The Science of Hook-up Manhandle
With civil commitment, child-pornography offenders can be imprisoned indefinitely, lest they molest children when released.
On a Saturday night in the summer of 1998, an undercover officer logged in to a child-pornography talk room using the screen name Indy-Girl. Within minutes, a user named John introduced himself and asked her, “Are you into real life or just fantasy?” Indy-Girl said that because of the “legality of it” she had never acted on her fantasies. But she soon exposed an adventurous spirit. She was a bisexual college sophomore, she said, and had learned about hookup at an early age. “My mother is very European,” she explained.
John, a thirty-one-year-old soldier stationed in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, had been using the Internet for less than a year. He began downloading child pornography after watching a television special about how Internet child porn had become epidemic. He hadn’t realized that it existed. In the five months since he’d seen the showcase, he had downloaded more than two thousand photos from child-pornography news groups. In the anonymous talk rooms, he felt free to adopt a persona repugnant to society. He told Indy-Girl that he was a “real-life pedophile,” adding, “At least here I can come out and admit it.”
“What’s the kinkiest you’ve done?” Indy-Girl asked. John said he’d had hookup with a ten-year-old while her parents were skiing, and with a fourteen-year-old at a night club in Germany. Indy-Girl recognized that she was too old for him, which was “depressing,” but she suggested that her little sister liked older fellows. “Maybe you could intro me,” John wrote. “We could meet somewhere discreet.”
John had been in the Army for eight years, serving in Desert Storm and Bosnia, and had graduated from Penn State with a degree in history. He was thinking of leaving the service, in part because he felt picked on by other soldiers. He had been commended for having a memory for technical details, but he was also jumpy, nerdy, and impatient to please. At all stages of his life, he had been afflicted with the sense that he was just a “wannabe.”
Unlike other people John met online, Indy-Girl seemed to like him. After a week of conversations, she asked John if he was “r/l” (real life) about the meeting, and when he said that he was she sent him a soft-focus digital pic of a doll who she said was her fourteen-year-old sister. “Now don’t be mean when you see it,” she warned. “She still has some of her baby fat, she’s kinda embarrassed.” Undeterred, John described how the three of them would love one another’s company: they could have lovemaking in the shower or in a field of flowers. He encouraged Indy-Girl to “talk dirty” and “let your imagination go wild,” but she cut him off, explaining, “I’m not the cyber type.”
She preferred to discuss the logistics of their meeting, a subject that John approached hesitantly. During the following week, Indy-Girl repeatedly voiced concern that John was avoiding her: “You’re usually so joy to talk with . . . and now . . . I feel like just . . . blaaaahhh.” She apologized for getting “a bit too gabby” and for “being so weird” and “reading into things.” John said it wasn’t her—he worked long hours and was tired. He also admitted that he wished a relationship more than he wished lovemaking. He hoped to find someone who “could accept me the way I am.” “Give it a chance,” Indy-Girl encouraged. “If you like her . . . and she likes you . . . things will work out.” She added, “It’s not like she’s gonna die if you don’t.”
They determined to meet at a park in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where they could have a picnic or go boating on the lake. Two weeks after their very first conversation, John drove three hours to the appointed meeting spot. He brought lacy undergarments in his briefcase. The Military Police Investigations unit, working with the F.B.I., had recruited two youthfull officers to play the roles of the two sisters. They arrived early, spread a blanket on the grass, and flapped at John, who was sitting at a picnic table, writing in his journal.
An athletic man with light-brown hair and green eyes, John leisurely walked over to the damsels, who were playing with a beach ball. He suggested them sodas, and they chatted about what they liked to drink—Indy-Girl said she preferred beer—and about how long the drive had taken. It was a “normal conversation,” one of the cops later wrote, until John “saw the agents approaching him, and he began backing away.” A plainclothes officer whom John had seen standing by the lake, holding a fishing pole and a tackle box, shouted at him to put his palms behind his back.
John waived his right to a lawyer, hoping to end the abjection quickly. (His mother, for the sake of John’s two junior brothers, has asked that I not use the family’s last name.) In an interview with the agents, John confessed that he frequently downloaded child pornography, storing it on his hard drive in a folder labelled “2Young.” He was sexually attracted to the ladies in the photographs, he admitted, but he had never had sexual contact with anyone below the age of eighteen. He insisted that he had invented his sexual exploits to impress Indy-Girl. According to an F.B.I. report summarizing the interview, “Everything that he said on the Internet was a lie.”
John pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography and to using the Internet to persuade a minor to have hook-up, and was sentenced to fifty-three months in federal prison—a relatively light sentence by today’s standards. In the past fifteen years, sentences for possession or distribution of child pornography—a federal crime, since pics cross state lines—have enhanced in length by more than five hundred per cent. The average sentence is now a hundred and nineteen months, which is about the same as the average penalty for a physical hook-up crime.
Child pornography didn’t become a priority for federal law enforcement until the mid-nineties, when the Internet, suggesting a fun-house reflection of the spectrum of human sexiness, exposed a previously invisible population of pedophiles. Talk rooms have spawned an underground subculture in which social status is based on comprehensive libraries of pics. Many users consider themselves “collectors,” trading pictures until they assemble sets that feature certain children, starlets on the Internet, being sexually manhandled over time.
In a explore of child pornography, the historian Philip Jenkins, of Penn State, found that talk rooms foster a kind of “bandit culture.” Self-described “Loli fans” see themselves as part of a subversive fraternity, unified by the pursuit of prohibited enjoyments. There is a hierarchy of users: new-comers, lurkers, traders, and, at the top, the pornographers themselves—“kings of the rooms,” as John told me. He said that the most sought-after photos were fresh and made in America, and showcased interracial couplings. The more taboos violated, the better. Members reinforced one another’s desires, engaging in communal rationalization. “We’d pull at evidence from the dawn of photography to prove that child sexiness was once acceptable,” John said. “Then we could say, ‘See, it’s society—not me!’ ”
When U.S. obscenity laws were very first relaxed, in the fifties, no special stipulations were made for photographs of minors. “If the Very first Amendment means anything,” the Supreme Court wrote in 1969, “it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may see.” But, by 1982, the public seemed to have discovered child lovemaking manhandle, both its trauma and its prevalence. The Supreme Court made child pornography an exception to the Very first Amendment, since “a child has been physically or psychologically harmed in the production of the work.”
Early efforts to suppress the American child-porn trade—a petite network of adult bookstores and mail-order services—were so successful that within a decade the market was all but nonexistent. But the Internet undid those achievements. Controlling the flow of pics is almost unlikely, because pornography is posted online from other nations, which have different definitions of who is a child and what is obscene. In arguing for harsher penalties for viewing child pornography, lawmakers have tended to conflate the desire to view photographs (a crime that can be detected by tracing a computer’s I.P. address) with actual hook-up manhandle, which is notoriously difficult to prosecute, since youthful victims are lightly muffled. In 2002, the chief of the F.B.I.’s Crimes Against Children Unit told the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security that the online pornography trade had created a “vast network of like-minded people, who believe it is acceptable to engage in sexual fantasies about children, thus lowering their inhibitions . . . and enhancing the likelihood that they will actually molest children.”
Child-pornography sentencing laws have been passed rapidly, with little debate; it’s almost unlikely, politically, to object to harsh penalties for perverts. Melissa Hamilton, a law professor at the University of Houston Law Center, told me that lawmakers have treated pornography possession as if it were an “inchoate crime.” She said, “It has become a kind of proxy—a way to incapacitate fellows who we fear have already molested someone, or will in the future.”
In prison, the only friends John made were other child-pornography convicts. “We picked each other out like black beans in a pile of rice,” he told me. He adjusted poorly, feeling perplexed by a sense of failure. “I was supposed to be the successful child,” he told a prison psychologist. In therapy, he refused to share intimate details. “When asked to describe adult relationships with women,” the psychologist wrote, “he appeared to be making up details of these as he spoke.” On the Internet, John said, “I can be whoever I want to be.”
John’s father, an engineer, said that he would have disowned his son if he had been the one “standing behind the camera, taking the pictures.” But he forgave him for “acting like a schmuck.” In 2003, after completing his prison term, John moved into his parents’ suburban home and began a three-year term of probation; he was not permitted to use the Internet or to go places where children congregate. He got a job at a bakery but chafed under his legal confinements, complaining to his case manager, “I am not permitted to use my abilities.” (After his arrest, he had been “other than honorably” discharged from the Army.) To serve with the terms of his probation, his parents put their computers in one room of the house and padlocked the door.
John’s mother was a member of the local Day Lily Club, and spent much of her free time in her garden, where she had seven hundred and fifty varieties of lilies, whose growth she documented in scrapbooks. Warm and self-deprecating, she said that she identified with John’s tendency to become compulsively immersed in his hobbies. He’d spent long periods of his life absorbed in role-playing games, like Dungeons & Dragons—he became so caught up in this world that he almost flunked out of college—and the Society for Creative Anachronism, a club that reënacts aspects of medieval culture. His mother believed that John might have disregarded Indy-Girl if only he’d been less “prone to fantasy.”
