The children pictured are being abused again every time a paedophileuses an image, writes Kathryn Holmquist
The 110 men arrested for downloading Inter- net images of actual children being sexually abused come from all walks of life and many are in careers which gives them access to children. We tend to think of such men as simply using pictures for private sexual gratification. This is naïve, warns Rachel O'Connell, Cork-born director of the Cyberspace Research Unit at the University of Central Lancashire.
In the US, 36 per cent of men convicted of downloading child pornography have subsequently been convicted of sexually abusing children, says O'Connell.
Just as paedophiles groom children for abuse, the process of using Internet images to fuel sexual arousal around children is a grooming process in itself. The websites celebrate paedophilia, describe it as a normal aspect of sexuality and assert that the children in the pictures enjoy and even instigate the abuse. The children pictured are being abused again every time a paedophile uses an image. "Can you imagine how staggering it is for these children to realise that their image can never be erased from the Internet?" asks O'Connell.
A disturbing increase in the number of adolescent boys, some as young as 13, engaging in online paedophilia has been recorded in New Zealand. Some of these boys have used digital cameras to record and disseminate their abuse of younger brothers and sisters. In the UK, a 13-year-old boy was placed on the paedophile register after being convicted of possessing 300 such images.
O'Connell, who once posed as a child in paedophile chat-rooms as part of the COPINE project at University College Cork, objects to the term "child pornography" because it implies that the children depicted co-operate with the images, which are cleverly manipulated to make the children appear happy, relaxed and seductive.
"These pictures are records of crime scenes," says O'Connell, who has had some success in forensically analysing such pictures in order to trace the perpetrators. Often, the abusers are fathers in what appear to be normal family situations.
Paedophiles may purchase pictures (the 100 arrests on Monday were the result of an FBI investigation which traced credit card numbers), although picture-trading paedophiles collect images of sexual abuse as a perverse hobby. To get new images, you must offer new images in exchange. "Each new image is a new case of sexual abuse," says O'Connell. "And we have evidence that the proportion of new images is increasing faster than before."
Parents worry that children using the Internet may be drawn into such exploitation. In Florence earlier this week, O'Connell participated in the Dotsafe conference, part of a European drive to empower children to protect themselves when using the Internet.
O'Connell has been teaching children how to determine whether a "friend" in a chatroom is genuine or not, encouraging them to record suspicious interactions and showing them how to trace potential paedophiles back to their individual IP numbers.
New software programmes enable Interpol to enter chatrooms and intercept IP numbers, which are unique to every PC.