Childp PDF

06 6464 pornography report
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Child abuse, child pornography

and the internet
John Carr
Internet Consultant, NCH
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Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Child abuse through contact offences
Child pornography child abuse images
Looking at numbers
The importance of the US
An agenda for reform
Conclusions
Endnotes
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Child abuse, child pornography and the internet
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Acknowledgements
I accept complete responsibility for everything which
appears in this report but I would like to thank the
following people for reading early drafts or for
encouraging me to write it at all: Liz Kelly, Child and
Woman Abuse Studies Unit, London Metropolitan
University; Annie Mullins, Vodafone; Shaun Kelly,
Caroline Abrahams and Helen Crow, NCH; Chris
Atkinson, NSPCC and, of course, Glenys Thornton,
my wife.
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Foreword
Access to the internet via computers and a range
of other digital communications devices1 are
increasingly a modern day must have for children
and young people in the UK and many other
countries. Not only are they establishing new
cultural norms, they are also becoming
mainstream within education.
I do not doubt for one moment that for the vast
majority of children and young people, for the
great majority of the time, access to the internet
will be positively useful and a source of perfectly
innocent fun and games. But every child or young
person who uses the internet will almost certainly
be exposed at some time to materials that will
shock and possibly harm them, or they will come
into contact with organisations or individuals who
mean them no good. Only one such encounter
needs to go wrong for potentially disastrous
consequences to follow.
According to the UKs Office of National Statistics,
in the second quarter of 2003 12 million
households had access to the internet at home.
That is 48 per cent of all households, and is five
times larger than the equivalent number in the
second quarter of 1998. By August 2003, according
to OFTEL, the percentage of homes with internet
access had risen to 50 per cent. The rate of growth
in internet usage at home has been huge and
rapid, and often seems to have outstripped our
capacity to meet many of the new challenges that
have arrived in its wake.
Households with children are more likely to have
internet access than other households. In 2002,
according to the British Educational
Communications and Technology Agency, 68 per
cent of 518 year olds had internet access at home
and the numbers are still rising. In November
2003, over 99 per cent of all schools in the UK had
internet access, with 91 per cent of secondary
schools in England and Wales already on
broadband. A study published by Nielsens Ratings
in September 2003 showed the UK had 4.5 million
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under-18s regularly using the internet, the highest

number in the whole of the EU, with the fastest
growth happening among under-12s. Across the
whole world the number of children and young
people regularly using the internet is now running
towards the eighty million mark,2 and this number
is also still rising. The same Nielsens Ratings
study showed that 27 million American children
between the ages of two and 17 are internet users,
and that is one in five of all US internet users.
These are all big numbers, thus it is important
never to forget that when we refer to the
probability that only a small proportion of children
who use the internet might come to harm on it,
this can still encompass very many young human
beings. If we only ever talk in percentages we can
be deceived.
Moreover it is anyway wrong, or frequently
unhelpful, to speak of children and young people as
if they were an undifferentiated mass. Within any
large group of children and young people who use
or will use the internet there will be specific
subgroups who will be more or less vulnerable,
either some or all of the time. There are, for
example, a range of children and young people with
learning difficulties, needy or very young children,
or children and young people who may just be
going through a particularly difficult period of their
lives. They all use the internet, or will do soon.
Civilised society has a duty to all children and
young people, not just some, but the burden of
that duty will differ according to the varied needs
of each individual child or young person. One size
does not fit all.
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Our task as parents, carers, teachers, law

