The problem of child sexual abuse in the United States is far greater than most people realize. Sixty million American adults are sexual abuse survivors. Twenty percent of us. Thirty-nine million of the victims were abused before turning twelve years old. Because most of them will never tell anyone about their experiences, the scope of the problem remains largely a hidden evil.

One in four girls and one in six boys are sexually abused before reaching eighteen.

Why is so little being done to stop it?

During the 70’s and early 80’s I worked for the Illinois Legislative Investigating Commission, eventually becoming the Chief Investigator. More commonly known as the Illinois Crime Investigating Commission, the agency was created to attack organized crime and official misconduct. Because of that focus, we were directed to investigate the rising instances of child pornography and child prostitution that we were seeing throughout the country.

It was well known that vice activities were dominated by organized crime. So it stood to reason that the outfit was responsible for sexually exploiting growing numbers of children as well. That theory proved to be untrue.

Ninety percent of abuse victims are abused by someone they know. Sixty percent are abused by a family member. Almost twelve percent of students who graduate from high school are victims of educator sexual misconduct sometime between kindergarten and twelfth grade. The mob was not behind it.

The sexual exploitation of children turned out to be something beyond what anybody thought.

Our investigation uncovered a range of horrors none of our investigators ever expected and it led to an almost eight-year investigation into every aspect of the issue—the victims, the families, the perpetrators, the social service agencies, the health workers, the police and detectives, the prosecutors, the entire judicial system. It was all a mess. Nothing worked smoothly. There was little or no cooperation or coordination between and among agencies. Every facet of the system was riddled with incompetence and indifference.

There is no easy solution.

We contacted every police department in the state and interviewed scores of detectives about sex abuse cases they handled. What became very clear immediately was most detectives did not like being assigned these cases. A downstate detective told me one time he heard over the radio the call come in about a child being sexually abused. Immediately, he said, he hid under his desk until the supervisor assigned it to someone else.

The cases were depressing, even more so than homicides. And because the conviction rates were so poor and because they sometimes involved prominent people in the community, they were seen as career killers. Today, these cases generally are handled by specialists. But there are not enough of them.

As a way to improve the overall system, we drafted the initial enabling legislation for what has now become known as the Child Advocacy Centers. There were none back then. Today there are over 800 around the country and, for a time, they were performing a coordinating function that was very effective. Based on indicators I’ve seen recently, I am not sure that is true anymore. In Illinois they seemed to have lost touch with the original intended purpose. I have seen a similar erosion of purpose in other states as well.

During the 70’s, prosecutors were reluctant to take on cases involving child sexual abuse because convictions were hard to get. That remains the situation today. Prosecutors often take plea deals that don’t involve the perpetrator admitting to a sex offense. Or, they agree to a less serious offense that has less jail time.

Social workers for DCFS and contract agencies remain ill equipped to handle any serious cases as they remain hamstrung by rules that prevent adequate triaging of the caseload. Often, then and now, they will spend more time on easy cases where parents and caretakers are cooperative, than they will on much more serious cases where the parents actively resist and evade the caseworkers.

You would think that at least the health care workers would be universally committed to the protection of children. Not always. They generally are pretty good at reporting suspected cases of abuse, at least physical abuse. But underage girls who are pregnant sometimes are not reported as victims of abuse, despite the prima facia evidence that the child was sexually abused. Children legally cannot give consent.

In some cases, health workers help arrange, or provide, abortions without notifying the police, DCFS or any other official.

This is also sometimes true when there is evidence boys have been sexually abused, and the boys refuse to cooperate.

No report.

When a case overcomes all the hurdles, and the prosecutor secures a conviction, there is no guarantee justice will be served. Too often, judges minimize the sentencing.

Recently, a teacher in Michigan engaged in sexual intercourse repeatedly over several months with her 13-year-old student. She was convicted of multiple counts of first-degree and third-degree criminal sexual conduct, for which she could have received life imprisonment. She was sentenced to 3 to 20 years. Period. She probably will be out much earlier. She’s not the only one. It’s the same as it was 50 years ago.

In the 70’s, one of our first cases involved a man who was sexually abusing a girl for three years, starting when she was 6. We got him cold on child pornography charges and he gave a full confession. He was sentenced to five years.

Pathetic.

