One of the great legislative challenges of history, from the Hittite abominations to the regulation of internet porn, has been anticipating the latent evils unleashed by man’s ingenuity. Now, child sex dolls—robots engineered to warm to the human touch and disturbingly lifelike in their prepubescent features—are being marketed to pedophiles. Made overseas, they’re increasingly prevalent stateside.
Republican Dan Donovan of Staten Island, a federal prosecutor for 20 years before his election to the House in 2015, has made it his mission to sound the warning about child sex dolls. “When I saw articles on the issues of child sex dolls abroad, I knew I had to act immediately to stop the proliferation of them within the United States,” Donovan said in an email to THE WEEKLY STANDARD. (They’re already illegal in the United Kingdom and hotly debated in Canada.)
To wit, Donovan has proposed the Curbing Realistic Exploitative Electronic Pedophilic Robots (CREEPER) Act to ban their import and make possession of them illegal. Donovan spent an entire career locking up pedophiles and he says that, “Every case has stayed with me—there is no situation where a child was hurt or victimized that doesn’t leave your thoughts.” And now, as then, he adds: “I will do everything possible to stop crimes against children.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials informed Donovan recently that they’d discovered a child sex doll during a crime bust. Which suggests that more will be en route. “This situation shows that these dolls are being shipped here now. The ability to obtain child sex dolls needs to be stopped immediately.” In the United Kingdom, where the dolls’ possession and production are banned by a law similar to the proposed CREEPER Act, police seized 128 of them last year and found that the vast majority of their owners were in possession of child pornography as well.
Thirty-one cosponsors (and counting) have signed on to the CREEPER Act and a Change.org petition in support of the bill bears 163,000 signatures from members of the public. The Stop Abuse Campaign supports the bill and amplifies the warning: “These child sex dolls can normalize a pedophile’s behaviors, emboldening them to harm children, as is often the case with those who view child pornography.” Possession and production of child porn is against federal law and often results in significant jail time.
An aide recently commented in passing that gaining attention and support for the CREEPER Act has been remarkably easy: All you have to do is describe the dolls it would outlaw and people are left in stunned disgust. And the technology could get worse. Noel Sharkey, co-director of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics, says that by using photographs and voice recordings it would be fairly easy to manufacture a sex robot modeled after a real human child.
And yet, there are those who defend child sex dolls as a therapeutic tool. This, despite a lack of any real evidence. A recent academic study of the subject, “Child Sex Dolls and Robots: More Than Just an Uncanny Valley” by Drs. Marie-Helen Maras and Lauren Shapiro, makes the case that use of the dolls encourages pedophilic activity—given that manufacturers aim, and succeed, to make the dolls and robots as realistic as possible.
Indeed, as Maras and Shapiro note, “A known creator of such dolls is Shin Takagi, a self-proclaimed pedophile, who founded a company that sells them (Trottla) in Japan, supposedly as an ‘alternative’ to actual offending.” The authors argue that the dangers of general distribution outweigh any unknown benefits: “Even if real children are not involved in the production of child sex dolls and child sex robots they could be harmed thereafter by users of these objects.”
Sharkey’s organization published a report last year, predicting similar effects. Another unknown danger, Sharkey acknowledges, is the possibility these dolls’ unchecked proliferation could “shift our societal norms to make pedophilia more acceptable.”
Even so, Sharkey allows that “more research needs to be done.” And he proposes that if sufficient study does find that dolls can prevent pedophiliac abusers from realizing their fantasies, then they could be regulated and “handled separately as a therapeutic aid, under supervision of licensed therapists.”
The Foundation for Responsible Robotics is currently surveying pedophiles and consulting therapists to see whether these theoretical benefits have any basis in reality. Their findings so far suggest not. “Some would find a sex robot as a useful masturbatory aid, but it would not reduce their attraction to children. Others are repulsed by the idea of using a robot and say that it would be no substitute for the real thing.” Therapists likewise worry that while it may help satiate some sex criminals, for others “it could be more like a gateway drug.”
Here, Rep. Donovan analogizes—“you don’t give an alcoholic a bottle of liquor”—and points to the slippery slope: “Once a child sex abuser tires of practicing on a doll, it’s a small step to move on to an innocent child.”
What happens if Donovan’s bill does become law? Inevitably new technologies will come along to circumvent its restrictions. The 3D printing of lifelike child sex robots, for instance, could undermine the proposed ban’s implementation in the not-terribly-distant futuristic hellscape that awaits us. “We, of course, should be forward-looking to ensure that the law continues to keep up with technology,” Donovan says. But, for now, he urges colleagues to join him in a decisive strike against the latest depths of high-tech depravity.