enforcement officials, policy makers, owners or
directors of internet companies, government officials
or as other kinds of public agencies, is to try to
ensure that all children and young people, of all ages
and from all kinds of backgrounds, with all kinds of
abilities and needs, are appropriately educated
about, made aware of, and prepared for what they
might encounter on the internet, just as we educate
them about, make them aware of and prepare them
for so many other areas of lifes attendant hazards.
The internet is just the newest and latest
phenomenon with which we need to grapple.
However, some of us also have additional duties.
Some of us also have a responsibility to ensure
that everything that can reasonably be done at a
technological level is being done to reinforce and
support these wider educational and awareness
messages. It is this combination, of education and
awareness on the one hand, linked to improved
technological solutions and support on the other,
that holds the key to protecting children and young
people in the digital age. At the moment we have
not got the balance right. I hope we will get it right
in the very near future. We need an increased
sense of urgency, especially as, at the time of
writing, we are on the cusp of yet another major
technological revolution.
With the development of GPRS mobile telephone
networks, and with the imminent, large-scale
arrival of the 3G networks, linked to the increased
availability of highly sophisticated telephone
handsets and a variety of forms of wireless
connections, the internet is going mobile. This is
very likely to add a new layer of complexity to all,
or at any rate many, of the issues discussed in
this report.
John Carr
London
December 2003
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Introduction
The sexual abuse of children and young people is a

phenomenon that predates the arrival of the
internet by many, many centuries. It follows paths
that are now well understood by the police and by
the other professionals who work with abused
children or with sex offenders.
Not so well understood are the ways in which the
internet is helping to create new pathways to the
old forms of abuse, and how it is also helping to
create new forms of abuse.
One of the central aims of this report is to draw
together what we now know about the different
types of sexually abusive behaviour, old and new,
to which children and young people who use the
internet can fall prey, and it seeks to determine to
what extent the internet facilitates that behaviour.
The report also tries to assess to what extent the
arrival of the internet as a mass consumer product
has led, or is likely to lead, to an overall increase in
the level of sexual offending against children and
young people.
A second and closely related major aim of the
report is to draw together what we now know
about the distribution of child pornography over
the internet and the associated abuse that goes
with the production of those images. The report
discusses the role that child pornography can play
in stimulating people with a sexual interest in
children to go on to commit real-world offences
against children.
The report concludes by setting out various
proposals for reforms that are designed to
enhance the protection of children and young
people on the internet and to reduce the amount
of child pornography in circulation on the internet.
Legislation plays little or no part in this
prospectus, although views on the need to use
legislation may well change if the broad range of
companies that now make up the internet
industry do not respond positively within a
reasonable timeframe.
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I argue that the arrival of the internet has almost

certainly led to an increase in the volume of child
pornography in circulation and to an increase in
the overall level of sexual offending against
children and young people. It has also almost
certainly led to an overall increase in the
exposure of children and young people to a wider
range of undesirable or age-inappropriate sexual
materials, that are abusive in character or may
become so. The reason this report focuses
primarily on undesirable or age-inappropriate
sexual materials, is because of the way they are
often linked to the sexual abuse of children, but it
would be a mistake for anyone to believe that
sexual materials are the only ones that concern
parents, or indeed children themselves. I further
suggest that, short of countervailing measures
being taken, all of these trends are likely to
continue and get worse, therefore ever larger
numbers of children and young people will be
harmed or put at risk.
The key conclusions I have just set out are put in
a rather provisional or tentative way. In the main
this is because there are a number of major
methodological problems associated with proving
them incontrovertibly, eg certain benchmark data,
from pre-internet days, simply do not exist. Also,
in this particular area of inquiry, there are a range
of insurmountable ethical obstacles to research,
eg you cannot deliberately expose children and
young people to hardcore or illegal pornography
over a prolonged period simply in order to try to
measure its effects on them. However I believe
that any reasonable examination of the evidence
that is already available points ineluctably
towards certain very obvious conclusions.
That said, this report still in no way tries to claim it
is the final word on any or all of the issues it
discusses. What it very definitely does seek to do,
however, is give shape, structure and coherence to
some of the larger emerging issues that continue
to capture the publics, the medias and policy
makers attention, and to air key aspects of the
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current state of thinking, at least among those

