Recently in Child Pornography Category

Minnesota Public Radio reporter Madeleine Baran released this story today on whether private boarding school Shattuck-St. Mary's should have told police about an accused teacher's child pornography in 2003.

Child pornography is increasingly being produced in schools with the resulting child pornography collection being stored on school-owned computers and servers. Teachers, administrators, coaches and volunteers have all been implicated in school-based child pornography in recent years.

The Marsh Law Firm has been involved with several of these cases involving child pornography in schools and other educational settings.

I am quoted extensively in this report on Minnesota Public Radio:

[School head] Stoneman was confronted with a problem. There was child pornography on teacher Lynn Seibel's computer. The discovery couldn't have been a surprise to everyone at Shattuck-St Mary's. School officials had overlooked red flags about Seibel's behavior, according to documents and interviews.

The discovery of child pornography in July of 2003 was serious. The school now had evidence that a teacher may have broken the law. Moreover, school officials suddenly were aware of what legal experts and law enforcement consider evidence of child sexual abuse.

Stoneman, though, did not contact police. The school said it consulted its lawyers and decided that the child pornography on Seibel's computer ''did not trigger a reporting requirement.'' In addition, the school said it investigated and considered Seibel's claim that the pictures were popping up beyond his control.

By not telling police the school likely avoided a firestorm. An investigation may have angered donors and frightened parents. It also may have led to questions from police about whether Seibel was sexually abusing students.

Seibel was quietly forced out on August 7, 2003. The child pornography found on Seibel's computer would remain a secret for nearly a decade.

James Marsh, an attorney in New York who represents victims of child pornography in federal court said the school should have reported the images.

"Tucking it away for 10 years…prevented law enforcement from investigating crimes that may have taken place by Mr. Seibel no matter where he was in the last 20, 30 years."

Read and listen to the complete report—Should Shattuck-St. Mary's have told police about accused teacher's child pornography in 2003?—here.

According to the 2010 Administration on Children Youth and Families (ACYF) report, more than 3 million reports of child maltreatment were made in 2009. Of those cases, 10 percent involved sexual abuse, and 11 percent of sexual abuse victims reported having a disability.

The Vera Institute of Justice's Center on Victimization and Safety recently partnered with the Ms. Foundation for Women to research factors contributing to the sexual abuse of children with disabilities and determine possible action steps for prevention.

The project released a research brief that begins by reviewing existing literature, which showed that children with disabilities are at a higher risk for experiencing sexual abuse than children without disabilities. To generate discussion on this issue, the researchers convened a roundtable of 25 subject-matter experts tasked with describing what is currently known about the topic.

The roundtable discussion identified the following factors that contribute to relatively high rates of sexual abuse of children with disabilities:

• Aspects of children's disabilities and their receipt of disability-specific services heighten risk of sexual abuse.
• There is a lack of primary prevention tactics aimed at impeding the sexual abuse of children with disabilities.
• Children with disabilities who have been sexually abused are less likely to receive support services for healing and seeking justice.
• There are low levels of public awareness with regard to the sexual abuse of children with disabilities.

The authors note that the complexities associated with the problem require a unified and cohesive strategy. Because no such national strategy exists, the authors suggest creating and implementing one based on the factors outlined in the brief. They propose that a strategy can be accomplished by rallying key stakeholders at the local, State, and national levels to join in a unified and concerted effort for large-scale progress.

If you or someone you know was sexually abused as a child, the Marsh Law Firm can help. We have vast experience representing abused and neglected children, children with disabilities, and adult victims of childhood sexual abuse. Click here for further information about our firm.

Guest blogger Dr. Abigail Bray wrote this several years ago. It's well worth republishing here.

I think it is agreed by all parties that whoever could find a fair, cheap and easy method of making poor girls useful members of the economy, would deserve so well of the public, as to have her statue erected as preserver of the nation. To this end, I propose a method inspired by Milton Friedman. Let us recognise that the influence of Friedman’s deregulation thesis on third way social engineering is so profound that we can now say that the Chicago School of economics is the pinnacle of right-minded left wing practice. For example, George Papandreou, the president of Socialist International, is currently deregulating the Greek economy. While some might call him an undertaker, a cannibal, and a pimp, we in the progressive Left know such hysterical accusations come from wowsers.