John’s imagined sexual encounters had always surpassed his real ones. The very first time he witnessed nude models was in middle school, when he discovered a copy of Playboy belonging to his father. He was astonished and disappointed that the models weren’t his age. By twelfth grade, he noticed that the damsels at school whom he found most attractive were freshmen. But his desires seemed academic, his classmates having nicknamed him Fungus. “If anything, chicks dreamed me to be their friend—never their beau,” he said. When masculine classmates boasted about their sexual escapades, John made up his own. He paid for the majority of his sexual encounters; he lost his virginity at the age of nineteen to a hooker at a twenty-four-hour health spa, he said. Pornography became an outlet for assuming an invented role. “You pick exactly which female you want, when you want her—you control everything,” he said. “It was unspoiled pleasure without the stuff of reality.”
During John’s very first year out of prison, his parents were certain that he was “straightening out.” He, too, felt that he was on track to acquire the “trappings of success: a wifey, a house, children, a beautiful garden.” Then the conditions of his supervised release were loosened, permitting him access to the Internet. “It packed some deep crevice in me that I didn’t even know existed,” he said. He visited online forums dedicated to medieval culture and war games, and began downloading adult pornography. His downloads became increasingly explicit, but the procession of subordinated youthfull females proved monotonous, and he found himself looking on a news group called Youth and Beauty for photos that were more extreme. John couldn’t fairly get himself to believe that he would ever get caught. Crossing the boundary was part of the “mystique,” he said.
When he received a letter from Gary, another child-pornography ex-convict, he said, he “fell right back into it.” He wrote to Gary about fresh software that would enable them to view child pornography securely, and marvelled at porn titles as if they were collector’s items. In a chummy, rebellious tone, he assured Gary that when their probation terms were over they would cross the border into Mexico and pick up a youthfull black-haired or fly to Cambodia and make some “homemade product.”
During a routine home visit, John’s probation officer spotted questionable pics on his computer, and sent the machine to the F.B.I. for a forensic analysis, which exposed twenty pics of underage females. Two months later, the letters to Gary were discovered. John pleaded guilty to viewing illicit pictures and to failing to obtain authorization from his probation officer to have unsupervised contact with his five-year-old niece. (An investigation found no indication that he had behaved improperly toward the child.) At his probation-violation hearing, in 2005, John was sentenced to two more years in prison. In his testimony, he described pornography as an addiction. “I truly don’t have enough control over it,” he told the judge. “I would like to figure out how to make it stop, I indeed would. I just don’t know how to do it yet.”
John had been back in prison for a year when, in 2006, Congress passed the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, which its sponsor described as the “most comprehensive child crimes and protection bill in our Nation’s history.” It permits the federal Bureau of Prisons to keep inmates in prison past their release date if it emerges that they’ll have “serious difficulty in refraining from sexually violent conduct or child molestation if released.” Their extended confinement is achieved through civil commitment, a legal procedure more often used to hospitalize patients who have severe mental illness, usually bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. The law is named after Adam Walsh, a seven-year-old boy who was kidnapped at a mall and decapitated. (His father went on to host “America’s Most Dreamed.”) Since the nineties, twenty states have passed similar statutes, known as sexually-violent-predator laws, for offenders who suffer from “volitional impairment”—a legal term that does not correspond to any medical diagnosis. The laws have been passed in the wake of gruesome, very publicized sexual abductions and murders by boys who repeatedly preyed on strangers. The crime is statistically rare—most molestation is committed by family members or friends—but, for almost a century, has loomed large in the public psyche. One of the very first films about a hook-up offender, Fritz Lang’s “M,” from 1931, dramatized the plight of this insidious type. “I can’t help myself!” the killer sobs. “I have no control over this—this evil thing inwards of me.”
According to the largest examine of released prisoners, conducted by the Bureau of Justice, the re-arrest rate for lovemaking offenders is lower than that for perpetrators of any violent crime except murder. But the notion that hookup offenders have a unique lack of self-control has been repeated so frequently that it has come to feel like common sense. In 1997, the Supreme Court ruled that sexually-violent-predator state laws are constitutional, because they adhere to the medical model of commitment, by which patients who pose a danger to themselves or others can be prevented from leaving a hospital. To be detained, inmates must have a psychiatric illness or “mental abnormality”—typically sexual in nature—that renders them out of control.
As John’s release date approached, his records were examined by the freshly established Certification Review Panel, a board of prison psychologists tasked with determining which prisoners to detain. The panel determined that John had many risk factors: he “self-identified as a ‘pedophile,’ ” evinced a “level of abnormal preoccupation,” and had “never been married, thus he may have difficulty developing suitable, intimate relationships with adults.” John was transferred from a penitentiary in Pennsylvania to a medical prison in Devens, Massachusetts, for a psychological evaluation. The therapist, Monica Ferraro, wrote that John displayed no signs of a thought or mood disorder, tho’ his manner was “inappropriate to content.” At times, he laughed at the idea of civil commitment. At other points, he became visibly angry, telling that he was being subjected to “double jeopardy” and would choose to be executed.