whose principal concern is the protection of
children and young people.
Having reached my conclusions, I want also to
make it very clear that I am most certainly not
trying to blame the internet itself for these trends or
developments nor, emphatically, does it mean I
believe in any kind of technological determinism.
The internet is not an actor in its own right. The
internet is merely a technology, a conduit. It has
brought, and continues to bring, huge benefits to
society in general and to children and young people
in particular. It is only through human agency,
through deliberate or accidental acts, that the
internet can be turned to harmful use. However, if
we are to have a good understanding of what needs
to be done to protect and support children and
young people in the digital age, we need to focus as
specifically as we can on the new modalities of
abuse that the internet has made possible.
The report relies mainly on UK data. The challenge
is to construct a similar report based on data
drawn from many more countries. Are there
differences between children and young peoples
exposure to online risks according to where they
live? If there are, how do we explain them? If there
are not, what does that tell us?
The report touches on a broad range of issues, but
it focuses principally on the two areas that have
been of most concern to policy makers:
(i) contact offences: real-world sexual
offences against children that begin on
or are commissioned by or through one
of the internets interactive technologies,
typically a chatroom
(ii) the production, circulation and possession
of child abuse images
The report also looks at the connection between (i)
and (ii) as this seems to be at the heart of so many
of the current debates about online child
protection strategies and tactics, and related law
enforcement strategies and tactics.
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Child abuse through contact offences
The term contact offence describes criminal

behaviour that is sexually abusive in nature and
involves some kind of physical activity in the real
world. The most extreme form of contact offence is
rape, but the term also encompasses other forms
of sexual assault or inciting others to perform
illegal sexual acts.
Contact offences can be committed by adults on
other adults, and by legal minors on other legal
minors, but in the context of this report the term
refers only to situations where an adult3 commits
or seeks to commit a sexual offence involving a
person below the age of consent for sex, ie a child
under 16.4 In this report, except where the context
provides otherwise, all references to children and
young people refer to persons under the age of 16.
In relation to the internet, the term contact
offence is also used to distinguish real-world
behaviours from mere online exposure to
certain materials, eg illegal child abuse images or
even certain types of pornographic images or
materials that are probably legal but which are
age-inappropriate.5 As Utting and others have
noted,6 exposure to material of this kind can play
a decisive part in desensitising children. Among
other things, this might make the children more
vulnerable to improper sexual contacts with
adults. Paedophiles7 often use hardcore
pornography as part of a sexual grooming
process, a process of manipulation and
entrapment.
The family and social circle

Historically most child sex abuse has taken place
within existing family or social circles. We also
know that a significant amount of child abuse took
place where children were in care, being looked
after by adults who were not their parents8 or who
enjoyed some other kind of position of trust, eg
from within a faith community or linked to leisure
or sporting activities. For adults already engaged
in such abuse the internet can therefore become a
means of finding new or alternative victims outside
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these established family or social circles or

institutional settings. But the internet also allows
adults who might not be party to such circles or
settings, or who may, at least initially, be inhibited
from offending within them, to make contact with
new children in new places.
There have always been a small number of cases
each year9 where a complete stranger has sexually
assaulted a child, abducted or even murdered
them. These continue to happen and are in no way
necessarily linked to the existence of the internet.
Typically such crimes are opportunist in nature,
and they depend upon the murderer, rapist or
abductor finding a potential victim in particular realworld circumstances. What we now have, courtesy
of the internet, is an additional possibility of a
person finding a child with whom they have had no
previous contact or knowledge. Thus, even though a
great deal of thought and preparation may have
been put into engineering or contriving the
circumstances in which an encounter might take
place, the crime itself is still, essentially, opportunist10
in nature and to that extent there is no doubt that
the internet has created a completely new route to
committing an old and familiar crime.11 In the UK
thankfully, as far as we know at the time of writing,
no such online encounters have led to a murder12 but
many have led to rapes or other forms of serious
sexual assaults.13
Interactive technologies
On the internet adults who are intent on or who
may become involved with sexually abusing
children can locate them and make the initial
contact using an array of different interactive,
communications technologies.14 These can
facilitate both one-to-many virtual contact and
one-to-one virtual contact. They can promote an
abusive relationship or allow it to develop without
the necessity for participants to meet in real life.
An early face-to-face encounter in the real world
might have shown or suggested the true age or
disposition of the stranger. Now the would-be
abuser can delay that initial encounter, perhaps
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for a long time, or at any rate until a time when

they judge, through a grooming process, they
have formed such a close bond with the child that
the revelation will not be viewed as a destructive
form of deceit.
The internet has therefore introduced a new or
intermediary stage in the development of certain
sorts of relationships. It has created the possibility
of a kind of intimacy at arms length that, in
former times, could only have been attempted
through correspondence and therefore was very
different indeed. A paedophile can work with this
intimacy, through the grooming process, to
sexualize a child and bring them to a point where
they have won their trust, and perhaps also their
affection. At that stage the child may well have
become open to the possibility of a meeting in
real life and to complying with or submitting to
the paedophiles sexual advances. By then the
persons age may have become, as they see it, an
irrelevant detail. They will continue to see them
as being still the same person I have come to
know and love.
A typical modus operandi

