Behind every child porn image on the Internet is an abused child, writes Kathryn Holmquist
This week, intelligence gathered at University College Cork led to the arrest of a suspected paedophile in Thailand. This is the third time that UCC's COPINE (Combating Paedophile Information Networks in Europe) project has led to a specific arrest. UCC has also been involved in 40 per cent of the identifications of children pictured being abused on the Internet in Ireland and in the UK in the past four years. Behind each abusive image on the Internet is an abused child, who experiences not only the trauma of sexual abuse, but also the added trauma of multiple exposure to countless individuals. Furthermore, once an image appears on the Internet, it can be endlessly reproduced, and remains readily available despite the apprehension of offenders.
Developments in the Internet are making even more sophisticated and abusive material available, such as full-length videos. Pictures range from little girls in white dresses and white ankle socks, to children being raped. But there is no such thing as "mild" child pornography, says child exploitation expert Prof Max Taylor of the Department of Applied Psychology and the COPINE project at UCC. The intent of the pictures is always the same: to generate fantasies of sexual abuse of children for the purposes of masturbation."There is no other reason that anyone looks at these pictures. And that immediately takes it out of the area of 'mild'." The second reason why you cannot judge pictures as mild, is that we know from studies that the effects on the child can be varied. The same abuse may affect different children differently.
Third, we don't know what is happening in the pictures. "It is highly unlikely that the perpetrator would stop when the child gets undressed," says Taylor. So the extent to which the child has been harmed cannot be objectively measured in a photograph.
One in five men who download Internet pictures also abuse children in real time outside the Internet, often taking pictures as they do so. One US study put this figure at 36 per cent of Internet paedophiles. The more pictures a man has downloaded, the more dangerous he is to children in his environment, because it reflects the intensity of his interest, says Taylor. Possessing a large number could require trading with other paedophiles and that usually involves production of these pictures.
A spate of high-profile investigations of men in the entertainment industry, most recently former Who guitarist Pete Townshend, as well as the 100 investigations in Ireland resulting from Operation Amethyst, are beginning to convince the public that paedophilia is not a rare perversion confined to Third World sex tourism.
While there is, as yet, no evidence that children are being sexually abused and photographed for Internet websites in Ireland, it is likely that this has happened, says Taylor. Using child pornography for sexual gratification is far more common than we think, and it is not a mental illness, Taylor stresses. It is an irresponsible choice to engage in risky behaviour. And in any room of 100 people, the probability is that there is a paedophile in their midst, he adds. These men tend to be highly intelligent, well-resourced and extremely manipulative of others.
Townshend has denied using child pornography and claims to have been doing research. However, as Taylor has pointed out, research by members of the public is against the law. No one except the Garda and people working with them may download these images.
Catching Internet paedophiles is important, but far more resources must go towards rescuing the children in the pictures, he argues.
The only people who can judge whether child pornography is "mild" or not are trained experts, he asserts. In the UK, a scale is used when sentencing, which directly relates the sentence to the level of abuse against the child in the pictures. An offender with a thousand images would normally get a prison sentence.
Intelligence gathered by Taylor's department led to the arrest by Greater Manchester Police on Tuesday of a British man, Robert Errol Wood, in Thailand, on suspicion of abusing young boys, and producing abusive images of children. The type of images that are then used for masturbation by Internet paedophiles. Insp Terry Jones of the Abusive Images Unit of Greater Manchester Police describes the co-operation between UCC and the Manchester Police as "brilliant".
Tackling the problem of child pornography on the Internet presents enormous difficulties for governments, the information technology industries and society in general. Who takes responsibility for the identification of the children involved in child pornography that we see on the Internet?
Since 1998, about 100 such children have been identified, but this does not represent the huge number being exploited. COPINE research suggests that new children are appearing in highly abusive images in publicly accessible areas of the Internet at the rate of about three or four a month; in excess of 50 children are appearing each month in images involving nudity and erotic posing. A disturbing new trend is evidence of a growing involvement of organised crime exploiting this market, through pay Websites.
"Men who purchase child pornography on the Internet are contributing financially to organised crime, which also includes trafficking in human organs and trafficking children for the purposes of sexual abuse," says Taylor.
The children seen being abused in Internet pornography can come from anywhere in the world, and there is no single agency which takes responsibility for monitoring and investigating the origins of these children. The 2nd International Congress Against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children proposed that a step towards this would be the establishment of a Child Pornography Observatory, drawing on a range of disciplines and professions to address this problem.
Regulation is a huge problem. COPINE research suggests in excess of 50,000 abusive images of children are posted to newsgroups alone each month, and the number appears to be growing. Government policy seeks to develop self-regulation of the Internet industry to control this and other problems. Two principal industries could also take responsibility - Internet Service Providers and credit card companies. However, given the apparent inability of existing structures to deal with this problem, hard questions have to be asked about the adequacy of self-regulation as a means of controlling this problem.
Since the UCC project was founded five years ago, the extent of abusive images of children on the Internet has grown, and efforts to control the problem seem largely ineffective. Taylor believes major efforts have been put into improving police co-ordination and capacity, yet these efforts have yielded little in terms of reducing the amount of material available, or increasing the number of children identified.