The trade in child pornography

In January 1971 Joop Wilhelmus, the publisher of Chick, was arrested for distribution of the Lolita booklets, containing prototypical child pornography. This did not prevent him from publishing more than 50 other issues of the Lolita series, a magazine featuring some very young girls. In 1986 the report of the U.S. Senate Commission on Child Pornography and Pedophilia described the magazines as "the most notorious of the foreign commercial child pornography," with good reason.

In 1975 Wilhelmus was prosecuted again, this time for photographs of 12-year-old twins from the town of Arnhem, a boy and girl. Small articles appeared in some papers and the news died out quickly. Chief Editor of the sensationalist magazine Panorama, Gerard Vermeulen, called for increased penalties for the parents who had provided the opportunity for the making of the photographs. However, he discredited his appeal shortly thereafter by publishing in Panorama the photographs of a 13-year-old Danish girl who "stripped for grandma and grampa." Those were different times. [...]

We have called the claims about child pornography "myths." The existence of child pornography is certainly not. The myths are the exaggerated estimates of the number of children, the volume and value of the trade, the profits that are alleged to have been made, and the horrifying damage said to have been done to the children. In fact, on many important points our conclusions are more or less the same as the conclusions of the ILIC, the Senate Commission under William Roth, and the De Wit work group [Work Group Child Pornography] in the Netherlands. The results of these findings have not convinced the crusaders in the past, and no doubt our results will be ignored by those whose political agendas are not served by the facts.

source: Article 'The Trade in Child Pornography' by Jan Schuijer & B. R. [edit]; www.ipt-forensics.com/journal/volume4/j4_2_1.htm; IPT Journal, Volume 4; 1992