Lollitots magazine is one of the milder examples. It features preteen girls showing off their genitals in the gynecological style popularized by Penthouse and Playboy. Other periodicals, with names such as Naughty Horny Imps, Children-Love and Child Discipline, portray moppets in sex acts with adults or other kids. The films are even raunchier. An 8-mm. movie shows a ten-year-old girl and her eight-year-old brother in fellatio and intercourse. In another film, members of a bike gang break into a church during a First Communion service and rape six little girls.
These and a host of other equally shocking products are becoming increasingly common fare at porn shops and sex-oriented mail-order houses across the nation. They are part of the newest growth area pushed by the booming, billion-dollar pornography industry: child porn.
"I just found out about these magazines and films this summer, and I've become a raving banshee over it," says Dr. Judianne Densen-Gerber, a Manhattan psychiatrist who has been barnstorming around the country in a crusade against this abuse of minors. Her effort is only one part of a new campaign against child porn. New York City has cracked down, and police have at least temporarily forced kiddy-sex periodicals and films out of the tawdry Times Square area. Some twenty states are considering child-porn laws. Last week the Illinois house of representatives approved a bill setting stiff penalties for producing and selling child porn. The bill is expected to pass the senate and become state law.
Child porn is hardly new, but according to police in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, sales began to surge a year or two ago and are still climbing. Years ago much child pornography was fake—young-looking women dressed as Lolitas. Now the use of real children is startlingly common. Cook County State's Attorney Bernard Carey says porno pictures of children as young as five and six are now generally available throughout Chicago. Adds Richard Kopeikin, a state's attorney investigator: "They are even spreading to the suburbs, where they are now considered rare items, delicacies."
Among recent developments:
> Underground sex magazines are heavily stressing incest and pedophilia. One current West Coast periodical ran ten pages of photos, cartoons and articles on sex with children.
> In San Francisco hard-core child-porn films were shown in a moviehouse for five weeks before police seized the films last February. Even San Francisco's Mitchell brothers, the national porn-film kings, were outraged. Says Brother Jimmy: "We think obscenity laws should start with child porn."
> An Episcopal priest, the Rev. Claudius I. Vermilye Jr., who ran a farm for wayward teens in Winchester, Tenn., is awaiting trial on charges that he staged homosexual orgies with boys on the farm and mailed pictures of activities to donors around the country.