Ferraro gave John a diagnosis of pedophilia, which he discussed candidly during the evaluation. He admitted that he was attracted to kids “hitting puberty,” and said that he was unsettled by the realization that all of his sexual fucking partners, the majority of them hookers, had been petite, with puny breasts. Even when viewing adult pornography, he said, he would “de-age” the models in his mind.
Child-pornography talk rooms had become a “self-reinforcing community,” he explained. At very first, people in the talk rooms had overlooked him or accused him of being a cop. He made up stories about manhandling children, because “no one wished to talk.” When Ferraro asked him about his own pornography—during his very first prison term, he’d sketched pictures of a man having hook-up with a youthful girl—he said that he’d felt isolated and had justified the pictures by telling himself, “This isn’t truly bad, it’s just drawings.”
When relying only on clinical interviews, mental-health professionals predict dangerous behavior at a rate not much better than chance. To determine John’s risk of committing a fresh lovemaking crime, Ferraro used an actuarial instrument, the Static-99, and concluded that John was in the “high range of risk.” The tool—which was developed through studies of rapists and child molesters, not Internet-pornography offenders—places individuals in classes of risk based on ten factors correlated with recidivism, including age, whether the defendant has ever had a live-in relationship that lasted at least two years, and whether his victims were strangers. (The two undercover cops were considered to be John’s victims.) The request for ways of predicting future criminal behavior has spawned a cottage industry of actuarial instruments, which predict sexual violence about as well as the S.A.T. forecasts freshman grades. Neither correlation is particularly strong. But the instruments confer a stamp of scientific precision on a judgment that psychologists have proved ill-equipped to make.
In early 2007, the Certification Review Panel, after considering Ferraro’s report, concluded that John was a “sexually dangerous person.” The decision was made without a legal hearing. Two weeks before his scheduled release, John was told that he would remain in prison until his civil-commitment trial, which would be his very first chance to challenge the panel’s decision. He became so distraught that he had to be escorted to a psychologist’s office, where he said that he was “ready to curl up in a ball in a corner.” The therapist ran through the standard list of questions, asking John if he had delusions or hallucinations or wished to kill himself. He said no to all of them and shouted, “I want to live! I want to get out of here! I want to go home!” He said that he couldn’t control the fact that he was attracted to underage ladies, but he knew that he could not act on it. He told the psychologist that he felt morally persecuted, as if he were “wearing a scarlet letter.”
Three days later, incapable to reach his parents to tell them that he couldn’t come home, John cried for much of his therapy appointment. “He introduced somewhat dramatically,” the therapist observed. “His speech was difficult to interrupt, and he frequently raised his voice when stating, ‘And all for a crime I have not yet committed.’ ”
During the past fifteen years, the American Psychiatric Association has repeatedly objected to the civil commitment of hook-up offenders. In 1999, a task force created by the organization wrote that “confinement without a reasonable prospect of beneficial treatment of the underlying disorder is nothing more than preventative detention.” Six years later, another task-force report asserted that the laws represent a “serious brunt on the integrity of psychiatry.”
The science of perversion is decades behind the rest of the field. The diagnostic criteria for sexual disorders were tested on only three patients before being added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, in 1980. No field trials have since been conducted. Most offenders labelled “sexually dangerous” receive a diagnosis of pedophilia, sadism, exhibitionism, fetishism, hebephilia (attraction to pubescents), or “not otherwise specified,” a category in the D.S.M. reserved for insufficiently studied disorders. Michael Very first, the editor of the two most latest editions of the D.S.M. , told me that there is no scientific research establishing that abnormal desires are any tighter to control than normal ones. “People choose to do bad things all the time,” he said. “Psychiatry is being coöpted by the criminal-justice system to solve a problem that is moral, not medical.”
Most hook-up crimes arise not from illness but from opportunism or disdain for other people’s feelings and rights, conditions not lightly remedied by medicine. Civilly committed offenders find themselves in what Very first calls “psychiatry’s bottomless pit.” They aren’t released until a court or a treatment provider concludes that they are no longer dangerous, a risky judgment to make, given the stakes involved in a wrong decision. Albeit outpatient treatment is modestly correlated with diminished recidivism, the efficacy of institution-based treatment has proved difficult to measure. Treatment varies widely—most programs combine cognitive behavioral therapy with lessons about empathy and anger management—and, in most cases, never completes. In Minnesota, which has one of the largest commitment programs, six hundred and seventy inmates work on correcting twisted thoughts about hook-up (at a cost of a hundred and twenty thousand dollars per person annually), but in eighteen years only one man has been discharged from the program. (The man was released last year, after concluding a course of treatment that began in 1994.) By 2007, toughly forty-five hundred hookup offenders had been civilly committed nationwide, and just over ten per cent had been released.
