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Until recently, much child porn sold in America was smuggled in from abroad. Now most of it appears to be home grown, with the steady stream of bewildered, broke runaways serving as a ready pool of "acting talent" for photographers. Pornographers who stalk children at big-city bus stations find many victims eager to pose for $5 or $10—or simply for a meal and a friendly word. Says Lloyd Martin, head of the Los Angeles police department's sexually abused child unit: "Sometimes for the price of an ice-cream cone a kid of eight will pose for a producer. He usually trusts the guy because he's getting from him what he can't get from his parents—love." In many cases, the porn is a byproduct of child prostitution. Pimps invite children to parties, photograph them in sex acts, and circulate the pictures as advertisements to men seeking young sex partners. Frequently, the pictures are then sold to porn magazines.
Even worse, some parents are volunteering their own children to pornographers, or producing the sex pictures themselves. Last year a Rockford, Ill., social worker was sent to jail for allowing his three foster sons to perform sex acts before a camera for $150 each. In January, a couple in Security, Colo., was charged with selling their twelve-year-old son for sexual purposes to a Texas man for $3,000.
Some children in porn photos are victims of incest. Parents will have intercourse with a son or daughter, then swap pictures with other incestuous parents, or send the photos to a sex publisher. Sex periodicals, particularly on the West Coast, publish graphic letters on parents' sexual exploits with their own children. Says Los Angeles' Martin: "We had one kid in here the other day who is eleven years old. His father started on him when he was six, then sold him twice as a sex slave. The kid had been in movies, pictures, magazines and swap clubs. After a while, he broke down and cried and said how grateful he was to have been pulled out of it."
Such experiences can of course scar a child for life. Warns New York Psychoanalyst Herbert Freudenberger: "Children who pose for pictures begin to see themselves as objects to be sold. They cut off their feelings of affection, finally responding like objects rather than people." Some psychiatrists believe that children who pose in porn pictures are often unable to find sexual fulfillment as adults. Another danger, says Los Angeles Psychiatrist Roland Summit, "is that sexually abused children may become sexually abusing adults."
Child porn poses fewer hazards for the pornographers. Producers of child porn can be prosecuted for sexual abuse of children, but the children are hard to identify and locate. So are the producers, who often hide behind a welter of dummy corporations. Thus most prosecutions are under the obscenity laws, which generally make no distinction between children and adults as porn models. One result: many lawyers believe that the genital pictures in Lollitots, however offensive, might be judged no more obscene under the law than similar photos of adult women routinely published in most men's magazines.