Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography on the Internet.

• Author: Schwartz, John
• Position: Political booknotes: pedophiles.com - Review

BEYOND TOLERANCE: Child Pornography on the Internet by Philip Jenkins New York University Press, $24.95 LET'S GET THIS STRAIGHT FROM the outset, in case anybody might possibly be wondering: Child pornography is evil. Because it involves child abuse and molestation, the laws of every country prohibit it. The ACLU, which defends the right of adults to view X-rated fare, abhors it. The fact that such stuff can be found online is one of the facts most often trumpeted by those who warn that the virtual world is a wicked place, whether they be ministers preaching to the flock, law enforcement officials looking for bigger budgets, or politicians drumming up votes (George W. Bush himself has used the overdrawn phrase: "the dark dungeons of the Internet").

So anyone who picks up Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography on the Internet, might well ask what Philip Jenkins, a professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University, can bring to the topic.

What he brings to it is a sense of scale. Like so many aspects of the Internet, child pornography has become the center of a debate packed with hidden agendas. Jenkins, in the context of describing the fight over the 1996 Communications Decency Act, describes the problem with real elegance: "The debate over the CDA tended to become polarized between two extreme stances: Conservatives held that a vast amount of Internet business involved the most horrifying pornography, while liberals all but denied that such material existed."

The key, Jenkins suggests, lies in finding a middle argument that neither exaggerates nor downplays the problem. He writes, "A third and less publicized position was possible, namely, that although pedophile interests and images account for only a small proportion of life on the Web, this was still a substantial volume, maintained by a small but very active underworld."

Jenkins hates hype. His previous works have been earnest attempts to deflate what he sees as statistically warped hysterias about the prevalence of serial murder, of pedophilia by priests, and of designer drugs. He calls this "deconstructing public perception of social problems." And, in fact, Jenkins admits toward the beginning of this slim volume that he had gone into the project intending to debunk certain myths again. He defines himself as "a libertarian" who s believes "criminal law should be kept as far removed as possible from issues of personal morality. I am in no sense an anti-smut...