Girl Models

Amber seems like a typical 11-year-old girl who loves horses and hates chores. Her website shows her hugging a stuffed white rabbit and playing dress-up.

But her site also contains photographs that are only available to dues-paying members.

For $25 a month, "Lil' Amber" fans can ogle pictures of the little girl coyly hiking up her miniskirt or posing in a bikini on a faux bearskin rug. For $50, they can purchase a video of Amber "dancing and running around" in outfits that leave little to the imagination.

The money goes to her college fund, the site says.

Lil' Amber is one of several websites featuring "models" as young as 9 owned by Webe Web Corporation, an Internet hosting company in Florida. A list of the sites is available at Child Super Models.

Watchdog groups say the sites smack of pornography, but Webe Web argues that the sites constitute a perfectly legal enterprise.

"This is definitely not kiddie porn in any form," said Webe Web spokesman Evan Gordon. "None of our sites have naked children."

Gordon said that the child modeling sites were inspired by a birthday party thrown for a friend's 9-year-old daughter. Pictures of the Spice Girls-themed party were posted on the Internet, and within a week they were getting 20,000 page views a day, he said.

"We decided to see if there was a market for this and there was," Gordon said.

The company started charging access to the site, which morphed into Jessithekid.com. Members can browse photos of a little blonde girl practicing yoga in a white leotard or strutting down a homemade runway in swimsuits. The site also sells videos of a coifed Jessi engaged in childish pursuits such as baking cookies or carving a pumpkin.

It proved to be a successful business model. Soon, other parents were contacting Webe Web to enlist their daughters.

Gordon said he had no idea why someone would shell out $25 a month to browse pictures of little girls in bikinis.

"That's something you'd need to ask a psychology professor," he said.

Mitchell Earleywine, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California, responded:

"Beats the hell out of me. I'm really at a loss why anyone would pay to look at these photos."

Earleywine said that men who are attracted to children tend to exhibit poor social skills and confusion on how dating works.

"I would encourage men who are on this site to seek professional help," Earleywine said.

But there's one thing Webe Web is sure about: The girl model sites are profitable.

"Many of these girls are making more money than their parents make," Gordon said, adding that while the company has been accused of exploiting children, he has no reservations about the sites.

"If you had a cute dog that I could put up on the Web and make money off of, I'd do that too," he said.

Webe Web also runs another business: hardcore porn sites, including Home From School. (The site www.homefromschool.com was taken down soon after an interview with Webe Web.)

Gordon said he was "irked" by a question of whether the company's child-modeling sites and porn sites were related and insisted there was no crossover between the company's two lines of business.

The images on sites such as Lil' Amber fall into a murky legal area, said Parry Aftab, a lawyer and the director of Cyberangels, an Internet safety and education group.

"This is utterly and absolutely distasteful, and I think it would invoke child abuse, but it's probably not illegal," said Aftab.

While the law explicitly prohibits images of minors engaged in real or simulated sex, it also forbids depictions of children designed to elicit sexual arousal.

In a landmark 1995 case, a Pennsylvania man was sentenced to jail for possessing videotapes of young girls posing provocatively in skimpy clothing. It was the first such conviction dealing with this issue in which the genitals were not exposed.