What a tragedy for humanity that Milton Friedman did not follow up his Capitalism and Freedom (1962) with Capitalism and Sexual Freedom.

Thankfully, however, deregulation produces a sexually liberated market place. We now enjoy the seductive interpellations of a self-regulated corporate culture that promotes incessant sex industry style fucking: from children’s films and baby wear to real estate and shampoo adverts, everything is bubbling with the promise of sexual excitement. At the local brothel, young women sell their bodies to all kinds of men for different and diverse sexual practices. Or I can stroll into an adult.com chain shop and buy magazines showing women laughing with delight, as they are hogtied and given a vigorous triple penetration. Or at the deli near the local high school I can buy magazines full of smiling barely legal teens captioned ‘Cum on my braces!’. With a tap of my varnished nail, my PC ejaculates a load of porn—bestiality, incest, gonzo, BDSM, Lolita. Newspapers are full of adverts for self-reliant individual female sex workers.

Yet we have not gone far enough. We are in the infancy of our sexual freedom as a nation and it is the responsibility of the Left to see to it that progress is made. The sex industry should be free of any state control and the Left, in the interests of liberty, equality and fraternity, should embrace a range of laissez-faire policies immediately.

I say to you: it is time the Left stood shoulder to shoulder with the sex industry and said ‘yes we can!’

More needs to be done so that those who are at risk from welfare dependency can chose to become self-reliant consumers.

I am talking, of course, of those poor girls who come from sexually and physically violent homes, intermittently attend financially irresponsible state schools, only to spend their lives drifting miserably through the expanding secondary labour market. These girls often end up on sole parent benefits with numerous children to feed. It is time the Left encouraged these poor girls to embrace the choice of a self-empowering life in the sex industry.

Can the Left argue with any credibility that sex work shouldn’t be promoted as a viable career option for these unfortunate girls? Recently I heard that one girl had finished high school and was earning $3 an hour in a cafe. If sex work were de-stigmatised to be a job like any other, she could be earning $150 an hour. Instead of labouring for years in dead-end jobs, with the burden of debt on her young shoulders, she could be paying those university fees, saving for that $200,000  or so she will need as a deposit on a modest home.

Here are merely some of the socio-economic benefits of a deregulated sex industry.

• The sex industry builds social cohesion by providing a healthy outlet for male sexual needs of all kinds. In the interests of public health and safety it is vital that the Left defend the right of the sex industry to fully penetrate the private and public sphere. Let us face facts. Although decades of scientific feminist research argue that the sex industry practices and promotes violent woman hating, circumstantial evidence suggests feminists make these claims because they are man-haters.

• We must offer brothels the choice to corporatize their business. By gentrifying the sex industry we enhance the social status of sex work.

• Within working-class areas pornography corporations should be approached as industry partners in state sex education projects. Brothel owners and pimps might select students for job training in year 10. Already groomed for such work by the sex industry’s colonisation of their life worlds, this opportunity to professionalize their knowledge will be eagerly embraced by poor girls.

• Student unions could actively place girls within the sex industry formalising an already growing trend for poor students. The sex industry will support the higher education sector by increasing retention rates for the poor that in turn will lead to increased corporate/university profits.

• Australia should be marketed internationally to sex tourists. Currently many Australian men go to places like Cambodia for unregulated sex industry business—it is time we reversed the trend.

• The unemployed, the homeless, the entire standing reserve of at-risk and vulnerable girls should undergo training in various aspects of sex work and be thoughtfully placed in the industry. There will be no need for exit paths—rather old workers of 30 will be offered promotion to pimp. 

• Female run pornography companies and sex industry venues would enhance gender equality.

• Much research has been done on the negative impact of our image-obsessed culture. Yet here too is where the sex industry can help us. As Marx wrote: ‘I am ugly but I can buy the most beautiful woman. Which means to say that I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness, its repelling power, is destroyed by money [Marx, Early Writings, Penguin. 1975, p. 377]. Surely then, the sex industry, which offers attractive girls to ugly men for money, will enhance men’s self-esteem which will in turn radiate outwards as a benevolence towards others, such as women, perhaps. 

