STOLEN FLOWER CONFERENCE AND PRESS COVERAGE

PRESS

LONDON, TUESDAY, 7 AUGUST, 1990

British Children In Porn
by Lois Rogers

CHILD pornography campaigner Phillip Carlo was on his way to Scotland Yard today with what he claimed was evidence of British children I pedophile films.

He arrived in London with photos and catalogues of videos openly on sale in Amsterdam sex shops.

He also spoke at today's opening of the International Conference on Incest at Northwick Park Hospital, Harrow, and urged an international clampdown on the trade. The conference was told that one child in 10 is sexually abused.

Mr. Carlo, a 41-year-old writer from New York, said the film in which English voices were audible involved naked children playing on a beach.

And he claims to have evidence that snuff movies do exist. Posing as a Texan millionaire with pedophile proclivities, he was taken to lunch by an Amsterdam sex shop owner who asked if he would be interested in financing pornographic films.

"I told him I was interested in the really hard-core stuff. It took several hours, but at the end of the day he showed me a film in which a five-year-old South American girl was killed during a sex act.

"The Dutch police are not interested in this kind of thing, they turn a blind eye. But I am hoping to get more response from Scotland Yard." Mr. Carlo started his campaign eight years ago when his girlfriend committed suicide, unable to come to terms with being sexually abused as a child.

He said Liechtenstein is the centre of the pedophile movie industry because it is the only place in Europe which does not outlaw it.

"Children as young as two and three are appearing in soft-core porn which you can easily get in the Amsterdam red light district.

Showing photographs of explicit pictures on video-tape boxes, he told the conference: "Holland outlawed child pornography in 1986, partly as a result of my efforts, but I was offered this stuff just a few months ago.

"Child soft-core pornography must be stopped. All it is is a cover for hard-core porn and an encouragement to pedophiles. Some of these films are the documentation of child rape."

Mr. Carlo says he has interviewed a girl of eight who had already spent two years working in a Naples brothel of children.

The 200 delegates also heard from Harley Street psychotherapist Vera Diamond, co-organiser of the conference. She said it was impossible to know how prevalent child sex abuse is adding: "Some American estimates go as high as one child in four, but I would say it is somewhere between one in 10 and one in four."

TUESDAY, 7 AUGUST, 1990, LONDON

Childline Director Calls For Royal Commission
by Lin Jenkins

A ROYAL commission on child pornography and sexual abuse is urgently needed to prevent any increase after the relaxation of trade barriers in 1932, Valerie Howarth, director of Childline, said yesterday.

She said such a move was the only way of assessing the extent of the scourge, how offenders could be treated and the way in which pedophiles could be stopped in this country. Miss Howarth told an international conference on incest and related matters at Harrow, northwest London: "In this country our laws are much tighter than anywhere else in Europe.

"Child pornography is nothing more than abuse on film and, as we get towards 1992, we have to look at whether we are going to get a better or a worse system to protect our children."

People convicted of sexually abusing children were at present released from prison "a better abuser than when they went in", she said.

Miss Horwarth said that her experience of offenders in Wandsworth jail, southwest London, showed that the system of locking them up together meant that they swapped stories on how to get hold of children. "Pedophiles are clever and sophisticated, and all they do in prison is increase their sophistication."

She said that Childline received 10,000 calls a day, and that the most common complaint from children was that they were asked to copy acts seen on video. Resources to deal with the problems were still scarce, she said, and medical students, police, social workers and other care-service workers were inadequately trained to recognize the symptoms or to deal with them. Miss Horwarth's call for a royal commission has been echoed by Det. Inspector Sylvia Ashton, the West Midlands police force adviser on rape and child sexual abuse.

"It is totally illegal to be in possession of child pornography here. But laws are different elsewhere, and we have to know if these things will be easier to get hold of in 1992," she said.

Miss Ashton added that people in positions of trust were often responsible for child sexual abuse. "If your child says that someone has been taking photographs, then ask questions. This is the starting point of pornography. Don't just ignore what children say." Nursing Times is also launching a campaign this week backing the call for a royal commission on the issue.

Delegates told the three-day conference that nobody had examined the effects of 1992 on the issue, and said that the legal age of consent for homosexuals in Europe varied from the age of 14 to 21. Evidence that videos involving child pornography are made in Liechtenstein and are freely available in Amsterdam, was presented by Philip Carlo, an American author of a novel about child pornography.

TUESDAY, 7 AUGUST, 1990
Published in London and Manchester

10,000 A Day Call Child Abuse Line
by Chris Mihill
Medical Correspondent

Ten thousand telephone calls are made every day to Childline, the organization set up to help abused children, its executive director told a conference yesterday. The calls are logged by British Telecom, but only 1,500 a day can get through on the available lines

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Philip Carlo, an American author on child pornography, told the conference that most videos involving children were made by a firm in Liechtenstein and were freely available form Amsterdam. Some involved children and adults with British accents.

He said that during his researches he had been offered a "snuff movie" [in which the victim is murdered] and believed its scenes showing a five-year-old girl being abused and having her throat cut were real.

He intended to take his evidence to Scotland Yard.