As it did to so much else in society, the Internet has changed how child pornography is distributed.
Not so long ago, pornographers primarily shared child porn images by downloading them onto hard drives and printing them out. That made perpetrators — and evidence — relatively easy for police and prosecutors to track down.
Nowadays, it’s easy for porn merchants to avoid criminal liability for possession of child porn by sharing access to images on remote computers accessible through the Internet.
“They can look at images on a news group without leaving any evidence that they have done that,” said Dan Sytman, a spokesman for Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna.
But criminal law in many states has not caught up with the technology. Existing Washington law limits a prosecutor’s ability to charge multiple counts of possession of child pornography when the defendant has intentionally viewed multiple images of children engaged in sexually explicit activities.
“The existing law assumes an image will be downloaded and printed,” McKenna said. In April, the Washington Supreme Court issued the latest in a series of opinions narrowly interpreting the law.
McKenna wants to change that law. He has drafted legislation for the 2010 Legislature that would allow prosecutors to charge multiple counts of possession of child porn if they can prove a defendant had a pattern of intentionally viewing multiple images of children engaged in sexually explicit conduct over the Internet.
The argument for the law is simple: Child pornography is a permanent record of the sexual abuse of a child, and each time an image of that abuse is viewed, the victim of that abuse is victimized again.
In fact, there is a growing movement to substitute the term “child abuse images” for “child pornography,” because the term “pornography” could imply consent by the victim.
McKenna’s legislation flowed from the work of a Youth Internet Safety Task Force he convened in 2007 to identify strategies for making the Internet safer for Washington families.
It’s a daunting challenge in the rapidly transforming world of cyberspace, McKenna said.
“There has been a huge increase in circulation of images of children being raped,” due to the proliferation of digital cameras and the use of the Internet, he said. “We think every time an image is viewed, a child is being traumatized.”
Those images also help to create a larger market for child porn, he said. Child pornography is estimated to be a multi-billion-dollar industry of global proportions, fed by the growth of the Internet.
And many consumers of child porn are not merely passive viewers. A 2000 study by the Federal Bureau of Prisons found that 76 percent of offenders convicted of Internet-related crimes against children admitted to previously undetected sex crimes involving children.
Another study found that 83 percent of possessors of child porn had images of children younger than 12 years old, 39 percent had images of children younger than 6, and 19 percent had images of children younger than 3.
McKenna’s legislation, introduced as House Bill 2424 and Senate Bill 6201, would redefine the felony crime of possession of depictions of child pornography to include deliberately viewing those images over the Internet. Similar legislation introduced in the 2009 session died on the Senate floor. But the latest bills have drawn sponsors from both parties.
Under the proposed legislation, in order to prove the crime of possession of child pornography, a prosecutor would have to show a pattern of viewing. That would involve using computer forensic experts to document the use of search terms and thumbnail images and downloading activity.
The law would protect people who inadvertently stumble on child porn sites, or who buy used computers with pornographic images on their hard disks, Sytman said.
“Prosecutors would have to be able to show that the defendant has intentionally gone looking for these images.”
Kathie Durbin: 360-735-4523 or kathie.durbin@columbian.com.
