Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families

by Pamela Paul

  Meanwhile, in the United States, the FBI, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, and the U.S. Customs Department are using what means are at their disposal. The FBI launched a $10 million campaign, Innocent Images, which tracks down child predators. Since 1996, the campaign has opened 7,067 cases, obtained 1,811 indictments, performed 1,886 arrests, and secured 1,850 convictions or pretrial diversions in child pornography cases.42 Local courts are also strengthening law enforcement’s hand. In June 2004, the Supreme Court of California reversed a 1983 precedent by requiring people convicted of child pornography possession to register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives.

  “I Essentially Stumbled Upon It”

  It was only a matter of time before Charlie was exposed to child pornography. “I essentially stumbled upon it,” he explains. “It wasn’t something I sought out or even thought I would ever be interested in.” His foray began innocently enough—checking out nudist Web sites, where he observed families frolicking in the buff. Then there were naked children alone. Child porn. “At first it was a real turnoff,” he recalls. “But there was an aspect of curiosity as well.” He kept clicking back, intrigued. What was it about those young girls that was so seductive? Why was he getting so excited? Within a month’s time, Charlie was seeking out child porn regularly, with the explicit intention to masturbate. Between 1997 and 2000, Charlie became a habitual user of child pornography. “That whole period is like a blur to me,” he says.

  Meanwhile, his pornography habit began to spill over into real life. After hesitating and fantasizing, procrastinating and finally taking the plunge, Charlie arranged a meeting with one of the women he met through the Internet. When the appointed hour arrived, Charlie had second thoughts and couldn’t go through with it. He did this repeatedly. He met a woman or couple online, interacted over the webcam and in chat rooms, proposed a meeting, then chickened out at the last minute. He didn’t even bother canceling their rendezvous. It was so easy to arrange, it would be so easy to go through with it … but something wasn’t right. The whole thing terrified him. He was spending hours online, going nights without sleep. Elise constantly complained about the time he was spending on the computer. He was always exhausted. “I realized I didn’t seem normal,” he says.

  What really started to scare Charlie was when he began lusting after people he encountered in his everyday life. That hadn’t happened since puberty. In fact, he had long ago concluded that pornography helped keep his desires in check, satisfying them virtually while maintaining his perspective in real life. Now, pornographic thoughts began intruding into everyday activities. “I was teaching Sunday School to high schoolers,” he recalls. “The whole time I would be lusting after the girls in their short skirts. And, of course, I felt overwhelmed with guilt.”

  Who Uses Child Pornography?

  In most people’s minds, the child pornography user is the ultimate transgressor—perverted and dangerous, a person who has fallen beyond the boundaries of society and morality. When asked about child pornography, men who are regular users of pornography typically become incensed. “Those people should be executed,” they say. Disgusting, horrible, troubling, scary are words they use to describe men who enjoy sexual depictions of children. “They’re ruining it for the rest of us!” three men fumed separately in interviews.

  Fear of child pornography is pronounced and growing more intense. Every day, at least fifty newspapers worldwide contain stories—outraged, sorrowful, fearful—about child pornography. Headlines are filled with attention grabbers like “Nuclear Physicist Arrested for Third Time on Child Porn!”43 “Disgraced Former Judge: I Downloaded Child Porn.”44 “Kiddie-Porn Suspect Worked with Children.”45 The men seem at once suspicious and unlikely, like all other men, and yet somehow terribly different. True to terrifying stereotype, the child pornography user often works with children. Here they are, the lineup:

  • Harold Shaw, fifty-nine, was a regular churchgoer, a “good guy” according to neighbors. The former gymnastic coach worked as a volunteer at a summer camp run by the Mormon Church. Fellow churchgoers affectionately called him “Brother Shaw.” Since leaving the school system, he worked as an electrician, sometimes doing free repairs for neighbors and watching after people’s dogs and mail while they were away. He also welcomed teenage girls from his church and young female relatives to his home. But in February 2004, Shaw was arrested on charges of child pornography. The walls of his Las Vegas home were lined with photographs of girls between the ages of eleven and fifteen, featuring close-up shots of their genitalia while performing gymnastics. The police also discovered a videotape of Shaw performing sex acts on an eleven-year-old girl, who appeared to be either drugged or drunk in the footage. “I can’t imagine that he would do something like that,” said a shocked neighbor. “He’s never been anything but a good person. I would trust him with my kids any time.”46

