By Matthew D. LaPlante
The Salt Lake Tribune
Salt Lake Tribune
Each day, hundreds of people log onto "Jessie's" Web site to peruse the 8-year-old girl's modeling portfolio. This e-mail was initiated by machine [10.148.8.4] at IP [10.148.8.4].
But they're not talent scouts. They're grown men with a fetish for young skin, looking for a fix.
Most of Jessie's pictures show the blond third-grader in various states of undress: in white panties with legs spread apart; in thong underwear bent over at the waist; in a thin layer of blue paint over an otherwise topless body.
Paul Ammon scrolls through the menu.
"This is clearly a child who is being exploited," says the state Attorney General's Office prosecutor, who specializes in putting pedophiles behind bars. "It's horrible what this person is doing to this child. This isn't a kid having a . . . normal and innocent and carefree childhood that every kid is entitled to."
But Ammon will not investigate whether Jessie's parents knew their daughter was being exploited. And he won't be filing charges against the webmaster.
Jessie's online portfolio - hosted by a Utah-based "child modeling" agency that recruits locally - is not illegal.
Welcome to the not-so-underground world of child erotica, where parents cash in on their children's sexual appeal, carpetbagging talent scouts recruit future "stars" and pedophiles come to whet their appetites.
Prosecutors say they're helpless to do anything about photographs that do not, by current legal standards, break the law, which prohibits the "lascivious exhibition" of a child's genitals.
Investigators acknowledge that erotica is often a gateway into illegal pornography, but they don't have time to investigate every case.
The folders scattered on the floor around Fred Ross' desk tell that story better than he can. Inside each file is a tip about a child who may be sexually exploited. Along the wall behind him is a yellow toolbox marked "evidence." Next to it is a cardboard box, about the size of a microwave oven, stuffed full of compact discs and computer hard drives.
"There's more work than we can stay on top of," says Ross, a Salt Lake City police detective assigned to Utah's Internet Crimes Against Children task force.
Ross, who has been with the task force for two years, investigates hundreds of cases each year. In most cases where he found child pornography, he also found child erotica. Among the cases where both types of photographs were found in a single cache is that of Orem photographer Joseph Paul Durborow, who admitted in 2003 to taking explicit pictures of children and is now serving a 10-year term in federal prison.
As Ammon did before him, Ross scrolls through a site purportedly devoted to helping "aspiring young models."
"Yeah, OK, whatever," the detective says as he scrolls through a menu of similar modeling Web links that offer "non-nude" sites with names such as "Little Fantasy," "Elite Nymphets," and "Lolitas," the latter presumably a reference to Vladimir Nabokov's controversial 1955 novel about a man's love affair with his 12-year-old stepdaughter.
The protagonist in Nabokov's book ultimately comes to the realization that his relationship with the girl set her on a path to destruction. Child erotica critics say that's a good metaphor.
"Sometimes parents innocently think these things are harmless, but they don't realize these kids are being taught that displaying their bodies for money is a reasonable thing to do," says Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., a five-term congressman who has proposed legislation aimed at stopping child erotica sites. "The next thing you know, these same children are walking the streets, engaging in prostitution, [strip-club] dancing or some other deviance."
Foley says he's aware of parents who, having first had their children submit to being photographed for child erotica Web sites, later turn to "even worse ways" to make money off their children.
"Next thing you know, they're hustling their child," Foley says. "We had one woman here in Florida who we found out was a porn star, and she was raising her daughter in that tradition."
Foley says some parents just don't realize that their child's "talent scout" has ulterior motives, but said most know exactly what is going on.
"I don't think a lot of them are ignorant to what they are doing," he says. "They're making thousands in revenue from these sites."
Believing parents were not adequately protecting their children against being exploited, Foley introduced a bill in 2003 that would ban "exploitive child modeling." The Child Modeling Prevention Act died in committee, but Foley said he was planning to resubmit the bill this year.
Critics contend - and some supporters lament - that the bill won't pass constitutional muster. Foley is confident that he can find away to placate such concerns, noting that the legislation, if passed, would ban only sites that sell a child's image, rather than a product.
Ammon, the state prosecutor, says he doesn't believe any kind of ban would get by the courts.
"I just don't think it is possible," he says. "The court has found, essentially, that if there is any arguable merit in the images then they are protected."
mlaplante@sltrib.com