Ask almost anyone about children, and you will hear the same things. We want them safe. We want them educated. We want them to grow into healthy, capable adults with a meaningful future. Few causes command such consensus.
Then look at the results.
We pass education reforms in the name of achievement, yet achievement falls. After two decades of steady gains, national test scores peaked a little more than a decade ago and have since declined, with the steepest losses after 2019. On the most recent Nation’s Report Card, 12th-grade reading and math scores fell to record lows.
- A record 45 percent of high school seniors now score below the most basic level in math.
- Only 31 percent of eighth graders are proficient in science.
Students who were already furthest behind lost the most ground, and the gap between the strongest and weakest students is now the widest ever measured (National Assessment Governing Board, September 2025).
We pass child-protection laws in the name of safety, yet the protections are thin. We say we want to end the sexual exploitation of children. Yet a federal court has now protected the private possession of AI-generated child abuse images. Illinois excuses teachers and librarians who give children material that its own law calls harmful to minors. And Illinois law lets a teenager be treated for a pregnancy caused by an adult without her parents or the state ever being told.
No one set out to do this. Each law had sponsors who presumably meant well, and each policy had a reasonable-sounding purpose. But good intentions do not protect children. Results do. When a stated purpose and a documented result point in opposite directions year after year, the gap itself should be the focus. Nowhere is that gap wider than in the sexual exploitation of children.
A ruling the judges themselves warned against
On August 25, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, the federal appeals court for Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin, upheld the dismissal of one criminal charge against a Wisconsin man accused of using artificial intelligence to generate sexually explicit images of young children (United States v. Anderegg, No. 25-1354).
Prosecutors allege that Steven Anderegg, a software engineer from Holmen, Wisconsin, used an AI image program to generate hundreds of photo-realistic images of prepubescent children, some depicting sexual contact with adult men. The case began when Meta reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children that an Instagram user had sent such images to a teenager and explained how he created them.
Anderegg faces four federal charges: producing the images, distributing them, sending obscene material to a minor under sixteen, and possessing them.
The Court dismissed only the possession charge. It held that the government may not punish a person for keeping such images privately in his own home, so long as they depict children who do not exist. The charges for making, sharing, and sending the images to a child remain in force and are headed toward trial.
The reasoning rests on two Supreme Court decisions. Stanley v. Georgia (1969) held that the government’s power over obscene material ends at the front door of a private home. Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (2002) struck down a federal ban on computer-generated images that “appear to be” children, reasoning that the law against child abuse material rests on harm to the real child used to make it. An image of a child who does not exist, the Court said, records no crime and creates no victim.
The government offered the Court four reasons to treat AI images as real abuse material: they are used to groom children, they normalize sexual interest in children, they feed the market for real material, and they are now so realistic that they make real cases harder to prove. The Supreme Court heard nearly the same arguments in 2002 and rejected them all. A federal appeals court must follow the Supreme Court, so the panel affirmed.
The judges in this case made their personal views clear. Judge John Z. Lee wrote that the panel had “some concerns about the lines these cases draw, but we are not free to redraw them ourselves.” He and Judge Joshua Kolar separately asked the Supreme Court for new guidance, warning: “The stakes are high.”
This is an example of the law working at cross-purposes. The rule in Free Speech Coalition exists because the law protects real children. Yet the tools that create today’s “virtual” images are built from real children. Researchers at Stanford found thousands of suspected child abuse images in a major dataset used to train image-generating AI, more than a thousand of which were confirmed (LAION).
The Internet Watch Foundation reports that offenders now share AI models trained to reproduce specific, identified abuse victims; one forum alone held 202 of them (Harm Without Limits, 2026). So a 2002 ruling written to protect imagination now shields material assembled from real children’s suffering.
The Supreme Court left a door open. It said the government could act if it showed “a significantly stronger, more direct connection” between virtual images and the abuse of real children. That connection now exists in the training data and in the flood of images that consumes investigators’ time. So far, the government has not presented it to a court.
How exploitation actually begins
To understand this issue more fully, it helps to know what the research shows about how children become exploited. Some of the numbers circulating online, such as the claim that 300,000 American children are trafficked each year, rest on a 2001 estimate of children “at risk” across three countries and should be retired (Washington Post Fact Checker). At best, it’s inaccurate and clearly undocumented. The documented picture is sobering enough.
Sexual abuse comes first.
A review of 37 studies found that children with a history of sexual abuse had nearly four times the odds of later commercial sexual exploitation (Laird et al., JAMA Network Open, 2020). A second review found that sexual abuse, specifically, carries that risk more than other forms of mistreatment (De Vries and Goggin, 2020). Most abused children are never trafficked, but abuse opens the door.
The recruiter is usually someone the child knows.
According to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, family members and boyfriends were the leading recruiters of minors, at 44 and 39 percent, respectively (Polaris). Strangers in vans are rare. Trusted adults are common.
Sexual images are the new leverage.
One in five teens report being sextorted, and about three in ten of those report being pressured to meet in person (Thorn, 2025). One in seven young people say they traded sexual images or acts for something of value before turning 18 (Thorn, 2025). Under federal law, any sex act involving a minor that is exchanged for anything of value is a commercial sex act, without the need to prove force (U.S. Department of Justice). In 2025 alone, the national tip line received 1.4 million reports of adults enticing children online (NCMEC).