  • In March 2004, Joseph Thomas Nurek, fifty-four, a school principal on Chicago’s North Side, was arrested for possession of child pornography. Federal authorities found more than a hundred images on Nurek’s computer, as well as CD-ROMs, videos, and DVDs, with pictures of boys as young as twelve performing sexual acts. Nurek had served as an administrator and principal for four and a half years at the Chicago International Charter School. A criminal background check prior to his hiring had come back clear.47

  • That same month, a former navy physicist and weapons designer was convicted for using the Internet to seduce teenage girls and for possession of child pornography. The defendant, forty-six-year-old George Paul Chambers, argued that he had just been role playing when he exchanged graphic sexual e-mails and photographs with a thirteen-year-old cheerleader in an AOL chat room called “I Love Older Men.” It was all an elaborate fantasy—just for fun. When he arranged to meet the girl at a local mall in Maryland, FBI agents tracked him down and arrested him. His lawyer claimed that his client, a “socially awkward” and “sexually inexperienced” middle-aged man, had been a victim of the “thought police.”48

  • David Deyo, forty-three, was a Sunday School teacher and youth group leader in North Palm Beach, Florida. He was also a pedophile and child pornographer who had more than a hundred images stored on his computer and computer disks. According to the U.S. attorney who prosecuted his case, Deyo portrayed himself as a clown, a babysitter, “someone who could be trusted.”49

  • In February 2004, Kerry Dwayne Stevens, forty-eight, of Aberdeen, Mississippi, pleaded guilty to charges of child pornography. Stevens photographed his daughter and two of her friends’ genital areas while they slept, and uploaded the images to his computer for distribution. Prior to this incident, Stevens worked as a radio show producer for a children’s program on American Family Radio, a Christian radio station.50

  • Donald Edward Godman, a twenty-seven-year-old percussion instructor and band assistant at North Carroll High School in Halethorpe, Maryland, was charged with sending child pornography over the Internet to his teenage students and soliciting teenagers to pose naked for him. One of the teenage girls Godman had allegedly sent pornography to, a fifteen-year-old color guard member, said she considered Godman a “mentor.”51

  Few studies quantify how many people use child pornography, but all indications point to a growing prevalence of child pornography with the Internet’s expansion. In the United Kingdom, the Internet Watch Foundation found that between 3,000 and 3,500 child pornography sites are added to the World Wide Web each year. When British Telecom, an Internet service provider, introduced a filtering technology to prevent child pornography Web sites from being downloaded in 2004, more than 20,000 attempts were blocked every day. British Telecom, which serves 2.9 million customers, is only one of many ISPs in the United Kingdom.52

  Most men come across child pornography for the first time inadvertently. Among those interviewed for this book, three-fourths of pornography users said they had encountered child pornography while online, nearly always by
accident. Miles, a thirty-three-year-old military man from Indiana, saw child pornography back when he was a frequent pornography user (he has since stopped looking altogether). “The Yahoo! groups and chat rooms are renowned for people slipping child porn in, so you come across it whether you’re looking for it or not,” he explains. “Sometimes it would horrify me, but after a while, it would occasionally excite me.” A father of two, Miles says he “compartmentalized” his enjoyment. He would be online for a couple of hours, euphoric with the buzz of porn and masturbation, and find child pornography staring him in the face. At some point, he would tell himself, “I can’t look at that.” He would see his own children and think, “If something like that ever happened to them, I would be sick.” He would force himself to pull away from the computer. Forty-four-year-old Ray felt a similar push and pull. While online for pornography, he would inevitably come across child pornography. He looked at it a little bit, though it was never a major draw. “It was more curiosity,” he explains. “I just wanted to see what it was.” After a while, he would become “shocked and disgusted” by what he was getting into. Especially as a high school teacher. Especially as his own five children had reached the age at which kids are featured in pornographic Web sites. “The idea that my son could be dating a girl I think is really hot is kind of scary,” he says.

