A Conscientious Objector in the War on Kiddie Porn

May 28, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Five years, mandatory minimum, even for a first conviction. The crime? Possession of kiddie porn. When we Americans don’t like something, we’re very good at enacting harsher and harsher penalties, often as part of a “war.”

As in the wars on drugs and crime, some federal judges, though, are now trying to skirt or challenge these war-on-kiddie-porn laws. A New York Times article last week focused on one federal judge, Jack Weinstein, who worries that the mandatory sentences “destroy the lives” of men who pose no real threat to society.

Today, the Times printed some reader responses.

Judge Weinstein. . . . does not believe that those who view images of child sexual abuse are a threat to children. But of course they are! If they did not provide a market for such images, then children would not be abused to produce them in the first place.
– Kathryn Conroy . . . clinical social worker and executive director of Hedge Funds Care, Preventing and Treating Child Abuse

Ms. Conroy is correct about one thing – if you can kill demand, supply will dry up. But do harsh sentences in fact have an effect on either the demand or the supply? Ms. Conroy merely assumes that they do and provides no evidence. According to the Times, in the last ten years, sentence severity for possession has quadrupled. Has anyone assessed the impact of these laws on the production, distribution, or possession of kiddie porn? Is there evidence that the laws have reduced demand?

A law professor, Audrey Rogers, in her letter, focuses on the issue of harm. And she has evidence

Studies by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children show that more than half of defendants charged with possession of child pornography molested or attempted to molest children.

If you look at the actual study, you see that Rogers is playing fast and loose with the data. This was a study of people arrested for possession. About half of these cases were discovered through investigation of other crimes, usually molestation or attempted molestation. So what Rogers should say is not that those charged with possession are also molesters but that molesters are also charged with possession. Is it really surprising that child molesters also own kiddie porn?

But what about the men whose arrests began as possession cases? Here’s what the report says: “84% of cases involved CP possession but investigators did not detect concurrent child sexual victimization or attempts at child victimization.” The authors of the report see 16% as “a high rate.” But it’s not “more than half.”

Rogers continues,

This correlation belies Judge Jack B. Weinstein’s opinion that those who view child pornography present no threat to children.

The key word here is correlation. Correlation is not causation. Any freshman who has taken a basic sociology or social science course knows that. Did the porn make them more likely to commit actual molestation? And would making kiddie porn inaccessible reduce their crimes?
That was the assumption of the anti-porn slogan from the 1980s, “Pornography is the theory; rape is the practice.” It’s a fairly simple hypothesis: more porn, more rape. Or in the case of children, more kiddie porn, more child sexual abuse.

Again, I don’t know the evidence, but my impression is that technology – first VCRs, then the Internet – has greatly expanded access to porn both adult and child.* Victimization statistics on rape, where most victims are adults, show a more or less steady decrease since the late 1970s, though the UCR (“crimes known to the police”) shows a slight increase to about 1990. Since the early 1990s, while the Internet burgeoned, both victimization and police reports show a sharp decrease.

I don’t know if we have any good data on rates of child molestation, and I can think of many reasons why good data would be hard to get. But my impression is that there has not been a burgeoning of these crimes that parallels the expanded availability of child pornography.

But the results aren’t really so important, are they? Once we have identified an evil and launched a war against it, what seems to matter to the warriors is keeping up the good fight. The actual outcome seems to be a secondary consideration. After all, you can’t give up a war against evil, at least not until you have identified some other evil to occupy your attention.


* The stats for this Socioblog still show the occasional visitor who got here by Googling “naughty pictures of 15 year olds,” though apparently Google’s algorithm has a date variable that now puts us far down on the list.

No Blame in My Game

May 23, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Texas school board approved those guidelines. They rehabilitated Thomas Jefferson – apparently he did well at the re-education center – but I fear that sociology did not fare so well. According to an earlier report,

In the field of sociology, another conservative member, Barbara Cargill, won passage of an amendment requiring the teaching of “the importance of personal responsibility for life choices” in a section on teenage suicide, dating violence, sexuality, drug use and eating disorders.
“The topic of sociology tends to blame society for everything,” Ms. Cargill said.

It’s not just Texas. Ms. Cargill’s comment took me back to a brief encounter during my first tour on jury duty in New York – nearly two weeks of boredom and frustration. I was eager and curious to serve on a jury, but I could never make it past voir dire. The prosecutors rejected me every time. (In principle, you are not told which side rejected you, but it was not hard for me to guess.)

One afternoon when I came back from lunch, I went to the men’s room, and there at the sink was the district attorney who had kept me off a jury that morning. “Why did you toss me off your case?” I asked trying to sound innocent. “Are you kidding?” he said. “A sociologist? You people don't think anyone’s responsible for what they do.”