In a typical case the adult15 and the child will
initially meet in an internet chatroom.16 Long-term
or committed paedophiles are known to frequent
chatrooms that are popular with children, eg ones
associated with music, fashion or sport, but the
possibility of an encounter with an opportunist
paedophile always exists in almost any chatroom.
Most chatrooms are quite public places.17 Within
this public space the paedophile might be
particularly adept at identifying the younger, more
nave or vulnerable child. He will make that child
the focus of his attention. He will try to speak
directly to the child, try to become their special
friend and persuade her18 to leave the public space
and go off into a private, one-to-one chat area.
This is therefore obviously a key, initial danger
point for any child. Children should be strongly
discouraged from going into private chat areas
with anyone they do not already know. If the child
is in any doubt, the advice must be to stay in the
public space or else leave the chatroom altogether.

Once in the private chat area the conversation can
go in a number of directions. Typically the adult
will trick the child into revealing her own age first
and then present himself as being just a few years
older, but there are several other strategies that
can be deployed.
Such an adult will generally be sure to be up to
date with all the latest trends in clothes, music,
sport and street talk so they can convincingly carry
off the pretence that they are a young person close
to the intended victims age.
The paedophile may be very skilful in communicating
with children. He will come across as a nice guy.
Having moved from a public or semi-public
chatroom to a private or one-to-one chatroom, the
paedophile and the child can then arrange to
continue to communicate with each other in any
number of different ways, eg via email, instant
messaging, SMS text messaging via mobile phones,
and then to direct voice contact via a fixed or mobile
telephone, or even by voice over the internet. There
have been instances where the paedophile has sent a
mobile phone to the child to ensure that the childs
parents have no way of knowing about or monitoring
contact between the two, or they have sent top-up
vouchers so that the child can make frequent calls to
them without having to ask their parents to pay,
thereby again reducing the risk of discovery. There
have even been instances where the predator has
established a freephone number for the child to call
him on. In the UK freephone numbers do not show
up on the telephone bills of fixed telephone lines
thus, again, making monitoring impossible, or at any
rate very difficult.
Secretiveness is generally essential to the abusers
strategy. In the course of their initial discussions
with a child, a paedophile will often take care to
establish the exact location of the computer in the
home. He will be anxious to discover how easily
their conversations could be overlooked or
overheard.19 He will also often be keen to ensure
that the child does not keep any record of their
conversations on the computer as sooner or later
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he will seek to sexualize the contact and

conversations as part of the grooming process. If
anything goes wrong with the relationship records
of such conversations could provide the police
with useful evidence that he will not want them to
have. Thus if a child ever discloses that they have
been talking to someone online who has raised
these sorts of issues it ought to act as a warning
and a clear signal to a parent or other responsible
adult to find out who the child is talking to and
why they are asking her such questions.
The scale of offending

So far, in the UK in the past two or three years,
following the sort of grooming process outlined
above where the initial contact was made in a
chatroom, 27 children20 or young people have met
the adult in real life and have been raped by them or
otherwise been subjected to a serious sexual
assault. Of the 27, 24 were girls and three were
boys.21 The typical age range of the victim is 12 to 15,
but children younger than 12 have also been
approached.22 We know about these 27 children
because in all bar one case the crime was reported,
and the perpetrators were caught, convicted and
sent to jail. We do not, of course, know how many
cases there have been where no prosecution was
brought or succeeded for want of evidence, or
because the incident was not reported to the police
in the first place. We can be sure that 27 cases does
not represent the real level of such offending.
However, with a global medium such as the
internet, we must ask if the UK courts are the only
place we should be looking for evidence. The true
measure of the real level of contact offending
linked to the emergence of the internet, and for
that matter all the other issues discussed in this
report, are to be found in the accumulated global
numbers that, so far, no one has drawn together.
Other forms of real-world offending

