Editor's note: This is the first in a two-part series; the second will appear tomorrow.
Americans heard for decades that if there were evidence pornography differentially injured women or children, it could be made contraband -- like any other toxic product.
With this assurance in mind we accepted the libertarian promises of a paradise on earth and jettisoned both our common sense and our historic common law in favor of wide-open sexual "expression."
In July 2000, the U.S. Department of Justice, National Incident-Based Reporting System, revealed that adults are not the primary victims of sexual assault. NIBRS confirmed what has been obvious to those dealing with the reality of children’s lives -- 67 percent of all reported sex abuse victims are children and 64 percent of forcible sodomy victims are boys under age 12!
NIBRS validated what some of us working in the child-protection field have observed for decades. The academic researchers for government oversight agencies -- the FBI, Health and Human Services, DOJ, Juvenile Justice -- have systematically ignored child sexual-abuse data. Without these disturbing data, people are lulled into a false sense of security regarding the harmlessness of our sex- and violence-drenched media, sexually explicit sex education in schools, presidential sex scandals and the like. The recent NIBRS report acknowledged a shocking decades-long "flaw" in national sexual-abuse data collections:
The only existing national data collection effort that explored the incidence of sexual assault ignored crimes against young victims.
The systematic "justice" undercounting of child sexual abuse began in 1958. An FBI consultant confirmed that year the FBI redefined "rape" to exclude incest, sodomized boys as well as all statutory rape (rape of girls under the age of consent).
Thereafter, although the public believed the FBI rape data reflected real rape rates, all data on children under age 12, the group known to be most susceptible to sexual and violent media, were purged by our most venerable justice agencies.
By ignoring crimes against children, on Oct. 15, 2000, the FBI Uniform Crime Report administrators alleged a nine-year decrease in violent crime. Now, joining the FBI, in January 2001, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, which is, after all, charged with preventing juvenile delinquency as well as harm to children, asserted that child sexual abuse declined 31 percent from 1992-1998.
After reading the small print however, we find it isn’t really child sex abuse that declined but the number of abuse charges confirmed by the hotly contested and often discredited, "Child Protection Services." Rather a different report indeed.
Nonetheless, today the FBI has announced that sexual charity holiday is over as all forms of violence are back on track -- heading upward. Any allusion to a safer society was always in sharp contrast with evidence of environmentally triggered, pandemic violence to and by children at school, home and in public spaces.
Those who object to pornography have pointed out the obvious. Some children exposed to pornographic images will be terrorized. Some will become coarsened and brutish. Even former ACLU executive Barry Lynn, admitted during a speech at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., that some people will commit copy-cat sex crimes based on a media experience. On the evidence, some adults and children will sexually experiment on younger siblings and other family as well as neighbor children and schoolmates.
The NIBRS admission that 67 percent of all sex assault victims were reported as children 0-17 years old and that 37 percent of these attacks were made on children under 12, largely excluded from FBI "forcible rape" data, undermines any claims of a safer society.
Girl delinquency increased 186 percent from 1987-1996; over 2.7 million children were reportedly criminally attacked in schools in 1997; we have roughly 1 million runaways (more than half enter prostitution) and 550,000 children in foster care, often battered and abused, and a helix of child victims of cyberporn since 1999.
These real world data are not reflected in the FBI numbers.