Allocating Liability for Child Pornography, in Full or Fractional Shares

Allocating Liability for Child Pornography, in Full or Fractional Shares 
By ADAM LIPTAK  December 2, 2013

WASHINGTON — The notices arrive almost every day. They tell a young woman named Amy, as she is called in court papers, that someone has been charged with possessing child pornography. She was the child.

“It is hard to describe what it feels like to know that at any moment, anywhere, someone is looking at pictures of me as a little girl being abused by my uncle and is getting some kind of sick enjoyment from it,” Amy, then 19, wrote in a 2008 victim impact statement. “It’s like I am being abused over and over and over again.”

Next month, the Supreme Court will consider what the men who took pleasure from viewing Amy’s abuse must pay her.

Images of Amy being sexually assaulted by her uncle are among the most widely viewed child pornography in the world. They have figured in some 3,200 criminal cases since 1998.

Amy is notified through a Justice Department program that tells crime victims about developments in criminal cases involving them. She has the notifications sent to her lawyer. There have been about 1,800 so far.

Her lawyer often files a request for restitution, as a 1994 law allows her to do. Every viewing of child pornography, Congress found, “represents a renewed violation of the privacy of the victims and repetition of their abuse.”

Amy’s losses are in most ways beyond measure, but some of them can be calculated in dollars. She has found it hard to hold down a job. She needs a lifetime of therapy. She has legal bills. Her lawyers say it adds up to about $3.4 million....
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/03/us/evaluating-the-liability-of-viewers-of-child-pornography.html

Victim Impact Statement of Amy – the Victim in the Misty Series

I am a 19 year old girl and I am a victim of child sex abuse and child pornography. I am still discovering all the ways that the abuse and exploitation I suffer has hurt me, has set my life on the wrong course, and destroyed the normal childhood, teenage years, and
early adulthood that every one deserves. My uncle started to abuse me when I was only 4 years old. He used what I now know are the common ways that abusers get their victims ready for abuse and keep them silent:
he told me that I was special, that he loved me, and that we had our own “special secrets.” Since he lived close to our house, my mother and father didn’t suspect anything when I walked over there to spend time with him.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/20100202-impact-statement.pdf


18 USC Chapter 110 - SEXUAL EXPLOITATION AND OTHER ABUSE OF CHILDREN

§2251. Sexual exploitation of children
§2251A. Selling or buying of children
§2252. Certain activities relating to material involving the sexual exploitation of minors
§2252A. Certain activities relating to material constituting or containing child pornography
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-110