In Quebec City, police have been going after pimps and their clients in a teenage prostitution and strip club racket. Defendants include thuggish characters from the Caribbean, the alleged pimps, and some of the city's most prominent citizens, who are among the alleged clients. Ordinary citizens are embarrassed and ashamed that their beloved city's reputation has been tarnished, and they're outraged by reports that the young prostitutes, girls as young as 14, were recruited at shopping malls with jewelry and fancy clothing. Finally, people in Quebec are worried that police will not press the case against some influential members of the Quebec community.
Yes, but the deeper problem has to do with the fact that the girls involved had so little respect for themselves, and were apparently clueless about the difference between right and wrong. What happened to their sense of moral values? Where do they get their ideas?
Well, look around. Our pop culture and the news media are full of answers.
Business and government leaders in Davos, Switzerland, for their annual meeting in January were focused on the same questions confronting the people of Quebec, but in Davos they were thinking not of corrupted teenagers but the fraud and greed of corporate executives that has led to bankruptcy and scandal, lost jobs, worthless stock, and ruined lives. Where did all that come from? Three guesses.
From Davos, the AP reported on January 25, "This year, there were more voices cautioning that regulation alone can't substitute for strong boards of directors and executives willing to stress personal integrity."
They may be on to something.
Sweden stayed out of the fighting as a neutral during the barbarism of World War Two but made its own lasting contribution to the assault on civilized behavior in 1944, at the height of the war, by legalizing human sex with animals. This was done "in connection with the decriminalization of homosexual sex," according to Commercial Sexual Exploitation News. The "connection," presumably, had to do only with the timing of the two enactments. (CSEN is published online at the University of Rhode Island.)
Fifty-five years later, in 1999, when Sweden finally caught up with world opinion and outlawed child pornography, child molesters in Sweden turned to sex with animals since that was still legal. The molesters switched to animal pornography and even sexual assault on dogs and cats. Veterinarians in Sweden are seeing 200 to 300 cases a year, CSEN reports.
Selling sex in Sweden is legal, but a law enacted there in 1999 makes paying for it a criminal offense. "Any one arrested for trying to pay for sex can be sentenced to as long as six months in jail, plus fines that are linked to their annual income," according to a report on January 21 by the Associated Press WorldStream service.
There's a method to this catch-22 madness. The hope was that scaring off demand would cause a decline in supply, which is what seems to be happening. The number of streetwalkers in Sweden has dropped from about 2,500 before 1999 to "between 500 and 1,000" now, according to the AP.
Acacia Research Corporation is going after Internet "adult entertainment" companies, not to put them out of business (which is, after all, a job for the Justice Department) but to get them to pay license fees for the digital transmission technology they use. (But could Acacia be indicted for aiding and abetting obscenity violations?) Acacia owns the patents used by all distributors of digital content via Internet, cable TV, and wireless systems, and is asserting its right to license fees from all of them, not only Internet porn operators.
News release headlines at Acacia's web site tell much of the story. Here are a few (PDF format):
- 12/18/03 - Acacia Adds New Defendants To Patent Litigation and Seeks Class Action Status
- 11/13/03 - Acacia Technologies Files Patent Infringement Lawsuit Against On Command Corporation
- 10/06/03 - Acacia Technologies Licenses Digital Media Transmission Technology to Hustler, Vivid Entertainment, And Wicked Pictures
Two of the headlines reveal a tactic that worked almost immediately with Go Entertainment, which operates a network of Internet porn sites:
Go Entertainment had more to deal with than the Acacia confrontation last year. We've heard from the porn fighters at Alliance Defense Fund of Scottsdale, Arizona, that Joel Hodgel, a Washington State resident, won a $179,000 judgment in federal court against the company on December 12. Mr. Hodgel complained that he had received 261 unsolicited pornographic e-mails from Go Entertainment. An attorney affiliated with ADF assisted in the case. It was a big win, one that ADF hopes will "set a nation-impacting precedent for family values and help to stop the onslaught of pornographic 'spam' on home computers." Go get 'em, ADF!
Just when you figure there's no hope for the Federal Communications Commission they go and do something right. They let it be known last year that the F-word will not be deemed indecent in the broadcast media, unless it is used to describe sexual or excretory organs or activities. That, a reasonable person would conclude, translates into an almost total surrender to the forces of broadcast indecency. But then, in January, the Commission slaps a $755,000 fine on Clear Channel Communications for airing indecent material over several stations for several days. The size of the fine, or "forfeiture" in FCC parlance, got everyone's attention. In another case, the FCC indicated last year that it was ready to consider the severe sanction of license revocation in appropriate cases.
It's a simple bill. Let's hope it makes it all the way through the House of Representatives and the Senate. President Bush likely would sign it into law. All HR 3717 would do is change a few numbers in the Communications Act of 1934, just in those places where the Act specifies how much a broadcaster can be fined for an indecency violation. The new numbers would increase the penalties tenfold, to a maximum of "$275,000 for each violation or each day of a continuing violation" up to no more than "a total of $3,000,000 for any single act or failure to act…" The bill has been referred to the Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans, writing for the administration, has sent subcommittee chairman Fred Upton (R-Michigan) a strongly worded letter in support of the bill.