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Allocating Liability for Child Pornography, in Full or Fractional Shares
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: December 10th, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/03/us/evaluating-the-liabilit...
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. Its 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 Amys 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. Amys 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. The question for the justices is how to allocate that sum among the participants in the sordid marketplace for pictures of her.
Note: For more on sexual abuse scandals, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.
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