The Morphing of Child Pornography

Morphing of Child Porn

At issue before the Circuit Courts has been the constitutionality of the 1996 Child Pornography Prevention Act (CPPA) in which Congress sought to modernize federal law by enhancing its ability to combat child pornography in the cyberspace era(Free Speech). There is a split in the circuit courts regarding this bill, and this essay will address the discrepancy.

This piece of legislation classifies an image that "appears to be" or "conveys the impression" of a minor engaging in sexually explicit acts as "virtual" child pornography. Such images include a photograph of a real child that may be scanned, replicated and manipulated by computer to create a sexually-oriented photo, or a wholly fake child that may be generated solely by computer graphics.

Congress recognized a loophole in the child pornography law, in that technological improvements have made it possible for child pornographers to use computers to "morph" or alter innocent images of actual children to create a composite image showing them in sexually explicit poses.

With this in mind Congress intended to (1) ban computer-generated images that are "virtually indistinguishable" from those of real children, (2) to protect the privacy of actual children whose innocuous images are altered to create sexually explicit images and (3) to deprive child abusers of a "criminal tool" frequently used to facilitate the sexual abuse of children.

On December 17, 1999, in Free Speech Coalition v. Reno, the Ninth Circuit struck down the law as a content-based restriction on protected speech not in furtherance of any compelling governmental interest because the prohibited images are not of actual children. According to that C...

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...guage of the statute "sufficiently narrowly tailored to promote the compelling government interest in preventing harm to actual children, based on substantiated Congressional findings that virtual pornography was used to seduce actual children into sexual activity, and thus comported with free speech guarantees."

WORKS CITED:

Eleventh Circuit Opinions. http://www.law.emory.edu/11circuit/nov99/

Free Speech Coalition v. Reno, 198 F.3d 1083 (9th Cir. 1999), United States v. Hilton, 167 F.3d 61 (1st Cir. 1999), United States v. Acheson,

195 F.3d 645 (11th Cir. 1999), and United States v. Pearl, 89 F.Supp.2d 1237 (D.Utah 2000).

Holder v. Free Speech Coalition, Docket No. 00-795). http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/docket/features2001.html

United States v Hilton http://www.law.emory.edu/1circuit/july2001/00-2545.01a.html