Posted on 05/09/2002 3:54:54 AM PDT by kattracks
In the $40 amateur video, Mandi dances seductively for the camera in a skimpy string bikini emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes.
Her long legs encased in red fishnet tights, the pretty brunette Texan grinds her star-spangled bottom at the lens, then gets down on all fours, pouting provocatively.
Mandi is 11.
And the video is being hawked on the Internet by her parents. Perfectly legally.
Mandi's World is one of dozens of sites parents have recently created to sell snapshots and videos of their scantily clad kids under the guise of child modeling — an enormously profitable niche that has exploded in the last year.
The sites — some featuring girls as young as 6 — don't show nudity or overt sexual acts, thereby breaking no child porn laws. Technically, they show no more skin than a kid's bathing suit ad.
But the child modeling sites, which get thousands of hits per day, have a primary audience of pedophiles.
They are set up just like porn sites, with all but a few sample pictures hidden in a members-only area accessed by credit card for $20 to $30 a month. Billing, viewers are assured, will be discreet.
"In and of itself, it's not illegal," said Ray Smith, head of the U.S. Postal Inspector Program for Child Exploitation. "But just watching these children move would be sexually gratifying to those people who would be inclined to view children as sexual objects."
Westchester District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, a leading crusader against child porn, monitors the sites with concern.
"This is the entry level for pedophiles," said Pirro aide David Hebert. "It encourages them and entices them to go further. It's the first taste of the ice cream."
Lawmakers are moving to outlaw the sites.
Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), co-founder of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, introduced a bill Tuesday to ban them under child labor laws.
"With all that's happening in the church today — and with the news about trusted people like coaches and teachers getting caught in child porn stings — it really sickens you to realize that parents are dangling their own kids out there as candy for some sick mind," Foley said.
The bill would ban Web sites that charge to view pictures of children without promoting any other products.
Foley said: "If a child is modeling for Gap or Gucci, it's legal. If the site is selling nothing else than the child via photos or video clips, it's illegal."
He also is pushing for hearings, saying he would like to subpoena parents to explain to Congress why they are selling videos of their half-clad kids. "Can you imagine, as a parent, basically giving a pedophile an all-access pass to your child?" he asked.
Benefits Kids, Parents Say
Parents insist they are hurting no one and are actually improving their kids' lives by fattening their college funds and boosting their self-esteem.
Each Web site has an e-mail fan club, and some parents participate, updating members — often thousands of them, almost all men — on the daily activities of their little girls.
"Stacy's Pop" told 1,400 fans of blond "Stacy Starlet" all about her plan to redecorate her bedroom. He welcomed feedback.
"Please understand that Stacy is 7, and all commits [sic] are welcome, but please keep them so that she can understand them," he wrote.
Fan club members — some with screen names like luvyunggirls — chat obsessively about the girls, raving over the latest outfits and poses and how cute missing baby teeth are.
The club moderator — concerned that Yahoo!, which hosts most of the fan clubs, would delete it — warned members: "Remember Stacy's parents who are both involved in her Web modeling career might want to show this club to Stacy from time to time. So keep in mind when posting any pictures or messages that a cute innocent precious 7-year-old angel of a child might see your posting."
Yahoo! routinely deletes the groups, but new ones pop up. And the men keep posting creepy requests.
"Would just like to see more of her posing prone [showing her legs and pretty feet]," wrote one Mandi fan. "It would be awesome to see her do a dancing video wearing high heels ... with more emphasis on the hips and shaking that derrier [sic]," wrote another.
They take votes like: "What type of panties would you like Mandi to model her pretty little bum in?"
Started in Florida
Child modeling appears to be the brainchild of Jeff Libman and Marc Greenberg, two Florida entrepreneurs who ran adult porn sites until a better idea came along.
Their Fort Lauderdale company, Webe Web Corp., which started the first child modeling Web sites, took in $200,000 last year, according to Dun and Bradstreet.
Neither Greenberg nor Libman responded to questions from the Daily News, but in an online message to fans, Greenberg offered a passionate and bitter defense.
"We and the parents have always and will always fight hard to protect these children," he wrote. "If these sites are legal, shouldn't anyone have the right to create and display them or access them without being labeled a pedophile child molester? Why not concentrate on the issues that effect thousands of children each day instead of a few that are legally doing nothing wrong?"
Pioneer Is Now 12
The first online child model was perky blond "Jessi the Kid," now a veteran at 12.
In an e-mail interview with The News, her mother said she stumbled on the lucrative concept in 1999, after she put pictures of her daughter's ninth birthday online for far-flung friends and family. Suddenly, the site was swamped with visitors.
"We received so many inquiries," she wrote. "It left us dumbfounded."
Soon, Webe Web set up a professional site and was charging for the pictures — first $15 for 60 days, soon four times that.
They sell videos of Jessi playing with crafts, cooking (in a pair of thigh-high stockings) and doing yoga.
"Jessi's Mommy," as she signs herself, insisted the pictures and videos are aimed at other children and parents, not pedophiles.
