Вредно для несовершеннолетних

77. The notion of predisposition informs all sting operations: police are not allowed to entice somebody into breaking the law (that would be entrapment) unless they have evidence indicating he is likely to do so on his own. Narcotics agents commonly buy from a known dealer; occasionally an undercover cop will put herself into a position to be assaulted by a rapist whose m.o. is known. However, the establishment of predisposition in child pornography enforcement is not so straightforward, because the enforcers' motives aren't. If the goal is to eradicate deviance and not necessarily to prevent actual crimes, as the ACLU's Marjorie Heins suggests, suspicion of deviance goes a long way toward legally establishing predisposition to criminality. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's manual for law enforcers suggests including in requests for search warrants a profile of what they call a "preferential child molester," accent on preferential, since he might want to do something he's never done. Since the person needs to have demonstrated no greater erotic interest in children than logging onto a site where they congregate (I, in researching this chapter, could be accused of such acts), the tactic resembles setting somebody up for a drug bust not because he's actually sold or bought drugs but because he has watched the doings of the dealer next door or because he has an "addictive personality." Once a "preference" for "child molestation" has been thus established, a search warrant stating this preference in the suspect alerts cops to the probability that a collection of illegal child pornography awaits their search. And the search fulfills their expectations: they find pictures and, whether they're pornographic or not, take them to be clues to molestation. "The photograph of a fully dressed child may not be evidence of an obscenity violation, but it could be evidence of an offender's sexual involvement with children," says the National Center's manual. In 1995 I asked Raymond Smith, who heads the Postal Inspection Service's child pornography investigations, about his estimation that PI agents find "evidence of child molestation" in 30 percent of their searches of the homes of suspected pedophiles: "We'll find pictures of kids—no sexual act; we don't know where these kids come from. But you get a gut feeling . . . you learn to identify it. . . . We're not finding a videotape of this guy having sex with the ten-year-old girl next door. We're not finding a picture. Just from what we see in the house and how they talk. "When we get into these cases, many of these individuals literally confess to committing horrible acts, before they're arrested. Sometimes that is fantasy, which is not against the law. But when you have the child pornography present, combined with the fantasy, in my opinion not only are they violating the law, they also pose a serious threat to children in the community where they live. If somebody told me this man never molested before, but, man, he loves kids and I knew he was a member of NAMBLA [the North American Man/Boy Love Association, a support group-propaganda organization], I would think that person was a threat to my child. But I have no, quote, evidence that he molested."

78. At this writing, in 2001, a constitutional challenge to the 1996 law is on the Supreme Court's docket.

79. "Cynthia Stewart's Ordeal," editorials, Nation (May 1, 2000).

80. James R. Kincaid, "Hunting Pedophiles on the Net," salon.com, August 24, 2000.

81. A particularly harrowing account of a year-long entrapment campaign resulting in the conviction of a man who seemed to have no preexisting sexual interest in children can be found in Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (New York: Grove Press, 1996).

82. Christopher Marquis, "U.S. Says It Broke Pornography Ring Featuring Youths," New York Times, August 9, 2001.

83. Kincaid, "Hunting Pedophiles on the Net."

84. During the U.S. Postal Inspection Service's late-1980s Project Looking Glass investigations, 5 of the 160 people indicted saved the government the effort of seeking a plea bargain by promptly committing suicide.

85. Marquis, "U.S. Says It Broke Pornography Ring Featuring Youths."