While rapes and sexual assaults that resulted from
initial contacts in a chatroom are perhaps the most
extreme forms of contact-based sexual predation,
they are by no means the only forms. No reliable
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numbers are yet available but we know, for

example, that children have been persuaded to
perform and photograph or take videos of sexual
acts that they have undertaken either alone or with
friends, and these images have then been sent to
the abuser. Such images might later be published
on the internet and become part of the stock of
child abuse images that are traded between
collectors or sold commercially. They can also give
the abuser a greater hold over the child because
they can be used to blackmail the child into
performing other sexual acts and into keeping the
relationship a secret. Some children abused in this
way have themselves become involved in
downloading child pornography and have been
arrested for doing so.
Children have also been persuaded to perform or
witness sexual acts live via web cams, to watch
videos online or to listen to audio files with sexual
content. Sexual predators have inveigled children
into abusive, sexually explicit conversations either
online in chatrooms or via email or directly by
voice, and these can be psychologically very
damaging for the child.
It has sometimes been suggested that children
who end up being abused in this manner sooner
or later would have been abused by another adult
anyway, ie that these were children who were
always heading for disaster. It was not a question
of whether, but when, they were going to be
abused. Some might argue that this is precisely
why there needs to be stronger and better
safeguards available to protect them, but there are
two major problems with such a proposition:
(i)
it implies the child is somehow to blame

or is responsible for their own abuse
(ii)
when it comes down to it, we have no way

of knowing with any degree of confidence
what might, or might not, have happened
to the child in question if he or she had
not met that particular abuser at that
particular time
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Ensnared in the manipulative clutches of an adult

who is a practised paedophile, the child might
have had little or no chance of escape. Such is the
nature of online grooming.
The effect on children of being sexually abused by
adults is well documented. It is almost invariably
deeply traumatising and damaging both in the
short and longer runs.23 What is less well known
and understood is what, if any, differences arise
because that abuse has been recorded on video
or in a photograph or sound file and then posted
to the internet where it becomes, in effect, a
permanent and ineradicable record.24
A child or young person who knew or believed
that images or a record of their abuse were out
there on the internet, might be permanently
worried that the image could turn up, even
randomly, on the computer screens of their
classmates, neighbours or other family members.
Alternatively the image could fall into the hands
of other people who know them and who might
then use it against them. Children who have been
abused in front of a web cam similarly could
never be absolutely sure that they would not meet
someone who might have witnessed their abuse
and recognise them in real life. Some preliminary
work suggests that different children will react in
different ways, some even denying that the
images are of themselves when plainly they are.
The therapeutic implications, and the
implications for how one approaches
investigations of these sorts of cases, are still
largely uncharted but it seems likely that victims
of this kind of abuse, abuse that has potentially
been displayed to countless thousands of
unknown people, will require long-term support.
Exposure to age-inappropriate material

In pre-internet days children and young people
were, of course, exposed to a range of both legal
and illegal age-inappropriate25 images, generally in
magazines or books, less commonly as moving
pictures in films or videos. They were also
exposed to age-inappropriate sexually explicit texts
and other materials, eg cartoons and drawings.
However, for the great majority of children and

young people, exposure to such material was
thought26 to be comparatively infrequent.
The internet has changed the situation
dramatically. Pornography in almost all its forms
is now routinely and easily available, not least
through a plague of unsolicited emails, known as
spam.27 In June 2003, Symantec, a major internet
security firm, published the results of a survey
that had been conducted for them by Applied
Research. Applied Research interviewed 1,000
youths between the ages of seven and 18.28 The
survey showed that more than 80 per cent of
them received what they themselves considered
to be inappropriate spam on a daily basis. Of the
spam, 47 per cent contained links to x-rated
websites and around 50 per cent of those
surveyed reported feeling uncomfortable or
offended by the spam they received. The UKs
Office of National Statistics, in its report on the
second quarter of 2003, found that in the past 12
months 44 per cent of all adult users (16+) had
received too many junk emails.
The kind of pornographic images that much of this
spam promotes could not legally be displayed or
sold in a public place in the UK, even though it
might be legal for an adult to possess it. And of
course some spam promotes access to images
that unquestionably are illegal in the UK.
There seems to be no settled view about the
impact that exposure to different kinds of
pornography can have on children and young
people29 just as there is no settled view about its
impact on adults. Some argue, in relation to
children and young people, the impact is nil to
very little, others argue that it can be positively
beneficial whereas a third group, perhaps a
majority in the UK, seem to believe it can either
be harmful or very harmful.
Here we come up against the first of a series of
problems: just as children and young people are
not an undifferentiated mass, neither is
pornography, and equally there is no agreed
definition of harm, let alone of its gradations.
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There is a wide variety of pornography that

