Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography Online [Hardcover]

Philip Jenkins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2001

Perhaps nothing evokes more universal disgust as child pornography. The world of its makers and users is so abhorrent that it is rarely discussed much less studied. Child pornographers have taken advantage of this and are successfully using the new electronic media to exchange their wares without detection or significant sanction. What are the implications of this threat for free speech and a free exchange of ideas on the internet? And how can we stop this illegal activity, which is so repugnant that even the most laissez-faire cyberlibertarians want it stamped out, if we know nothing about it?

Philip Jenkins takes a leap onto the lower tiers of electronic media in this first book on the business of child pornography online. He tells the story of how the advent of the internet caused this deviant subculture to become highly organized and go global. We learn how the trade which operates on clandestine websites from Budapest or Singapore to the U.S. is easy to glimpse yet difficult to eradicate. Jenkins details how the most sophisticated transactions are done through a proxy, a “false flag” address, rendering the host computer, and participants, virtually unidentifiable. And these sites exist for only a few minutes or hours allowing on-line child pornographers to stay one step ahead of the law. This is truly a globalized criminal network which knows no names or boundaries, and thus challenges both international and U.S. law.

Beyond Tolerance delves into the myths and realities of child pornography and the complex process to stamp out criminal activity over the web, including the timely debates over trade regulation, users' privacy, and individual rights. This sobering look and a criminal community contains lessons about human behavior and the law that none interested in media and the new technology can afford to ignore.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

oliticians, media and law enforcement have "massively over-responded" to "quite innocuous" adult sexual material on the Internet, argues historian Jenkins, while doing far too little to stamp out pernicious and prevalent child porn, such as pictures of four- and five-year-old girls sexually servicing men. Even anti-porn activists who target specific pedophilic Web sites are wrongheaded; the problem is international, Jenkins charges in this important wake-up call, with pictures posted on short-lived sites known only to a computer-savvy subculture that sidesteps the strictures of countries that condemn the material. Thus, while Jenkins (Synthetic Panics) has spent his career arguing that social menaces (e.g., serial killers) are overblown, here he aims to increase public concern. Given that simply looking at child pornography is illegal, Jenkins was constrained in his research. His ingenious solution was to access the news groups and "pedo boards" where regular users communicated, drawing on their descriptions of the material they consumed, and using a feature on his computer that prevented images from downloading. His reading of the various online discourses suggests that child porn users like some other deviant subgroups share a conventional morality, which suggests that many might be deterred by more effective law enforcement. Currently, policing focuses on child porn users, whom Jenkins likens to drug addicts, without striking against the suppliers at the core of the subculture. Thus, he calls not for increased punishment for users but for a prohibition of newsgroups and bulletin boards. And to increase awareness of the issue, he suggests a journalistic exemption to child porn laws.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Jenkins (history and religious studies, Pennsylvania State Univ.) offers a well-documented follow-up to Moral Panic (LJ 9/01/98), his history of child abuse and molestation over the past century. This new volume is a disturbing, thought-provoking study of the extent to which the distribution of hardcore child pornography "obscene or indecent images of underaged subjects" is available for illegal viewing and downloading from web-based bulletin boards, chat rooms, and newsgroups. Jenkins, who for research purposes limited his access to verbal and textual content, discusses attempts to regulate postings on the Internet, privacy and censorship issues, the trouble with identifying core content perpetrators, the inadequacies of traditional law enforcement techniques to control the international scope and sophistication of the web and its users, recent independent "vigilante" approaches by private anti-pedophile groups, and hackers who bypass legal and official strictures. This penetrating work is highly recommended for all concerned with this high-tech trafficking in the exploitation of children. Suzanne W. Wood, SUNY Coll. of Technology at Alfred
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: NYU Press (August 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814742629
• ISBN-13: 978-0814742624
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,308,239 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Philip Jenkins is the author of The Lost History of Christianity and has a joint appointment as the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of the Humanities in history and religious studies at Penn State University and as Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. He has published articles and op-ed pieces in The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe and has been a guest on top national radio shows across the country.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Its culture, extent, and what can be done, June 23, 2002

By 

Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography Online (Hardcover)

Philip Jenkins, Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State, is neither an anti-porn zealot nor an "anything goes" libertarian. He finds adult pornography tolerable, even believing that "The positive aspects of...legal adult material should be stressed." (p. 222). But he is clearly opposed to child pornography, believing that it should remain illegal and that we should take measures to reduce its existence to a tolerable level.

I was reminded of the war against agricultural pests because what Professor Jenkins stresses is that it is impossible to get rid of child porn on the Net completely without destroying much of what is good about the Net. In trying to completely kill all the pests, we may inadvertently kill all the beneficial insects as well.

This book is ostensibly about the "kiddie porn" culture on the Web, its extent and what can be done about it. Jenkins uses quotes from child porn Bulletin Boards to demonstrate the mind set of the traffickers. He describes a war between citizen vigilante groups and the child pornographers, each employing their hacker expertise in trying to shut down the Web sites and expose the identities of their adversaries. Jenkins does not describe child pornography other than in the most general terms. He claims not to have actually seen any child pornography himself, noting that it is illegal to view such material even for research purposes, and indeed intimates that had he seen such material he would deny having seen it.