"Someone once told me long ago that if you were to gear a product — any product — toward children, it would sell," she said. "Parents will buy anything to keep their kids busy and out of their hair."
She said the whole point is to "show kids the cool new things to do. We threw in some fashion files to show what the latest thing in kid's wear was."
She bristled at suggestions that there was something unseemly about Jessi's exposure. "Who is anyone to tell my child at what age she can create and sell a product?" she said. "Jessi is thrilled to be earning her way to college at such an early age and, as her mommy, I can't tell you what it has done for her self-esteem."
Legal Protection
Why would a pedophile pay for pictures of clothed kids when there are so many hard-core child porn sites out there?
For a start, you can't go to jail for having such pictures on your hard drive.
And for many pedophiles, attracted emotionally as well as sexually to the innocence of children, pictures of scantily clad little girls or boys are almost as precious as nude photos.
David Westerfield, charged in San Diego with murdering 7-year-old neighbor Danielle Van Dam, had 64,000 pictures of children on his computer. About 100 allegedly were pornographic.
The interest is enormous. One typical site had 32 million hits in the last nine months from 357,000 visitors. Another gets about 3,000 individual users a day.
Webe Web's success has begun to spawn competitors.
At one new rival, paying members can vote on what a stable of little girls will wear for the next photo shoot. Another auctions off thong panties that some of the girls wear in photo shoots.
Californian Steve Stewart sells $20 CD-ROMs full of pictures of young girls at his Web site — including some of an 11-year-old in a see-through white bra that she doesn't need yet.
The owner of an Australian site devoted to "cute kids" as young as 6 denied the site is geared to pedophiles.
"We get feedback like, 'I was a parent myself, but unfortunately lost my child in a accident, and it is good to see the children just having fun,'" he said.
"Sorry, we just don't see girls, clothed, usually in bikinis, as harmful or immoral."
In all the years I've been on the internet I've never stumbled across even one child porn web site.
I was under the impression that most child porn was insiders sending it via e-mail,
or maybe member only sites with passwords and such.
Am I wrong?
Are there any FReepers out there that have seen one of these "many hard-core child porn sites," themselves,
rather than "hearing about it from a trusted friend, group, news source, etc"?
Am I the only one who wants the Mossad to off these two subhumans so the rest of us Jews don't look so bad?
You can trust a pedophile. Sure you can.
In the old days, USENET had EVERYTHING. Probably still does.
I love the cartoons in Playboy. One of the best ones I have ever seen is as follows...
A lady answers her door to find a delivery man holding a package in a plain brown wrapper. She has a horrified look on her face. Reason is that the delivery truck is emblazened with "Dildo World" and other adult item descriptions. The delivery guy looks at her and says 'whats the problem, its in a plain brown wrapper'.
That's because you're DUMB.
"Sorry, we just don't see girls, clothed, usually in bikinis, as harmful or immoral."
Considering that bikinis leave the children mostly UNCLOTHED means nothing to people who are concerned about the MONEY. The mentality of a parent who would exploit their own child's body for "college money" is the same as those women who "work" their way through college as strippers. The end justifies the means?
How sickening.
I'll never forget the time I had my van door open and was swiftly changing my toddler child's soiled shirt. A grandfatherly-looking man pulled up next to my van at that moment and got out of his car. He saw my child's exposed belly an instant before I pulled a clean shirt on. His eyes widened and he said, "Beautiful!" in this appreciative voice before walking swiftly away. My child was very young, but not too young to understand that this was not a normal thing for a grown man to say or a normal way for someone's eyes to look at a child. This man gave us ALL the creeps. "Why did he say that? I didn't like that!" I hardly knew how to answer. We were outside the library when this happened, but instead of going in as planned, I drove away, knowing that this guy was now inside.
My child had been called beautiful before, but instinctively knew the difference when it was said inappropriately. The thought of exposing their innocent child's image to the lustful eyes of strangers should send a quiver of wary revulsion down a normal parent's spine.
It is a small step from pictures to live "fashion shows", isn't it? Even children's fashion shows at the mall have always concerned me, given the number of non-parent men who usually gather to watch. What next for these precocious young children? And how soon will they begin to experiment sexually, now that they have crossed the barriers of normal modesty by prancing around nearly naked on camera?
That is why parents need to get savvy with computers and the Internet. They need to set up an ethernet in the house, put NT (Small Business Edition) on the network. Then, they can restrict when the child is able to be on the computer altogether. They can set up setting that automatically "kicks off" the child (identified by their userid/signon) at a certain time. So, they aren't up at all hours, talking to God only knows who. In addition, they can set up very restrictive web preferences (similar to Web Nanny, but more powerful) depending on their child's age.
Unfortunately, most kids know more about this than their parents do.
Sure, parents suffering the incalculable grief associated with the death of a child seek comfort in photos of 11-year-old girls dancing seductively in see-through bras. Makes perfect sense.
Isaiah 5:20 - Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.
Matthew 18:6 - But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.
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