As the sex industry requires lithe bodies, many girls will be motivated to halt their descent into obesity in the interests of personal profit. Thus the sex industry will address the epidemic of youth obesity in Australia. Other issues facing disadvantaged girls, such as mental illness, rural suicide rates, social isolation, drug use, and anti-social behaviour will be eradicated by the therapeutic and financial benefits of belonging to the sex industry community. Cyber bullying through sexting will no longer have social purchase once society teaches the young to embrace pro-sex industry identities. The words ‘whore’, ‘ho’ and ‘pimp’, already terms of endearment among the young, will be further accepted as compliments.

This sincerely felt proposal should merit the originator a Humanist of the Year award, not to mention substantial research funding from the sex industry. Might I remind readers that it is the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day? Although the communist wowser Clara Zetkin instigated this day we have now reached a moment in history where we can more accurately see that economics never lies.

(With apologies to Dr. Jonathan Swift)

Dr. Abigail Bray is a research fellow at the Social Justice Research Centre at Edith Cowan University. She has published widely in leading international academic journals on anorexia, child sexual abuse, moral panics, and child pornography. She is the editor of Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry (2012), Hélène Cixous: Writing and Sexual Difference (2004), and Body Talk: A Power Guide for Girls (2005) with Elizabeth Reid Boyd. Dr. Bray was an inaugural inductee into the Western Australian Women's Hall of Fame in 2011.

In a forceful dissent, a judge in the latest child pornography restitution decision proclaimed that "to accomplish the difficult task of assigning financial responsibility to possessors of child pornography for the harm caused by their conduct, district judges should have all the tools provided by law at their disposal and should be permitted broad discretion to fashion an appropriate remedy."

The case before the Sixth Circuit, United States v. Hargrove, was decided under controlling Circuit precedent which requires "proximate cause" before a district court can award restitution to a victim of child pornography possession. The dissent appropriately recognized that

The discussion of proximate cause in [previously decided Circuit precedent] is not terribly helpful because the analysis of causation, both proximate (legal) and but-for (factual), is relatively straightforward once traditional tort-law principles of aggregate causation are employed. Defendants in these cases argue that the diffuse and anonymous nature of their conduct precludes a finding that they were the factual causes of any injuries. The majority properly clarifies that which [Circuit precedent] left somewhat vague, that even if conduct is insufficient by itself to cause a given harm, liability attaches when the conduct is sufficient to cause the harm when combined with the wrongful conduct of others. If the opposite rule were adopted, each defendant would be able to escape restitution even though it is undisputed that the defendants' collective action caused the victims' harm.

The dissent rightfully points out that

After a defendant is found to be both a factual and proximate cause of a victim's harm, the statute requires an order of restitution for “the full amount of the victim's losses.” 18 U.S.C. § 2259(b)(1). Under the theory of aggregate causation…each defendant should be considered to have caused the entirety of the victim's harm. Yet both [the majority's decision and Circuit precedent require] grafting an apportionment regime onto the proximate cause requirement. However, in an effort to avoid “unlimited liability for a single action,” [Circuit precedent] goes on to sanction a needlessly rigid apportionment scheme and reject the obvious solution of joint and several liability.

The dissent endorses joint and several liability explaining that "by authorizing joint and several liability or apportionment at the district court's discretion, [the restitution statute] gives the district courts appropriately wide latitude to fashion restitution awards to best effectuate the statute's purpose of fully compensating victims. As the en banc Fifth Circuit has held, the mechanism of joint and several liability authorized by § 3664(h) 'applies well in these circumstances, where victims [of child pornography] are harmed by defendants acting separately who have caused [them] a single harm.'"

The dissent reasoned that

Traditional tort-law principles also counsel in favor of giving district judges the option of joint and several liability in this context. In a typical multi-defendant tort action, an indivisible injury caused by numerous defendants would lead to the imposition of joint and several liability, with the risk that some defendants will be unable to pay borne by the other defendants, not the victim. The historical policy decision to shift the burden of insolvency from tort plaintiffs to defendants fits perfectly with the statutory goal of fully compensating victims of child pornography. See S.Rep. No. 103-138, at 56 (1993) (stating that mandatory restitution for victims of sex crimes is designed to create an assumption that defendants will pay the victims' expenses).