In 2010, the Supreme Court reëxamined sexual-civil-commitment legislation, in United States v. Comstock , which was named for Graydon Comstock, the very first man detained under the Adam Walsh act. Comstock, who had been convicted of molesting four boys and downloading child pornography, argued that the federal law permitted the government to reach beyond its “enumerated powers,” since civil commitment has traditionally been regulated by states. By the time the case was heard, four years after Comstock’s criminal sentence had expired, Comstock was sixty-seven and was suffering from heart disease, diabetes, and incontinence. He had twice requested to be castrated, thinking that the operation would help his case, but he was told that it wasn’t medically justified. The Court upheld the law, but the details of Comstock’s case were never discussed in the courtroom, because the decision was narrowly focussed on the scope of the government’s authority. “If a federal prisoner is infected with a communicable disease that menaces others,” the Court wrote, “surely it would be ‘necessary and proper’ . . . to turn down (at least until the threat diminishes) to release that individual among the general public, where he might infect others.”
A third of the dudes detained under the Adam Walsh act had been convicted of child-pornography crimes. Many had disclosed physical lovemaking crimes to prison psychologists while serving their sentences. (Others had had earlier convictions.) Because the therapeutic disclosures have a bearing on public safety, they are not confidential. Shortly after the passage of the Adam Walsh act, in a memorandum sent to federal public defenders, two lawyers with the National Sentencing Resource Project described therapy as a “trap.” They wrote, “No client can securely receive any form of hookup offender treatment while in the system.”
John waited for his civil-commitment hearings at the Devens prison, and albeit he had finished his prison term, his daily routine was largely unchanged. He wore the same uniform as other inmates and was subject to the same penalties, schedule, and rules. During a routine shakedown six months after his detainment, guards confiscated an accordion file in his cell containing more than a hundred pages of drawings and notes. A prison psychologist wrote that the papers, “when considered in their totality,” suggest that John “believes children are sexual beings who can consent to hookup.” John appeared to be searching for ways to justify his desires. “Our culture has a fear of (children’s) sexiness,” he wrote on one page. “Strictly speaking a chick inbetween thirteen and seventeen is not a child,” he wrote on another.
On dozens of pages, he listed books, movies, and art featuring child sexiness, including the Kama Sutra, “Lolita,” “Taxi Driver,” and the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, Sally Mann, Jock Sturges, and Lewis Carroll. “Obscene to who?” he wrote. “Community standard (what community?).”
He also listed the traits of the quintessential hookup offender: “social loner,” “often balding,” “overweight or pot belly,” “working a job below their academic achievement.” Evidently recognizing himself in the description, John jotted down items necessary for his “disguise kit.” He would need makeup to alter his skin tone, a wig, colored contact lenses, fake tattoos, and a mustache. On the next page were more notes on how to escape detection: “Don’t become predictable, use widely scattered hot spots”; “Try ultra petite flash drives”; “Use proxies (anonymous), wireless? minimal info”; “Avoid uploading—that’s how they got ya.”
John’s civil-commitment hearing began in January, 2011, in a federal district court in Boston, after he had been detained in prison for four years past the end of his sentence. (The long delay was due in part to constitutional challenges to the Adam Walsh act.) The hearing focussed less on what John had done in the past than on what he might do in the future. Psychological experts hired by both the prosecution and the defense agreed that John had pedophilia and would have a hard time avoiding child pornography. Whether this would translate into the sexual manhandle of a child was the only significant point of debate.
The case was built on John’s own statements—notes and drawings in his cell, his comments to therapists, transcripts of Internet talks, and the letters to Gary—but his sexual history was still unlikely to divine. He’d had hookup with fifty to two hundred hookers, depending on whom he was talking to. It appeared that he’d had one romantic relationship, with an exotic dancer called Dixie Lee Ray, which he described as essentially platonic. Explaining why he’d begun talking online with pedophiles, he told one of the psychologists who evaluated him, “I joined this subculture just to belong. I don’t even know if these were my own fantasies or I was feeding off of these people.” He said that he “created a very detailed, elaborate story to be accepted. I created a persona, a character. The more shocking I could make the story, the more people desired to talk with me.”