“Teen Porn”: Legitimising Sexual Desire for Children

Many feature girls who look 13 years old at best – girls with braces, pigtails, flat chests, no makeup, extremely young faces, holding teddy bears and licking lollipops, all while being aggressively penetrated. A quick search for the word ‘teen’ turns up titles such as ‘Young Girl Tricked,’ ‘Innocent Brace Faced Tiny Teen F—ed,’ ‘Tiny Petite Thai Teen,’ ‘Teen Little Girl First Time,’ on and on ad infinitum.”1

Child sexual abuse material

Child sexual abuse is a vast problem, both within the UK and globally. According to a 2019 New York Times report, “The internet is overrun with images of child sexual abuse.” Last year, tech companies “reported over 45 million online photos and videos of children being sexually abused – more than double what they found the previous year.”² The crisis is beyond epidemic: it is past breaking point and needs urgent international attention.

Of the total $100 billion annual revenue for the pornography industry worldwide, $13 million is thought to derive from child exploitation material (CEM) alone. Significant as this figure may be, it does not accurately reflect the extent of abuse occurring in the production of CEM. International Network of Internet Hotlines (INHOPE) estimates that 79% of CEM produced is non-commercial.’’³

Although most sites that host child pornography are not based in the UK, there are an estimated 144,000 Brits who visit some of the worst websites for child sexual abuse and exploitation.

There’s a real danger that we regard the issue of child sexual abuse as something that happens somewhere else, carried out by someone else – dirty paedophiles who are nothing like us. In which case, all we can hope to do to tackle the problem is to go after the perpetrators as best we can, playing an endless game of whack-a-mole we can never hope to win.

In other words, because law enforcement doesn’t stand a hope of solving this problem, we need to consider upstream prevention, taking a closer look at the cultural and commercial drivers. An obvious place to start is the internet, which massively facilitates the proliferation and distribution of vast numbers of child abuse images.

But another, not-so-obvious driver, is legal online porn sites, whose expansion has led so-called “naive offenders” to seek out this illegal content.⁴Mainstream online porn intersects with child pornography and heavy consumption leads some men to start seeing children as sexual objects.

Opening the floodgates

The internet has meant that there are now many millions of sexually-explicit videos available to us at just the click of a button. As consumers of online porn, we soon begin to demand more explicit, extreme and novel content, since increasing exposure means it takes more to turn us on.

In today’s culture, sexual arousal is considered a prize to be won regardless of the cost, though we draw the line at child pornography. In 1996, the U.S. Child Porn Prevention Act prohibited “any visual depiction that appears to be of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct.”

However, this law was successfully amended in 2002 by the Free Speech Coalition, a trade association that represents the porn industry, so that porn should merely exclude persons who were actually under the age of 18, rather than just appearing to be.

This opened the way for the porn industry to use “either computer-generated images of children or real porn performers who, though 18 or over, are childified to look much younger.”⁵ Many petite, young-looking performers are made to look like children by deploying props such as stuffed toys, lollipops and school uniforms.

This “pseudo-child-pornography”, or PCP, is watched by millions of men every day, which indicates a mass market for teen sexuality. Dr Gail Dines of the campaign group Culture Reframed explains: “Often sold under the banner of ‘teen porn’ or ‘teen sex’, it gives hardcore users welcome variety from the usual menu of voluptuous, well-oiled ‘sluts’, instead offering young, innocent ‘girls’ being ‘penetrated by any number of men masquerading as fathers, teachers, employers, coaches, and just plain old anonymous child molesters.’”⁶

Sugar-coating abuse

The outrageous and appalling scenarios that occur in the context of child sexual abuse are enacted through pseudo-child-pornography: everything from fathers having sex with their young daughters and babysitters being seduced by their employees to schoolgirls being persuaded to lose their virginity on camera. But in this sugar-coated, fairy-tale world of porn fantasy, sex with children is presented as “hot fun for all”; no one does anything they don’t want to do (even if they have to be persuaded), no one gets hurt, no one has regrets.

Is it, then, possible to enjoy being turned on by children without anyone being hurt? Have we tamed child sex abuse into a form of harmless entertainment?

These are vital questions to answer, because there’s little research has been done into either the content or the effects of such sites, due for the most part to resources being diverted to addressing the flood of real child abuse images.⁷

Normalising sexual desire for children

“We are destroying cultural norms that once taught male adults that children’s bodies are off-limits to sexual use. We cannot fully address child sexual abuse until we reject a culture that glamourises it.”
Melinda Tankard-Reist, Campaigner⁸

Sexualising children sends the message that they are appropriate and desirable objects of sexual interest. As Dines writes: “Once he clicks on these sites, the user is bombarded, through images and words, with an internally consistent ideology that legitimizes, condones and celebrates a sexual desire for children. The norms and values that circulate in society, which define adult-child sex as deviant and abusive, are wholly absent…”⁹

In ‘teen porn’, girls are groomed using the same kinds of techniques that real paedophiles use

The men who seduce the young women in ‘teen porn’ rarely use physical force to get girls to comply with sexual demands. Instead, they use more subtle forms of persuasion and seduction, which actually mirrors what goes on in the real world of child molestation, as Dines points out. By “seasoning” children carefully by first forging a bond with them, “the perpetrator then manipulates and exploits the emotional connection to erode the child’s resistance to sexual activity and to ensure the child’s silence.”¹⁰

As in real child pornography, ‘teen porn’ depicts the girls as being ‘up for it’

This deception is a key component of real child pornography, where victims are often instructed to smile or to make noises that suggest pleasure and arousal so that viewers can maintain the delusion that children are eagerly consenting, willing accomplices rather than victims of abuse.

“…It is very common for users of pornography to see images that they find stimulating and not think of the people in the images as individuals with human rights and feelings.”¹¹

‘Teen porn’ is a gateway into real child pornography

Pseudo-child-pornography sites are an obvious first step into the world of child pornography for men with a sexual interest in children, since nothing’s illegal and the stakes are low. It makes the lonely, nascent paedophile feel less alone in a community that accepts his sexual preferences.

But we know from extensive research that pornography consumption tends to lead to an escalation in tastes and preferences. Over time, users often require more shocking, novel or extreme material in order to maintain arousal.¹² Through such desensitization, men will sometimes find themselves turning to real child pornography. This effect is not just limited to paedophiles.¹³

The online pornography industry actively promotes sexualised imagery of children for its own commercial interests, with no regard for the consequences. The sexual taboos that have governed our attitudes and behaviour for centuries exist for a reason, and we ignore them at our peril.