An Interview with Dr. Sharon W. Cooper, pediatrician, CEO Developmental and Forensic Pediatrics, adjunct professor University of North Carolina (Chapel Hills) Medical School
Citizen magazine conducted this interview in March 2008.
Citizen: Do you see a big increase in virtual or pseudo child porn since the porn industry managed to get the virtual child porn act (Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition) overturned?
Cooper: Correct. But then, remember the PROTECT Act, which went into effect in 2003, was the remedy for the Ashcroft versus Free Speech ruling that said if the image appeared to be consistent with a child, then it was for all practical purposes, as far as the justice system was concerned, it was a child, and they didn’t anymore have to prove the actual identity of a specific child in a person’s collection of child pornography. That was the PROTECT Act in 2003.
It really has been the primary remedy to what caused for practical purposes a cessation of prosecution of child pornography cases over the two years that the Ashcroft versus Free Speech ruling by the 9th Circuit took place. And when the PROTECT Act went into effect, that was very helpful because time after that original ruling the only way an individual could successfully prosecute a case would be to locate an investigator who knew at least one of the victims in a person’s collection. And that investigator would have to come to the United States and testify that, in fact, ‘Yes, I did know this little girl. She lives in Paraguay. She was 8 years old. She was being prostituted on the street, and we rescued her and these are her images.’
The cost was very prohibitive, and after a while people just stopped trying, really, to prosecute these kinds of cases until the passing of the PROTECT Act, which really helped a whole lot. But the whole issue of age verification is another whole issue.
Citizen: How extensive a problem is the use of fake IDs?
Cooper: We wrote a textbook called The Medical, Legal and Social Science Aspects of Child Sexual Exploitation in 2005. One of the authors, Victor Veith, wrote a chapter called “Shadow Children” about child sexual exploitation in rural communities. He talked about how hard it is for girls, particularly in rural communities, where the only place they can get a job is the local bar and how they allow these girls to start working first as waitresses and then recruit them eventually to be dancers and then be prostituted from the bars.
Veith is president of the Prosecution of Child Abuse Cases of the National District Attorneys Association. Victor based this chapter on some of the work of Dr. Richard Estes from the University of Pennsylvania, who did without a doubt the largest study on the demographics and vectors of prostitution of children and youth in the United States in 2001. He felt that the best thing that all townships, counties and cities could have were ordinances that require proof of age by birth certificate, not by ID.
IDs are too easily falsified. Birth certificates are a more standard proof. You have to have a birth certificate to get a passport, for example. There are certain levels of veracity that are communicated by certain documents, and birth certificates are thought to be more reliable in that sense.
One of the common things that happens in the exploitation of minors is that individual traffickers–or ‘pimps’–provide the false IDs as well as false names and sometimes even false Social Security numbers. By doing that, they make it much more difficult to track who that child really is. She’ll be arrested as an adult who is practicing prostitution, and when she gets fingerprinted, her fingerprint then gets matched to a different person’s name with a different date of birth, and that date of birth will be of an adult, not of an under-age minor.
Citizen: So, is the legal system inadvertently providing cover by creating an adult record?
Cooper: That’s correct. And it’s really not so much an error on the part of the legal system; it is craftiness on the part of offenders by providing passive assistance.
Also, studies show [NHANES III] most girls in the United States are completely sexually mature–therefore, not discernible from an adult–by the time they’re 14 or 15. So, when you recognize then that looking at a person is not going to tell you that they are an under-age minor–even if they’re stripping–their body is going to look completely sexually mature by the time they’re 14 to 15 years of age–then you do need to have something more reliable to prove how old they are.
Citizen: Your thoughts on Gail Dines’ assertions that this proliferation of ‘pseudo child’ and ‘barely legal’ pornography is conditioning an entire generation to be sexualized toward children?
Cooper: She’s quite correct. I agree. The American Psychological Association’s recent task force report entitled “Sexualization of Girls” came out in February of last year, and it is a review of more than 300 studies in our country, asking the question, ‘Are we sexualizing girls?’ with the answer being ‘yes, we are.’
Sexualization means teaching a girl that her only value is in her sexuality, not in her academic skills, not in her athletic abilities or her talent, but only her sexuality. It’s teaching children that they are in fact sexual objects. This child cannot see herself as attractive or ‘petite’ or any of the other terms that we like to use when we’re talking about children or girls. They can only see themselves as acceptable if they are sexy.
The key thing––we’re talking 7- to 11-year-old girls–is the marketing in our society of sexuality to children to see themselves in this manner. And that’s why you find so many articles of clothing on the market for children that are very sexualized. There’s Abercrombie & Fitch that puts out [such things] for very young children. National Public Radio had a special on ‘Pimpsant-wear’–how this is being marketed even for babies. There are Web sites that have had Halloween costumes that are prostitution outfits for girls and pimp outfits for boys. And they are almost always sold out every Halloween.
Gail is quite correct that this is really a challenge, very much a challenge, to bring childhood back to children.
Citizen: Do you buy the idea the industry is selling, to differentiate child porn from the purportedly safe and legal ‘adult’ brand? Is that any kind of valid distinction?
Cooper: If you think you can separate children from adults, then you’re leaving out the whole time of childhood that’s adolescence, because adolescents begin to look like adults, as far as their physical changes are concerned. But they aren’t adults. That’s why we have proof of age. That’s why you have clubs that look at a 16-year-old and say, ‘You’ve got to show me a card to show me that you’re really old enough.’
Unfortunately, we know that you can have very definitely significantly under-age minors–we’re talking 13–who clearly will have the body of an adult woman, and therefore you really cannot visually separate children from adults unless the children are pre-pubescent or just barely pubescent.
Citizen: Do you see kids acting out sexually as a kind of game?
Cooper: Yes. It’s sobering for me as a forensic pediatrician and a developmental pediatrician to see the role-playing that our youngsters participate in now. Role playing began in our society with video games, where you take on the role of one player. You might be a car in a chase, or you might be a Ninja figure, but you have an identity, and you’re playing against the other image that’s in the video game, right? Video games teach you that winning doesn’t occur because you are right, but because you have the power.
And when you recognize that 6-year-olds and 7-year-olds and 8-year-olds are constantly exposed to this particular premise—which is really acted out by role-playing—it’s really easy to see why we have such problems with bullying that we didn’t have on our playgrounds before. But we have immense problems now because our kids are growing up believing it really isn’t about right or wrong–it’s really about who has the power.
Citizen: And what effect is adult pornography, especially on the Internet, having on our kids?
Cooper: As a forensic pediatrician, I deal fairly often with young boys who are becoming ‘opportunistic sex offenders’ with younger children after having watched adult pornography for a while. When pornography was mostly in magazine form and not so readily available, we didn’t see as many children sexually acting out what they were seeing. There is a difference between watching something moving on a screen with sound, as you have on the Internet, and turning the pages in a magazine. Studies have shown that your brain responds in a different way to what you see on the Internet in that manner.
Citizen: You’re actually seeing some of these kids in your practice who are becoming ‘opportunistic sex offenders’?
Cooper: Absolutely. I work in a regional child sexual abuse clinic, and I see patients every week in that clinic. And we see children who have been victims of youth offenders who tell us, ‘He was looking at the computer at those nasty pictures just before he told me I had to take my clothes off.’ We definitely hear that.
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