He was supposed to take a photo

Nicholas Kristof

Sunday, March 30, 2014 | 2 a.m.

One of Raven Kaliana’s first, hazy memories is of her parents taking her to a professional photo studio, telling her to be good, and then leaving her with a child pornographer. In front of a camera, a man raped her.

She thinks she was 4 years old.

Throughout elementary school in the American West, Kaliana’s parents took her to studios during vacations or over three-day weekends. Her parents said that these forays paid the bills and that she’d get over it.

“Around the time I was 11, my value started going down because I was beginning to look more like an adult,” Kaliana recalls. “So they started putting me in more dangerous films, things involving torture or gang rape or extreme fetishes.”

Yet Kaliana triumphed: She says that in college she escaped her parents’ control, changed her name and began fighting child abuse. She has produced a puppet play and short film, “Hooray for Hollywood,” based on her own traumatic experiences.

Now living in Britain, Kaliana is trying to use the film — which employs puppets and is not at all explicit — to raise awareness about child sexual abuse and to encourage frank talk about the problem.

“This happens all over the world; it happens in America,” she said. “It’s not necessarily children being kidnapped and swept away. A lot of times it’s someone the child trusts: family members or a minister or a coach.”

A Justice Department study reports that 21 million unique computer IP addresses were tracked while sharing child pornography files in 2009, more than 9 million of them in the United States. It’s not clear how many individuals that represented because some people may have used multiple computers.

It’s also not clear how many children are abused to generate child pornography, but, in 2011, law enforcement authorities in the United States turned over 22 million such images and videos to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to try to identify the victims.

With enormous frustration, police watched one girl they called Vicky being abused year after year; she grew up in wrenching images on their screens. Finally, she was located and her father was arrested for exploiting her.

There’s sometimes a perception that child pornography is about teenage girls pulling off their tops. That’s not remotely what we’re talking about.

“If we were starting over, we wouldn’t call it child pornography,” says Ernie Allen, president of the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “This is different. This is not pornography. These are crime scene photos. These are photos of the abuse of a child.”

Of the images the national center has examined, 76 percent involve prepubescent children with no signs of sexual maturation. One in 10 are infants or toddlers.

More than three-quarters of image series involve sexual penetration, and 44 percent involve bondage or sadomasochism.

“People don’t have an understanding of the kind of content and how horrific it is,” said Julie Cordua, executive director of Thorn, an organization that uses digital strategies to fight sex trafficking.

Law enforcement has made progress, and child pornography is no longer readily available for sale on the Internet or easy to find in Web searches or on public websites. Instead it is typically traded on peer-to-peer networks or inside password-protected chat rooms.

Just a few days ago, authorities made 14 arrests in connection with a password-protected child pornography website that had 27,000 members. More than 250 children, the youngest 3 years old, were identified in 39 states as having been abused in photos on the site.

I’m also sympathetic to the anonymous hacker who recently took over an entry site to the “dark Web” — used for all kinds of illicit purposes — and scrubbed it of child pornography links.

While it’s important to punish perpetrators, it’s also critical to offer help to pedophiles who want it, so as to prevent abuse. Germany has public service announcements advertising a phone number for pedophiles to call to get counseling, and that’s worth trying here.

As for Kaliana, she is no longer in touch with her parents, for whom she has complex feelings that include fear.

“When I was a child, I loved them very much even though they did awful things to me,” she said. “They were in denial. I feel compassion for them.”

Nicholas Kristof is a columnist for The New York Times.