The dissent concluded that

Joint and several liability may not always be appropriate, but it should be one option available to the district courts when they order defendants to pay restitution to the victims of child pornography. That option seems especially appropriate in cases such as this, where victims were harmed by the knowledge that people like Defendant were viewing images of their abuse, and their harm is not susceptible to division. However, if the district court were presented with evidence that a given defendant was more or less culpable than other possessors of child pornography, the statute empowers the court to “apportion liability among the defendants to reflect the level of contribution to the victim's loss.”

We agree that "the district courts should be permitted to apportion a victim's losses based on individualized determinations, impose joint and several liability, or devise alternative methods for allocating varying degrees of fault among perpetrators." It's now up to the Supreme Court or Congress to make this happen.

This recent commentary, by Slate.com columnist and journalist writer Emily Bazelon (who earlier this year wrote a New York Times Magazine cover story on the Marsh Law Firm's groundbreaking work on restitution for child pornography victims), is a reaction to the United States Sentencing Commission's recent report to Congress on federal child pornography offenses.

Making child pornography is abuse. What about possessing it? As a group, these offenders—the ones who look but don’t abuse children to create new images—are serving increasingly long prison sentences. In 2004, the average sentence for possessing child pornography was about 4 ½ years. In 2010, it was almost eight years. Child sex offenders may also be kept in prison beyond their release dates through “civil commitment” if the state deems that they’ll have “serious difficulty in refraining from sexually violent conduct or child molestation if released.”

It’s hard to feel concern for people (mostly men) who prowl the Internet for sexually abusive images of children, some of whom are very young. Their crimes aren’t “victimless,” as defense lawyers sometimes argue. These men create the market for new images. They are the demand behind the supply. I’ve written about how hard it is for women who were abused and photographed as girls to know that men are still viewing, and taking pleasure in, the record of their suffering—and about the victims’ efforts to win restitution from these men.

But the main reason Congress has upped the penalties for men who possess child pornography is the deep-seated belief that many of them physically abuse children and that they are highly likely to keep doing so because they can’t stop themselves. Is that true? I’ve heard it so many times it’s hard to think otherwise. Yet that premise is contested in a new 468-page report by the U.S. Sentencing Commission (the body Congress established to advise it about federal sentencing law). The commission did its own research. It says the federal sentencing scheme for child pornography offenses is out of date and argues that this leads to penalties that “are too severe for some offenders and too lenient for other offenders.”

For the rest of Emily's piece, visit Slate.com. The comments are especially instructive.

From the BLT: The Blog of LegalTimes, a recent post about the Marsh Law Firm's continued efforts on behalf of child pornography victims in the long-running Monzel case:

The thorny question of how to calculate restitution to victims of child pornography came back before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit last week, with the U.S. Department of Justice defending a proposed formula.

Friday's arguments marked the second time the court considered the case of Michael Monzel. Monzel pleaded guilty to one count each of distribution and possession of child pornography. A trial judge ordered Monzel to pay $5,000 to a victim known by the pseudonym "Amy," but on remand from the D.C. Circuit reduced the award to zero, finding the government didn't produce evidence on how much of Amy's losses he caused.

The government appealed, arguing U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler was wrong to reduce the award and that its proposed formula - dividing a victim's total losses by the number of individuals found criminally responsible and then adjusting based on certain factors - represented a fair solution. Monzel's lawyer, Federal Public Defender A.J. Kramer, said the formula was arbitrary and that Kessler was right to reduce the award after the government presented no evidence linking his client to specific losses.

Courts across the country have struggled to find a consistent way to calculate damages in child pornography cases. As lawyers on both sides noted, there are often an unpredictable number of defendants, especially if the images are distributed online, and it can be difficult to know the extent an individual defendant who viewed or possessed an image was responsible for harming the victim.

To find out what happened at the D.C. Circuit, read the rest of this post at the BLT.