The picture that emerges is of a deviant, global community populated by persons hiding behind nicknames and proxies who view and exchange pictures of children through sites and servers from many different places in the world. Jenkins believes that because of the differing laws in the various countries, child pornography cannot be completely eliminated, that it can only be controlled. He depicts the regular deviants themselves as savvy, elusive individuals who change identities and addresses as they stay one step ahead of the law. Only the amateurs get caught.

But there is a bigger issue here emerging out of the struggle between law enforcement and the deviants, and that is the issue of privacy. How can we simultaneously monitor the Web sufficiently to trap, expose and prosecute child pornographers while at the same time protecting ourselves from Big Brother?

Jenkins begins Chapter Six, "Policing the Net," with a revealing quote from Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, a man who ought to know what he is talking about: "You already have zero privacy--get over it." My feeling is that our government and the large corporations already have enough information about us to serve a totalitarian regime (should one ever emerge). Every key stroke on Web can be monitored, recorded and stored. Right now this information is being used mostly for commercial purposes, but we can see how such information could be used to influence, intimidate and control individuals for political purposes. Consequently what this book is really about is the war between the interests of society and those of the individual, the social good verses private interest.

This war is of course as old as humanity, going back even into the tribal culture. But never before has there been such power to coerce and persuade. The tribal leader may have been all powerful within his tribe, so that if you went against him, you would meet with defeat. But you could run away to another place in the world, as humans have always done. Today, and increasingly tomorrow, there is and will be no place to run to.

One of the fears we have of one-world government, now enormously augmented with electronic and computer technology, as Jenkins notes, is that of a totalitarian state from which there is no escape. Our fear is that we will conform to the dictates of that state or we will be punished and "retrained." The Orwellian nightmare in comparison seems limited and amateurish.

So the struggle against the very real and intolerable evil of child pornography becomes in this book a precursor scenario of the struggle of the state against the individual. What Jenkins wants to see happen is some kind of control placed on the invasive nature of the state while somehow maintaining the ability to go after anti-social deviants like the child pornographers. Somehow the state must be restrained but the bad guys controlled.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The real obscenity..., November 23, 2004

By 

Steven Cain (Temporal Quantum Pocket) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography Online (Hardcover)

Jenkins tackles a very difficult subject in a very professional manner. As Dennis Littrell suggested, Jenkins realizes that the 'trap the end user' approach will never even slow down the growth of this disturbing industry, and some of the more Draconian measures being suggested in some circles would only damage the freedom to surf of normal everyday users.

One point that many people might be unaware of is the fact that child pornography often involves children under five, as Jenkins suggests. Clearly this flies in the face of 'normal' sexual and reproductive urges, whereby males are only supposed to respond to females who are in the throes of puberty and beyond.

While it is certainly true to say that mere child nudity does not equate to child pornography, a common tactic of borderline sites is to place 'trigger' pictures in with legitimate 'lolita-esque' nude photos, which then lead to screens or sites that appear to offer a portal to an actual child pornography site, rather than plunging people straight into one.

The problem with writing books of this nature is that the Law is often in a state of flux. One of biggest 'gray' areas in terms of legality is the use of artificially generated/cgi child pornography. The 'pro' arguments suggest that as no children are being harmed or exploited, it doesn't qualify as child pornography. The 'contra' arguments suggest that it still involves images of adults having sex with children. At the time of writing this review, I believe it is still techincally legal.

Some years ago, a man was arrested for some sketches he made of naked adults and children embracing, without any specific suggestion of sexual contact. The counter argument to the prosecution stance made the point that drawing a sexual fantasy (or now, creating it with a computer graphics package) rather than merely thinking the same thoughts, should not be illegal, unless any attempt was being made to circulate it/them. The point being that this transition from a thought image to a cgi image, borders on the question of the Thought Crime of George Orwell's 1984, and the Inquisition logic of 'If she floats she's a witch and if she drowns, she's innocent'.

Jenkins has some solid ideas, such as monitoring message boards and the infrastructure by which the sub-net is able to operate, rather than setting up fake sites to lure in Joe Idiot who's just had a few beers, and thinking that such actions will ever impact the industry.

One of the biggest factors in the quantum growth of the 'CP' industry is the availability of white, Eastern European child victims. Previously, white children were never available in such numbers, which seems to have been a natural limiter on certain areas of this darkest of growth industries.

Sadly, where ever there is poverty, there will always be exploitation, and the online CP industry is just one part of a bigger picture - of a World and a people gone wrong, and the failure of the human race to love each other in the face of all our differences.

Yes, read this and be concerned about the sexual exploitation of children, but never forget that the greater obscenity is that 34,000 children DIE every day throughout the same world in which some rich people have gold-plated bath taps.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book got me through my dissertation!!, November 9, 2004

By 

Carol "Carol" (New Zealand) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography Online (Hardcover)

This is an excellent book. Jenkins provides you with a wealth of information. By conducting his own original research into the newsgroups he gains a first-hand insight into the thoughts and involvments of these individuals, something quite unique!