  Men who use adult pornography think of themselves as fundamentally different from the perverts and “sickos” they believe venture into child pornography. Yet the distinctions aren’t quite so clear, and for many men it’s a slippery slope. Randy Brown, a former basketball coach for the Iowa State Cyclones who was arrested in 2004 for child pornography use, slipped into child porn in the typical manner. After using adult Internet pornography for months on and off, he began veering younger. “In my mind I was envisioning the fifteen-year-old who looks twenty,” he said, emphasizing that he had never been interested in prepubescent children. “I know that sounds horrible. Let’s face it—the whole thing is awful. What was it about being on the computer that made it worth compromising everything in my life that I love?” Brown hated himself every night, but “it just seemed so harmless at the time. You engage yourself in fantasy, then it’s over and you’re out of there.” Child pornography wasn’t even a particular interest of Brown’s; when his computer was ultimately confiscated, only 26 of the 2,600 pornographic images on the computer were judged “problematic.” He was ultimately arrested for trying to pick up a fifteen-year-old girl—who was actually a grown man posing as a young girl for his own enjoyment in an online chat room. Alarmed by how far Brown took the fantasy (sending the supposed fifteen-year-old a series of photos of nude minors, asking her to meet him), the man/girl turned Brown in to the authorities.53

  But is it a surprise that men who never thought they would do so end up using child pornography? “Teen porn” Web sites, videos, and magazines abound, showcasing “barely legal” young women, fully shaved of pubic hair, cavorting in schoolgirl outfits and pigtails. Many of the sites and films are voyeuristic, featuring peepholes into girls’ locker rooms and showers, slumber parties and schoolhouse toilet stalls. In sex scenes, these “girls” are typically depicted having sex with much older men. And that’s assuming the “teens” are actually eighteen or nineteen years old. Though a woman must be eighteen years old before legally posing for pornography, underage women slip through, especially in the world of amateur porn and on the World Wide Web, where standards and laws in Southeast Asia and eastern Europe, for example, may differ from American practices. The supply exists to serve the demand. There’s an illicit, voyeuristic pleasure to the enterprise. There is also a tinge of revenge. Men in their teens, twenties, thirties, and even fifties regularly seek out the youngest women online or look for women who emulate their schoolboy crushes, bedecked in cheerleading costumes and Catholic school uniforms with their short skirts. Men feel an emotional tug toward these figures, hoping to “get” the girl who once rejected them and fulfill their long-delayed fantasies. The gazer longs for what he could not have long ago and what he certainly cannot have—at least, legally—today. These girls may not actually be underage, and therefore no “harm” was done to an actual child in creating the pornographic image. But the desire for a child and the desire for a childlike woman blur and overlap.

  The Effects of Porn on Kids

  Adults aren’t the only ones looking at child pornography. One teenage boy in Granville, Ohio, was said to be “mentally and emotionally troubled,” according to local press reports. “At the time I did it, I wasn’t me,” he told Judge Robert Hoover in the Licking County Juvenile Court. “I wasn’t in the right state of mind because I don’t remember doing it.” What he did was download more than one hundred child pornography images from a file-sharing service. When arrested in 2003, he denied having done so and initially cooperated with authorities, though he later tried to escape from the sheriff’s car and at one point threatened to infect the juvenile court system with a computer virus. A troubled child, the boy had been diagnosed as schizophrenic and depressed, put on medication, and sent to counseling. Sitting in court beside him, his mother cried periodically.54 Ultimately, her son was found delinquent on two counts of pandering sexually oriented matter involving a minor and eight counts of felony pandering. He faces three years in detention and will likely be required to register as a juvenile sex offender, a label liable to stick for the rest of his life.

