Crackdown on Child Pornography

Michael Seto, a Canadian researcher, said he thinks that an "invisible population of pedophiles" has lived in society all along but remained mostly hidden until the Internet offered relative anonymity and a community of like-minded people.

Whatever the role of the Internet, few dispute that it is the conduit for pornographic photos, films, videos and computer-generated images of children in lewd poses or involved in sexual conduct.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's CyberTipline received about 4,500 reports of children being victimized it its first year, 1998. This year the center, which works closely with law enforcement officials, has collected nearly 100,000 reports, more than 75 percent for online child pornography.

But an increase in federal cases -- a 28 percent spike in fiscal 2007 compared with the year before -- could partly be due to a rise in the number of agents attacking the problem. "Are there more offenses, or are we doing a better job? I think it's safe to say it's both," said Drew Oosterbaan, chief of the Justice Department's child exploitation and obscenity section.

The frequency at which people who view child pornography also molest children is a highly controversial issue and has been the subject of little research. The only federal agency that tries to track the correlation, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, says that about one-third of the 2,713 people it has arrested since 1997 on child exploitation charges, primarily for trafficking in child pornography, also committed "contact offenses" against children.

A recent study of 155 federal inmates in North Carolina convicted on child pornography charges suggests that the number is higher. It found that 85 percent admitted molesting children. The study's co-author, Andres Hernandez, told Congress last year that "these Internet child pornographers are far more dangerous to society than we previously thought."

But some people who treat sex offenders say the risk is often minimal. "There are a large group of individuals whose lives and families are absolutely being devastated because they looked at these images," said Fred Berlin, a psychiatrist who runs the National Institute for the Study, Prevention and Treatment of Sexual Trauma, affiliated with Johns Hopkins University. "They had absolutely no idea how severe the consequences would be and had no interest in doing anything other than viewing images."

Child pornography first became an issue in the United States when nude photographs of children and adults began entering the country after the Civil War. A postal inspector, Anthony Comstock, drafted the first federal obscenity law, passed by Congress in 1872.

For nearly a century, however, there were few prosecutions, because there was no specific child pornography law. People obtained photographs and magazines through the mail or by quietly trading them or buying them at adult bookstores, which often kept child pornography behind the counter.

The first federal crackdown began after Congress passed a 1978 law banning commercial distribution of child pornography, and the Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that child pornography amounted to abuse and had no free speech protections.

Although child pornography seemed to have almost vanished by the early 1990s, the Internet changed everything. "Previously, someone would have to put on a trench coat, drive to the seedy part of town and walk to the back room of the adult bookstore," said Chuck Rosenberg, the U.S. attorney in Alexandria. "Now it's just a few keystrokes away."

Federal and state task forces are multiplying, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement runs the Cyber Crimes Center in Fairfax County, which focuses on the international component.

Last year, the Justice Department unveiled Project Safe Childhood, which coordinates the fight against all child sexual exploitation but emphasizes child pornography. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey made it clear at a recent conference that the campaign against what he called "the sort of evil that is exchanged in dark corners of the Internet" will continue.

"Simply put, our children need our protection," he said.