product of compounding sexual violence for women and girls who are harmed first in its production, and then its application.
Bibliography
Australian Institute of Criminology (2008) ‘Online grooming laws’,
Brady, Katherine (1993) ‘Testimony on pornography and incest’ in Diana Russell (Ed) Making violence sexy: feminist views on pornography. Teachers College Press, New York, pp. 43–44.
Commonwealth of Australia, Criminal Code Act, 1995.
Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and Other Legislation Amendment (Emergency Response Consolidation) Bill (2008) Explanatory Memorandum.
McAlinden, Anne-Marie (2006) ‘“Setting ’em up”: Personal, familial and institutional grooming in the sexual abuse of children’ Social Legal Studies 15 (3) pp. 339–362.
Northern Territory Government (2007) ‘Little Children are Sacred’: Report of the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the protection of Aboriginal children from sexual abuse.
Queensland Government (1999) Report of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women’s Task Force on Violence.
Roberts, Greg (11 August, 1990) ‘Damned children on the islands of despair’, Sydney Morning Herald p. 69.
R v FVK [2002] Supreme Court of Victoria, Court of appeal,
R V H [2010] HC AK CRI 2009-092-02 High Court of New Zealand,
Schafer, Sue (1988) ‘Pornography as instruction manual for abuse’ in Everywoman (Ed) Pornography and sexual violence: evidence of the links (p. 126). Everywoman, London.
Tankard Reist, Melinda (2007) ‘An invasion of pornography’,
Helen Pringle
Civil Justice for Victims of Child Pornography
Child sexual abuse materials are trafficked through exchange or sale at an increasing rate, with the Internet making access much easier, faster and more private. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child places a comprehensive legal duty on states to protect children from sexual abuse and exploitation. In most countries, those who produce and traffic images, videos and other child abuse materials face prison sentences if they are caught and successfully prosecuted, just as do those who sexually assault children. The Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography requires states to bring under their criminal or penal law the “[p]roducing, distributing, disseminating, importing, exporting, offering, selling or possessing” of child pornography. Of 196 nations, however, 122 do not criminalise the knowing possession of child pornography (ICMEC, 2010).
It is sometimes claimed that the chief harm of child pornography lies in its production, and that by the time the images are downloaded, the harm has already been done – the conclusion being that ‘mere possession’ is like a ‘victimless crime’ and should not be penalised heavily. This claim and this conclusion fly in the face of how child pornography works.
Once in circulation on the Internet, child abuse materials constitute a continuing victimisation of children which goes beyond the wrong, damage, and injury done in their original production. Not all child abuse materials involve the sexual assault of children in their production,1 but where they do, these children are victimised again every time their image is viewed or downloaded. These children, as well as adults who were abused in their childhood for the purpose of producing pornography, can also be subject to further victimisation when people recognise them on the street, or even try to contact them to do further harm (see examples in McDaniel, 28 January, 2011, and Falso, 6 February, 2009).2
Where pornography is so ubiquitous, and its effects are so far-reaching, it is easy to fall for the idea that not much can be done in these cases. In such circumstances, despair can easily take over, and hope can easily be lost. But there are some hopeful signs that promise redress for victims of child pornography.
One of these is the development of innovative approaches to civil justice now being widely used in the United States. These approaches involve recovering damages and making restitution for the children (or the adults they have become) from those who participated in, or recorded, the original abuse, and from the ‘end-users’ of pornography. By ‘end-users’, I mean those who view, download, circulate or possess those images, even long after they were first made.
An important step here was the passing by the United States Congress of a provision known as Masha’s Law. Masha’s Law forms part of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, which became law with bipartisan support in July, 2006 (now 18 USC § 2255). This law increased the minimum mandatory penalty for downloading (including viewing) child pornography to US$150,000, up from US$50,000 (which was at that time one-third of the penalty for unlawfully downloading songs). Masha’s Law also allows people over 18 to continue to sue those who download or possess images of them made when they were children.
The law was named after Masha Allen who was adopted from a Russian orphanage in 1998 at the age of 5 by Matthew Mancuso, a wealthy engineer. Masha’s account of what happened over the following 5 years was given as testimony in committee hearings at the US Congress in 2006 (Allen, 2006a; see also US Congress, 2006). Mancuso sexually assaulted Masha from the first day she arrived at his home, and straight away began posting her images to the Internet. He had also previously abused his two older daughters. Mancuso was found guilty of the sexual abuse of Masha, and gaoled. However, Masha’s images are still being trafficked on the Internet, and in a Victim Impact Statement, Masha said that the circulation of her pictures is actually even more disturbing to her than Mancuso’s actions:
The absolute worst thing about everything that happened to me was that Matthew put my pictures on the internet. He traded them with other people like baseball cards. What kind of people want to see pictures of a little girl being sexually abused? I was told that my pictures are the most popular on the internet. How can so many people enjoy the horrible things that happened to me? Now every day and everywhere I go I have to worry about who has seen the awful things that happened to me. And what do they think about me
now? Do they want to hurt me? Or rape me? Or do they think I am bad, dirty, and ugly. I know that these pictures will never end and that the abuse from them will go on forever …
I want every single person who downloads my picture to go to jail and really be punished as much as possible. They are as bad as Matthew. They want to see me suffer. They want to see me starved and hurt and sad and abused. Child pornography is not a victimless crime. I am a victim and I still suffer every day and every time someone sees me being abused (Allen, 2006b).
Because of the long period during which Masha was assaulted by Mancuso, police found it wrenching to watch her growing up as a victim of sexual assault, as she aged in the pictures that they traced. The Internet circulation of the pictures prolongs her abuse to infinity, as each person who downloads her pictures participates in her abuse. For a time, Amazon.com sold a book by a convicted child pornography user, Peter Sotos, called Show Adult, which was advertised as featuring “the child porn star Masha Allen” (Marsh, 2007).3
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