In part two of our two-part series on The New York Times' two-part series on online pedophilia, we look at an article headlined On the Web, Pedophiles Extend Their Reach.
Unlike the first installment, which raised a few questions but was not terribly objectionable, this one is a stinker. Again, I'm not saying it's Landesmanesque or anything. It's merely another in a long line of breathless, overhyped, underanalyzed stories fed mostly be a pathological fear of the Internet. I've been pissing and moaning about this genre for nearly ten years and not much has changed.
The tip off comes early on when Eichenwald refers to online activity as "chatter in the ether." Ooh, ether! Mysterious! Primordial! This may seem like a small thing, but these turns of phrase reflect a fundamental discomfort with the Internets that color everything in the article. After all, when was the last time you saw a newspaper refer to a phone call or radio show as "chatter in the ether"?
The premise of this article is that the pedophilia community (did I really just write that?) "uses the virtual world to advance its interests in the real one." In practice that means lumping together three distinct types of activity so that they enhance one another in the reader's mind, the scary (but infeffectual) ideas making the other parts more scary by association, and the effective (but less scary) ideas making the scarier parts sound more effective.
The three activities, in descending order of seriousness, are:
� Using the Internet to gain physical access to children
� Using the Internet to justify sexual feelings for children, thus allowing pedophiles to cross the line from thought into action (The Times's experts call this "the most dangerous element," but I think my ranking makes more sense)
� Using the Internet to promote societal acceptance of pedophilia
Let's take these one at at time.
Using the Internet to gain physical access to children
The evidence that this is taking place is as follows:
One man asks if anyone knows "of girls� camps willing to hire adult males as counselors?" There is no mention of anyone responding in the affirmative, or of the man getting a job at such a camp, or of whether any such camps exist and whether they do background checks or anything.
One man who "had been offered a job leading a boys� cabin." Ah-ha! A pedophile using the Internet to get a job at a summer camp! Oh, wait. He doesn't actually say he got the job online, or that the Net helped him get the job in anyway. The only role the Internet plays in this story is that it's where the man came to gloat after securing the job in some more traditional manner. I look forward to the Times' freak-out series on the dangers of classified ads.
Speaking of which: "One man posted an Internet 'help wanted' advertisement from a single mother seeking an overnight baby sitter for her 4-year-old daughter." There is no mention of anyone responding to the ad, or getting the job.
"Someone calling himself Vespucci asked in June whether a single man could become a foster father." The response: it's very, very difficult. There is no mention of Vespucci making the attempt.
One man "recommended shopping at weekend estate sales, since plenty of bored minors showed up accompanying inattentive parents." Yes surely without the Internet, pedophiles would never have figured out that they should go places where there are children with little parental oversight. Again, I look forward to the article on the dangers of weekend estate sales.
The most alarming anecdote from this section concerns "an organization called BL Charity said it was seeking money to send Eastern European children to camp." Since the web site closed down "largely from a lack of money," the lesson would seem to be that the Web is bad at generating money for pedophile activities. There is scant evidence that the camp ever existed, or, if it did, that the Internet had anything to do with its extremely limited success.
Using the Internet to justify sexual feelings for children, thus allowing pedophiles to cross the line from thought into action
Here's where you get all the oogy-boogy quotes. Because, yes, there is nothing creepier than hearing pedophiles claim that little children are making sexual overtures to them; that they are the only ones who truly understand children; that their abuse causes no harm.
There is also nothing new about it. These justifications, excuses and "neutralizations" are intrinsic to the pedophile mindset. I recognized every one of them from Lolita, and I don't recall Humbert Humbert having broadband. Despite all the experts who weigh in here, there isn't the slightest evidence that the Internet actually facilitates anything that wouldn't take place entirely in the pedophiles' minds anyway.
What's more, there are, scattered throughout the article, a handful of anecdotes that are meant to express something else but that could be used, if an enterprising trend-story writer wanted to do so, to portray online pedophile communities as places where would-be pedophiles have their justifications challenged: One person tells the camp counselor to restrain himself "from doing anything." Another tells a "teacher" that the boy holding his crotch in class "might have just needed to go to the bathroom.� "Believe it or not," another pedophile is told "most young children are NOT anxious to have sex with adult men.� See! The Internets is our best line of defense against child predators!
Using the Internet to promote societal acceptance of pedophilia
This is a joke, right? Yes, it's interesting that pedophiles have their own logos. That's the sort of touch that could be included in a decent feature story on the topic. But not in a fearmongering front-page news story, because let's face it, if the movement can't design a better web site than this, it's not going far. Shit, NAMBLA has been at this for 30 years with nothing to show for it except retreat and humilation. (For my favorite evisceration of the "pedophile rights" argument, skip to 19:19 in this South Park episode.)
Although I have no doubt that the religious right has already jumped on this article as proof that granting civil rights to gays is as slippery slope that will lead to legalized child-rape, the idea that this "cause" could gain any traction is so self-evidently absurd that any decent article about it would at least point out that such talk is probably not meant seriously, but is rather just another type of fantasy.
Wait, what? Fantasy? Oh yeah, that.
Eichenwald includes one CYA graf that a careful reader should come back to after every single anecdote.
The conversations themselves are not illegal. And, given the fantasy world that the Internet can be, it is difficult to prove the truth of personal statements, or to demonstrate direct connections between online commentary and real-world actions. Nor can the number of participants in these conversations, taking place around the Internet, be reliably ascertained.
So those jobs pedophiles supposedly hold? Maybe not so much. "Pediatrician specializing in gynecology"? Uh, sure pal. And that poll about whether pedophiles would �have full intercourse with a little girl.� I'm shocked that even 17 out of the 74 would say no. Not because I think all 74 really would, but because these polls are not only "not scientific," they're not supposed to be anything more than spank material. Pedophiles who go online to chat with other pedophiles aren't looking for analysis of the pedophile mind, they're indulging in fantasy and preparing to get off. The Times's last-minute effort to shoehorn in a JonBenet news peg �� "In e-mail messages to a journalism professor that investigators believe were written by Mr. Karr, statements about children seemed to echo the online dialogue among pedophiles" � actually undermines the article, given that it seems increasingly likely that Karr is completely delusional.
For real insight into the world of pedophiles, it's better to pay attention to what they say when Eichenwald actually sits down and talks to a few in person.
Oh wait, he doesn't. And now we get to the crux of the problem. Writing an article based entirely on newsgroup and chat room conversations and never doing a single interview? That's not journalism... that's blogging.
