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

Polanski free, Church accepts liability for sex abuse, Belgian Clergy Inquiry

Polanski free after Swiss reject extradition
By Hui Min Neo (AFP) 7/12/10 GENEVA — Swiss authorities said that Roman Polanski was a free man Monday after rejecting a request to extradite the film director to the United States to answer for a child sex case dating back to 1977. "The Franco-Polish film-maker will not be extradited to the United States and the measures of restriction on his liberty have been lifted," Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf told reporters at a press conference.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jCGJhS900g2cGdXBg_7ZYhZVP9qg

describes crimes
Dominic Lawson: Let's not forget what Polanski did
The film director has been treated with extraordinary indulgence
Tuesday, 29 September 2009
A man who drugged and sodomised a 13-year old girl would not usually receive the uncritical support of the political and literary establishments.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/dominic-lawson/dominic-lawson-lets-not-forget-what-polanski-did-1794717.html

Church accepts liability for sex abuse LISA MARTIN AND ANGELA HARPER July 12, 2010
AAP The Catholic Church is being praised for its readiness to avoid a court battle over the rape and sexual abuse of young girls at a Queensland primary school. A former teacher, 61, has admitted to a series of sexual abuse charges involving 13 girls in classes he taught between January 2007 and September 2008. Lawyers for some of the victims say Toowoomba Bishop William Morris has formally accepted legal liability for the abuse and the church will enter into mediation with the victims.
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/church-accepts-liability-for-sex-abuse-20100712-106zr.html


Abuse Took Years to Ignite Belgian Clergy Inquiry By DOREEN CARVAJAL and STEPHEN CASTLE
July 12, 2010 WESTVLETEREN, Belgium — Behind an aggressive investigation of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Belgium that drew condemnation from the pope himself lies a stark family tragedy: the molestation, for years, of a youth by his uncle, the bishop of Bruges; the prelate’s abrupt resignation when a friend of the nephew finally threatened to make the abuse public; and now the grass-roots fury of almost 500 people complaining of abuse by priests....A public pledge by Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard of Brussels that the Bruges resignation marked an end to cover-ups prompted more than 500 people — mostly men — to come forward in just two months.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/world/europe/13belgium.html