WASHINGTON – Justice Department officials say one aim of pornographers as they flood the Internet is to desensitize children into becoming a new generation of smut junkies.
But officials and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch vowed Wednesday to wage war against it.

“This is a growing problem that we need to attack aggressively,” said Hatch, R-Utah. “We cannot sit quietly and hope it will go away.”
He held a hearing about federal efforts to combat it – which served as a warning to pornographers that the federal government is now hunting them aggressively, and as a warning to parents to do more to protect their own children.

Showing the breadth of the problem, deputy assistant attorney general John G. Malcolm said, “It has been estimated that 90 percent of children between the ages of 8 and 16 have been exposed to obscene material on the Internet.”

He added, “A recent study by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children indicates that approximately 20,000 images of child pornography (depicting children) are posted on the Internet every week.”
Hatch added, “Pornographic Web pages now top 250 million and are growing at an unprecedented rate.” He added that many are obviously targeted to children, bearing names that are manipulations of such things as Harry Potter or Pokemon.

J. Robert Flores, administrator of the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, explained why the government believes pornographers are flooding the Net and often aiming at children.

“The distribution of obscene material to children is the commercial porn industry’s vehicle to create a new generation of pornography junkies,” he said. Hatch said, “The result of all this porn is that there are 11-, 12- or 13-year-old children being treated for pornography addictions.”

That was supported by Victor Cline, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Utah who has treated sexual deviants for 26 years.
He testified, “I see too many patients of minor age who are stimulated to practice or try out in real life the things they see in this material. I see, repeatedly, older children sexually abusing younger children.”

Cline added that patients he treats almost always point to pornography as the beginning of their addictions, saying they acted out perversions while viewing it. “Not everyone gets addicted immediately, but if they persist in this behavior they will,” he said.

Flores said, “We cannot protect children if we do not change the environment on the Net from one where predators flock with an expectation of safety to one where they surf or troll at their peril.”
Federal officials said they are attempting to step up investigations and prosecution. Flores said federal-state task forces have made more than 1,500 arrests in the past five years, with 500 in the past 12 months.

Federal officials warn, however, that pornography is so widespread globally that they cannot stop all of it, and parents must do more to protect their own children. Flores said that “despite widespread information in the media, through schools and commercial marketing that warns of the risk of unsupervised Internet use, parents have failed to substantially increase their involvement in their children’s Internet use or utilize danger-reducing technologies.”

Malcolm added that it is highly unlikely that the department is ever going to be able to rid the nation of obscene material and child pornography through prosecution alone. He said active involvement by parents and use of Internet filters “are going to be necessary components of any effective strategy to combat this scourge.”