  No matter what kind of pornography they look at, spending one’s prepubescence and puberty on porn can have lifelong implications. Masters and Johnson clinical director Mark Schwartz has seen fourteen-and fifteen-year-old boys who are addicted to pornography. “It’s awful to see the effect it has on them,” he says. “At such a young age, to have that kind of sexual problem.” Schwartz isn’t surprised about the growing number of young addicts in the Internet age. “Your brain is much more susceptible,” he explains. “Many of these boys are very smart and academically successful; a lot of computer geeks are the ones who get drawn in. It affects how they develop sexually. Think about a twelve-year-old boy looking at Playboy magazine. When you’re talking about Internet pornography, you can multiply that effect by the relative size of the Internet itself.”

  Research trickling in has begun to document the effects of pornography on kids, a difficult area to study given obvious ethical challenges. Certainly, no parent would consent to have their children view pornography in order to further research on the damage done nor would respectable institutions fund or support such experiments. Still, some evidence has been gathered. A recent study of 101 sexually abusive children in Australia documented increased aggressiveness in boys who use pornography. Almost all had Internet access and 90 percent admitted to seeing online porn. One-fourth said an older sibling or friend had shown them how to access pornography online, sometimes against their will; another fourth said that pornography was their primary reason for going online. When questioned separately, nearly all of their parents said they doubted their child would access any pornography via the Internet.55 In Ireland, scientists are reportedly developing a program, in conjunction with the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, designed specifically for teenagers who have become addicted to pornography.56

  Interestingly, when asked about the effect of pornography in the Pornified/Harris poll, young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four were often most likely to report negative consequences. Four in ten eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds believe pornography harms relationships between men and women, compared with only three in ten twenty-five- to forty-year-olds. The Internet generation is also more likely to believe that pornography changes men’s expectations of women’s looks and behavior.

  “I Spent a Lot of Time Lusting After My Niece”

  Scared by the force and frequency of his desires for the women and children around him, Charlie discovered a local 12-step program for sex addicts online. The program’s Web site included a questionnaire to ascertain whether a person
was sexually compulsive or not. Charlie answered all but two questions in the affirmative. Shaking, he e-mailed the group’s leader but was told he would have to go to a group in person. That ticked Charlie off, though his anger was mostly a cover for embarrassment. He was too nervous to go to a meeting, so several months went by before he contacted a different group, this time an hour away. By this point, his wife knew he had a problem and, though she resented that he needed to take even more time away from her and their family, she knew he needed help.

  Over the next few years, while his three kids were exiting childhood and entering preadolescence, Charlie attended regular meetings with his sex addiction group, though he suffered through several relapses. In addition to the 12-step program, he saw a traditional psychotherapist. He went on Prozac, then went off. Nothing seemed to help. He couldn’t stop thinking about pornography and slipping back into old habits. Charlie decided just to wallow in his own degradation and returned to pornography full force. Then, in the spring of 2003, during one of his relapses, Charlie’s therapist asked if it would be okay to give Charlie’s phone number to another patient who might need a 12-step group. Charlie agreed. The guy who called Charlie for help was being sent to jail for molesting his stepdaughter. He begged Charlie to start a new sexual addiction group with him. Charlie didn’t want to. What was the point?

  But the man seemed desperate, so Charlie agreed to meet him; soon the two men were meeting regularly. After a few weeks, his friend started talking to Charlie about religion. Why, if Charlie called himself a Christian, was he still suffering from so much denial? At the time, Charlie had stopped going to church altogether. “At the church I attended you couldn’t dare admit that you had a problem with sex,” Charlie says. What could such a church do for him if it wasn’t even willing to acknowledge his problems? But through his conversations with the child molester, Charlie began to question those assumptions. Over the course of several months, Charlie joined another congregation. “At my new church they have pamphlets for people overcoming all kinds of addictions and they included pornography,” Charlie explains. “I was shocked to know that they even used that word in their literature. It was comforting. I felt like they were much more accepting of me.” In the six months that followed, Charlie didn’t look at any pornography at all.