At the time, I didn't know what to say, and the conversation ended there. But what I should have said is this: You are confusing two separate questions. It's one thing to understand the social forces that may have made a person more likely to commit a crime. It is quite another matter to absolve that person of legal blame for the crime. For a lawyer or a juror (even a juror who is also a sociologist), the question of guilt is paramount. But for the sociologist who is thinking about crime as a social problem, the issue of individual guilt or innocence is much less important.

I might have even offered this analogy from the tort side: if there’s a traffic accident, and one driver is suing another, we have to figure out who was to blame. But if we notice that several accidents have occurred at this same location, we also talk about “a dangerous intersection.” We’re not “blaming” the intersection. We are just saying that if you want to reduce the number of accidents, you can exhort drivers to be more careful, and you can punish those who smash into other cars. But you’ll have more success if you put in a stoplight.

Call It Please "Research"

May 21, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Internet seems to be a mostly copyright-free zone. Norms about using other people’s material are still evolving, and even when there’s consensus about the norms, who can enforce them?

Two weeks ago, in a post about political rumors, I took some information put together by another blogger, J.L. Bell, who had gotten it from Snopes. I turned Bell’s numbers into a simple bar graph, checked Snopes myself, and added a few comments. I linked to Bell’s blog. (I figured everyone knows Snopes, so I didn’t bother with a link.)

About ten days later, Lisa at Sociological Images, posted my graph along with a few sentences of mine and a few of Bell’s. along with a few brief comments of her own. She gave credit where due and provided the links.

Now a political blogger, Digby has pretty much copied Lisa’s post wholesale (including the links to me and Bell).

He
She has deleted one or two brief sentences and added one of

his
her own. Other than that, it’s Lisa’s post. No link to Sociological Images, no hat tip, nothing.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

See for yourself. Lisa’s post is here ; Digby’s is here.

Digby is usually more careful. His Her posts often consist mostly of quotes from other sources with his her own brief comments interposed and links to the original sources. It’s the kind of borrowing and linking that many bloggers do. Bell borrowed from Snopes, I borrowed from Bell, Lisa borrowed from me.

But what Digby did with Lisa’s post goes beyond borrowing.

It Could Happen To You

May 20, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Conservatives discount or ignore the importance of social forces. Even those observers who like to think of themselves as closer to the center, like David Brooks, emphasize “character.” As you turn the dial further to the right, you hear more and more about “individual responsibility.”

Parents need to communicate basic principles about character development, honor and individual responsibility. Young people need to know that they are not victims of their hormones . . . .

That’s from the Website of Concerned Women for America, a right-wing Christian group. (If you can’t guess their agenda, see their core issues here .)

One of their allies in congress is Mark Souder, a Republican from Indiana and a strong family-values guy. But now he’s resigning after news leaked out that he’d been having an affair with a woman on his staff. (A video of her interviewing him about his pro-abstinence views has the Internet ironists LOL in Schadenfreude.)

For conservatives, when a friend like Souder goes astray, the old responsibility rap sounds discordant, and they have to change the playlist. Penny Spence is the head of CWFA, and here’s her take on the Souder affair:

I am deeply saddened by the news of Congressman Mark Souder’s fall into the temptation of an affair. . . . If Mark Souder is capable of sexual misconduct, it could happen to anyone.

Right. The affair was not something Souder did. It “happened to” him. That seems a bit passive even by my standards. But then Spence gets downright sociological.

The frat house environment on Capitol Hill does nothing to encourage accountability. Most Members do not live with their families while they are working in D.C. during the week and have even ditched common rules of etiquette that even major corporations follow such as office doors with windows or careful examination of employee/boss interaction.

Her keen attention to situational forces does not extend to suggestions for structural changes that might discourage adultery. Instead, she merely encourages lawmakers in DC “to guard their hearts and reputations and to live by higher standards.”

To me, the interesting question is not how a solid, family-values Christian could fall into temptation. As Spence says, anyone can slip and fall.* But apparently this affair had been going on for years. How did Souder manage it? Did he change is ideas to accommodate his behavior – ideas not just about adultery but about himself – and what was that process like? What is the “moral career” of the adulterer?

*The subject line of this post is a reference to the great Burke-VanHeusen standard. If you are among the few who saw Woody Allen’s “Anything Else,” you heard this brief version by Diana Krall. Listen to the lyrics, for they reflect what Spence probably has in mind. “Hide your heart from sight; lock your dreams at night; it could happen to you.” Miles recorded it with his 1956 quintet. My favorite version is by Keith Jarrett in the 1996 Tokyo concert.)