of 1984.

The President's Commission on Uniform Sentencing is a
According to the Department of

result of this Act.

Justice,

385

The principal goal of the Sentencing Reform Act is
to establish a uniform, determinate federal
sentencing system that will accomplish the purpose
of just punishment, deterrence, incapacitation, and
rehabilitation. This goal is to be achieved
primarily through the use of sentencing guidelines
established by a Presidentially appointed
Sentencing Commission, which will be composed of
seven full time members and a staff. At least
three members must be active federal judges who
will not be required to resign from the bench to
serve on the Commission. The initial set of
guidelines is to be completed in eighteen months.
In the course of its work, the Commission will
examine the offense and offender characteristics
that judges now consider in making sentencing
determinations, and will determine which of those
should be reflected in the guidelines, which ones
occur so infrequently that they should not be
considered in the guidelines but might justify a
departure from the guidelines, and which ones
386
should not affect the sentence at all.

In addition, the President's Commission on Uniform Sentencing should specifically consider the problems associated with sentencing obscenity law violations.

SOURCE:

ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICES OF THE UNITED STATES COURTS.

385 United States Department of Justice, Handbook on the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 and other Criminal Statutes Enacted by the 98th Congress 31 (1984).

386 Id.

Chapter 3

Child Pornography

the

No clearer measure exists of the radical shift in issues confronted by the Commission on Ctscenity and Pornography in 1970 and those facing this one than the problem of child pornography. In its description of "the industries" producing sexually explicit material the 1970 Commission nowhere mentioned or alluded to child pornography,387

and its Traffic and Distribution Panel reported that "[t]he taboo against pedophilia

. has remained almost inviolate" even in the hardest of "hard-core" materials.388 The recommendations of the 1970

Commission included repeal of all laws restraining distribution of sexually explicit materials to children; no exception was stated for materials depicting children engaged in sexual

conduct.389

This

Commission, by contrast, has devoted a very substantial proportion of its time and energy to examining the extent and nature of child pornography. Indeed, one set of the Commission's hearings was devoted almost entirely to the problem, while extensive oral and written testimony on the subject was

387

Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography

7-23 (19705

388 Id. at 139.

389 Id. at 57-67.

received throughout the year. No aspect of the pornography industry has more occupied the attention of Congress and the general public during the past decade, and this Commission has made a wide range of recommendations for further legislative and public action. The very novelty of child pornography as a matter for public concern, however, requires at least a general overview of the rise of the "kiddie porn" industry, the nature of and the rationale for the governmental response to it, the effects the children involved, and the contours of the industry's surviving components. That overview must begin with attention to what "child pornography" by definition is and what it is not.

on

Drawings of children engaged in sexual intercourse with adults date at least from ancient Greece,390 and a graphic written description of child sexual abuse was to be found in seventeenth century France.391 Yet although these portrayals or accounts might be deemed "obscene," and although they deeply offend modern sensibilities regarding the rearing and protection of children, they are not "child pornography" in the specific legal and clinical sense that term has acquired over the past fifteen years. As defined by the United States Supreme Court in the 1982 decision, New York v. Ferber, the category of "child pornography" is "limited to works that visually depict sexual

390 See, Photographic vase drawings in K. J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (1978).

391 See, description of P. Aries, Centuries of Childhood 100-102 (1962) (diary of Heroard, physician to Henri IV, who set down graphic details of sexual "play" with the child Louis XIII).