Utahns urged to wage war on pornography

Utahns were urged Saturday to wage war on pornographers through the courts and were shown how frighteningly easy it is for child molesters to locate innocent children online.

An anti-pornography summit sponsored by the Utah Coalition Against Pornography, which spotlighted those subjects, drew about 450 people to the Salt Palace. There, keynote speaker Bruce Taylor encouraged participants to insist that prosecutors take on those who make and sell pornography.

"You've got to come up with an answer when your grandkids say, 'Grandma, Grandpa, what did you do in the war?' " said Taylor, a former Cincinnati city prosecutor and former federal prosecutor with the Justice Department who now heads the National Law Center for Children and Families.

For those who say prosecutors have better things to do, "There's nothing more important than protecting women who are getting abused and children who are corrupted" by the influence of pornography.

Taylor said prosecutors' lives are made easier when the public supports always having several porn-related cases in the pipeline, rather than saddling one individual with one case that could determine whether or not future porn crimes are pursued in a community.

"You've got to resurrect the demand to respect community standards," he said. "Don't take no for an answer and don't take prisoners."

At one of the event's many workshops, Kenneth Hansen, the section chief of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force in the Utah Attorney General's Office, offered grim statistics. Hansen said a University of New Hampshire survey indicated that one out of five young people online had received a sexual solicitation and one out of 33 had been asked to personally meet an online "friend." Of these solicitations, only 10 percent were reported to law enforcement.

"If a child's in a chat room, you should be over their shoulder," Hansen said. "Chat rooms are the most dangerous place for children online."

A good deal of child porn is created overseas, especially in the Ukraine and Russia where it is not illegal to photograph girls as young as 14 in the nude. It is difficult to get arrests and prosecutions for the manufacturers of this kind of porn, although it is being done, he said.

Hansen described one Dallas-based online porn site that in a few months attracted 35,000 people seeking child porn and 300,000 people looking for adult porn. "The people who ran it made $1.4 million every 45 days."