My judgment, after decades of investigating these crimes, is that a culture that steadily sexualizes children lowers the barriers an abuser must overcome. The documented chain of events is clear: abuse by a known adult, images used as leverage, and subsequent exploitation. Every protective measure that brings a parent or an investigator into that chain to disrupt it will make a difference. The earlier, the better.
Where the law cuts parents and investigators out
In Ginsberg v. New York (1968), the Supreme Court held that states may restrict minors’ access to sexual material even when adults have a right to it. The Court gave two reasons. The law supports parents, who have primary responsibility for raising their children, and the state has an interest in children’s well-being. The Court reaffirmed that principle just last year (Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, 2025). Measured against that principle, Illinois law undermines it on three fronts.
Who must report?
Under the Abused and Neglected Child Reporting Act, a doctor’s duty to report sexual abuse to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services depends on who the abuser is: a parent, relative, household member, caregiver, or someone in a position of trust, such as a teacher or coach (DCFS Manual for Mandated Reporters).
A 22-year-old boyfriend of a 15-year-old falls outside that list. Illinois law treats his conduct as a felony. Yet, the clinician treating her pregnancy has no clear duty to call the state. Texas requires reporting sexual abuse regardless of who the abuser is, and California requires reporting based on the age gap between the child and the adult. Illinois clinicians may report voluntarily, and many do. Likewise, many don’t. The law leaves it to them.
Who must be told?
Until 2022, Illinois required a doctor to notify a parent 48 hours before performing an abortion on a minor, with exceptions for girls abused at home and a court process for others. The General Assembly repealed that law in 2021 (Capitol News Illinois). During the debate, state Rep. Avery Bourne warned that the repeal would increase the risk of sexual abuse, exploitation, and trafficking. Supporters countered that notice endangers girls whose parents abuse them. The old law already exempted those girls. Illinois’s birth control law likewise allows a doctor to provide contraception to a minor referred by a physician, clergy member, or Planned Parenthood, with no parental notice at all (325 ILCS 10/1).
Put those two laws together. A 15-year-old can be brought for care by the adult who got her pregnant, and neither her parents nor the state need ever learn of it. No one designed that outcome. The laws produce it anyway.
Who is shielded?
Illinois makes it a crime to give minors material that appeals to their prurient interest, offends adult standards of what suits children, and lacks serious value for minors, the Ginsberg standard. Yet the same law gives schools, public libraries, and their employees a defense that no one else receives (720 ILCS 5/11-21). Librarians argue the defense protects them from prosecution over contested books, and courts already judge “value for minors” by the standard of older teenagers, which limits the law’s reach. The exemption covers even material that fails that test, and the adult who provides it to a child is exactly the kind of person Ginsberg expected the law to hold accountable.
Meanwhile, Illinois’s 2021 sex education law directs districts that teach the subject to align with national standards and vet outside materials. It guarantees parents the right to opt their children out in writing (Hodges Loizzi summary). That right is only as strong as parents’ knowledge of what the materials contain.
The same pattern across the country
Forty-seven states now criminalize AI-generated child abuse images, most since 2024 (Enough Abuse). Nearly all punish possession, and following Anderegg, those possession provisions face the same constitutional challenge, starting in Wisconsin. New York’s Sen. Patricia Fahy has already introduced a bill in response (NY Senate). Congress has passed the TAKE IT DOWN Act, which targets the publication of sexual deepfakes. Still, no federal bill yet addresses the ruling.
Other states are moving in the opposite direction from Illinois on school and library material. Arkansas removed its librarians’ defense, and a federal appeals court let that change stand in July (Eighth Circuit). Missouri’s Supreme Court heard argument this month on a law making it a crime to give students explicit sexual material. About three dozen states still require a parent’s involvement before a minor’s abortion (Guttmacher Institute).
What you can do
The stakes are a child’s safety, and several deadlines are approaching.
Ask the Justice Department to seek Supreme Court review.
The government has until about November 23 to file a petition. Write to the Office of the Solicitor General, U.S. Department of Justice, 950 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20530. Ask it to petition in Anderegg or to bring the next case with a full record on AI tools trained on real victims.
Call your U.S. Representative and both Senators.
Ask them to document, in formal findings, how AI-generated abuse images are built from real victims and how they drain resources meant to rescue real children. That record is what the Supreme Court said it needs.
Contact your Illinois legislators.
Ask them to require reporting whenever any adult sexually abuses a minor, regardless of the adult’s identity; to require parental consent for abortions; and to hold schools and libraries to the same harmful-to-minors standard as everyone else.
Know what your children are taught and shown.
Ask your district for its sex education materials, including all outside resources. Use your right to opt out if they fall short.
Protect your children now.
Talk with them about adults and strangers who send or request sexual images. Check their message settings. Report any such contact to the CyberTipline at report.cybertip.org or 1-800-843-5678.
We say we want children to be safe, educated, and whole. Our sincerity is measured by what our laws actually require.
Right now, the laws show we are all talk.