Those immersed in the system know all this is true, but for one reason or another are not inclined to do anything about it. Those outside the system are largely oblivious, and very often want to remain ignorant.

This leaves our next generation condemned to evade the predators as best they can largely on their own. The consequences? More and more children will become victims of child sexual abuse. In thirty years maybe there will be 90 million adult survivors. By then, twenty five percent of us?

Unless we step up and start doing something much more effective, the numbers are going to keep growing.

(Next time, some things that are working and what you can do.)

Many pro-family leaders are praising the GOP platform for its strong language in a variety of areas. For example, Phyliss Schlafly noted this week in an editorial in the Washington Times that the platform has the successful three-legged stool model that Ronald Reagan won with through strong national defense, economic conservatism and family values. 

One item responsible parents will appreciate is the replacement of language opposing child pornography with a broader call for the enforcement of all laws on obscenity. For years various coalitions have been calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to enforce obscenity laws passed by Congress and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Even when John Aschroft, someone whom I greatly admire, was U.S. Attorney General, his actions on this problem were not much better than that of the Clinton Administration under U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno. (Not since Bush 41 has any Justice Department done much other than enforcement of child porn laws, although under the Bush 43 administration an increased emphasis on human trafficking began to appear, which is related to our pornographic culture.)

Placement of this broader call to action into the Republican Party platform may help achieve that much needed enforcement if U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is replaced by a different administration. 

President Barack Obama recently nominated David W. Ogden to be the Deputy Attorney General in the Department of Justice, which prosecutes obscenity violations. Attorney Ogden has been praised by the adult entertainment industry as a “strong pick” since he has represented pornography companies such asPlayboy, Penthouse and Adam & Eve. Ogden has even defended child pornography!

Take ACTION: Ask Illinois’ U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Roland Burris to vote against David W. Ogden’s nomination to the Department of Justice.  Send an email or a fax to the Senators from Illinois to ask them NOT  to confirm someone who advocated an extreme position on a federal child-pornography statute that the U.S. Senate unanimously repudiated 16 years ago.

Background
by Attorney Patrick A. Trueman

While he was in private practice, Ogden filed a brief before the U.S. Supreme Court in support of child pornographer Stephen Knox. The brief was on behalf of the ACLU and others. Knox had been convicted of federal child pornography offenses involving videos of several children. Though the children were not completely naked in the videos, they were deliberately posed so that the focus of the depictions was on the children’s genitals, covered or partially covered by underwear or other cloth. This is the kind of material that could only appeal to pedophiles. The brief asserted that such sexual exploitation of children was protected by the First Amendment!

Federal child pornography law prohibits “sexually explicit conduct” involving children, including video or photographic depictions focusing on the “lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area.” The Knox brief filed by Ogden expressed concern that, “Publishers, producers, retailers and librarians, faced with the prospect of child pornography prosecutions based on images of clothed minors limited only by a subjective test of lasciviousness, would have only one rational response: self-censorship.” Is that too much to ask — that they remove sexually exploitive videos with children posed in a lascivious way?

At the time of the Knox case, I was representing American Family Association which led a nationwide effort to get then Attorney General Janet Reno to change her position on the case, expressed in another brief before the Supreme Court which also was supporting Knox’ position. Her position on the matter outraged many because it was the Department of Justice which had convicted Knox! The conviction occurred in the previous administration, that of President George H.W. Bush.

Attorney General Reno’s support for Knox caused a firestorm of controversy in the public. I was doing several press interviews a day about the case and I would tell skeptical reporters to go to the Supreme Court and view the videos, which were available. Without fail, those who did agreed that the videos were definitely child pornography. Knox and Attorney General Janet Reno lost the public opinion war because the videos themselves, which the Justices probably viewed, made the case that Knox was guilty.

Then something extraordinary followed: President Bill Clinton was asked at a press conference whether he agreed with his own attorney general on the case and he said no! The press had a field day over this public rebuke of Reno. The embarrassment of Reno, (and who knows what else went on between the President and Reno) undoubtedly caused Reno to order that her brief in support of Knox be replaced with one urging the Supreme Court to deny review in the case an uphold the conviction. That is what the Court did.

So far as I can tell, Ogden has never changed his position. The Department of Justice should have no place for a man who thinks that the First Amendment protects a child pornographer like Stephen Knox and those who sexually exploit children.