EXCLUSIVE: Republican Moves To Close ‘Loophole’ Letting Child Predators Off The Hook

A North Carolina Republican hopes to close a loophole in a federal law that he says allows child predators to get away with making sexually explicit videos featuring young children. 

Congressman Mark Harris introduced legislation on Monday that would allow predators to be punished for producing pornographic videos with children in the background, his office told The Daily Wire. He said that prosecutors sometimes have trouble bringing cases where a child may be seen in a pornographic video, but not engaged in an actual sexual act. 

“Protecting our children from sexual exploitation is one of the government’s most sacred duties — yet dangerous loopholes in federal law allow predators to evade justice and exploit minors,” Harris said. “We must act now to close these gaps, eliminate ambiguities, and equip law enforcement with tools to prosecute criminals fully and without excuse.”

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Harris’s office pointed to a decision from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals where a man named Matthew Howard had two convictions of producing child pornography vacated on a technicality. 

“The videos in question do not depict a child engaged in sexually explicit conduct; they show Howard masturbating next to a fully clothed and sleeping child. In other words, the videos are not child pornography,” the court said in an August 3, 2020 ruling. 

The court said that the government’s case against Howard stretched the “statute beyond the natural reading of its terms considered in context.”

Harris says his bill would clarify the law to classify those videos as child pornography, arguing they harm children regardless of how the child was involved. It would amend “federal law in three parts to ensure that videos intentionally depicting a minor in a sexually exploitative context – regardless of their role in the act – are treated as child exploitation under federal law,” his office said. 

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Under the definitions put forth in the legislation, intentionally depicting a child in a sexually explicit video would come with a 15-year minimum prison sentence. The bill is titled the ‘‘Child Predators Accountability Act of 2025.”

“Congress must act now to strengthen our laws and deliver real protections, ensuring that criminals who use children in any sexually exploitative context face real justice,” Harris told The Daily Wire.