Advocates Seek Better Obscenity Law Enforcement
Anti-porn advocates urged more vigorous enforcement of federal obscenity laws, saying Congress and the Department of Justice should ensure that aggressive prosecution of laws already on the books is a priority, they said at a briefing hosted by the Coalition for the War Against Illegal Pornography on the Hill Tuesday.
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Because obscenity laws haven’t been enforced, illegal adult pornography has flooded and polluted the Internet, said Donna Hughes, president of Enough is Enough. “Portable porn” via PDAs, mobile phones, gaming devices and laptops now offer kids, as well as adults, “anywhere access” to “this drug of the new millennium,” she said. CTIA and wireless carriers have long maintained there are plenty of parental control tools on the market. Meanwhile, the most porn sites have free teaser images and videos on their home pages and don’t require any age verification, Hughes said. Research reports have said some 12 percent of kids accidently access pornography through innocent word searches online, she said. Also, some 12 percent of kids accidently see pornography through misspelling a word, she said. Pornographers also misuse popular cartoons: Children can easily stumble upon “DisneyPornland” where they can see Disney characters engaging in graphic sex acts, she said.
This isn’t a partisan issue, said Patrick Trueman, former chief of the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division. Letters from advocacy groups addressing the harms of pornography are circulating in the House and Senate, urging high priority for prosecution of obscenity laws, said Trueman, a legal consultant for several non-profit groups on child sexual exploitation and related matters. The groups will be asking for hearings in judiciary committees of both the House and Senate to stress the necessity of law enforcement, he said.
Federal obscenity laws, which aren’t being enforced, prohibit distribution of hardcore, pornography on the Internet, on cable/satellite or hotel TV and in sexually oriented businesses and other retail shops, said Trueman. The role of the federal government should be to prosecute the major producers and distributors of pornography, he said. However, rather than aggressively enforcing federal obscenity laws against large-scale distributors, for several years DOJ has targeted primarily small operations that trafficked in the most extreme hardcore pornography and prosecuted very few of them, he said.
Obscenity isn’t protected by the First Amendment, meaning enforcement of obscenity laws doesn’t raise any constitutional problem, Trueman said. “We are not asking them to change the law. … We are asking better enforcement,” he said. Legislation approved by Congress two years ago has given law enforcement better tools for identifying child pornography and prosecuting those who use the Internet to distribute images of child porn, law enforcement officials had said earlier this year (CD Feb 5 p2). But they also acknowledged the law still has gaps, especially that it doesn’t apply to smaller electronic service providers. Today’s child pornography isn’t under control, Trueman said.
Internet pornography can harm people not immediately connected to consumers of pornography, said Mary Layden, director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Consumption of Internet pornography can harm women and children in particular, she said.