stretches from the grossest of multi-participant
sadistic nightmares through to images of men or
women posing alone naked or semi-clothed in
sexually alluring or suggestive positions. Of course
in some cultures, cultures with many adherents
who live in the UK, the definition of pornography
can be very much narrower than this.
Similarly with children and young people, there are
a wide range of capacities and levels of maturity.
And the context within which different kinds of
material might be viewed by children and young
people at any given time can vary enormously and
yet have a decisive influence in terms of its impact.
However desirable it might be, in principle, to
reach a settled and incontestable view of the harm,
or benefit, of exposing different children to
different kinds of pornography, it seems very
unlikely that this issue is ever going to be
susceptible to conclusive proof and resolution. In
the end it seems inevitable that these issues will
come down to matters of judgement and taste,
and these in turn are heavily influenced by the
religious or cultural backgrounds and previous life
experiences of the protagonists in the debate.
To that extent, therefore, arguing in general terms
about whether or not allowing children to be
exposed to pornography is a good thing or a bad
thing is likely to generate more heat than light.
There can be no one correct view that will or ought
to prevail in all circumstances at all times for all
people, young or old.
There is undoubtedly a lot of pornography of all
kinds on the internet and it is obviously very
popular with huge numbers of people. So be it. If
they are adults they have a perfect right to choose
to spend their time and money looking at or
collecting legal pornography if that is what
interests them. One might wish it were otherwise,
but it isnt, and in the end it is nobodys business
but their own.
But with children and young people things are
different. For one thing we have a range of existing
laws, customs, cultural or religious expectations or
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requirements that mean that their parents or

carers, or in schools their teachers, are empowered
and expected to make detailed decisions about
what is or is not appropriate for that specific child,
not just in relation to pornography but across a
much wider range of headings. They are
responsible for bringing up the child in the widest
sense. It might be going too far to say that in the
UK the law stipulates that children should never
under any circumstances be allowed to see
pornographic images, but if it were shown that a
child was regularly being exposed to pornography
it might well constitute grounds for concern
sufficient to justify a child protection enquiry by the
local social services department. Issues could also
arise under the Obscene Publications Act 1959,
because while it might be difficult to convince a
jury that showing pornography to adults was likely
to make them more depraved or corrupted, it
would be a lot easier to convince a jury if the
person being exposed to the pornography was a
child. Moreover in the Sex Offences Act 2003, it
has become an offence to cause a child to watch a
sexual act and watching encompasses looking at
pictures or videos of sexual acts every bit as much
as live sexual acts. It will be interesting to see what
impact this new provision has on the activities of
UK-based internet publishers.
Thus, while it is true that the arrival of the internet
has undoubtedly made it harder for many parents
and teachers to ensure that their own beliefs or
preferences about pornography are observed, it
has not fundamentally changed or invalidated their
expectations in relation to it. The fact that children
at some time or other seek to evade rules laid
down by their parents, teachers or others in
authority is no reason for saying that parents,
teachers and those in authority should therefore
abandon the effort and have no rules at all. Rules
describe standards.
Never before has such a large volume of such a
wide range of pornographic images been so readily
available to minors. No one knows what the longer
term consequences will be of this kind and level of
exposure to that sort of material. How will it shape
todays young peoples attitudes towards sex and
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sexuality? How will it shape or influence todays

boys attitudes towards girls and women, and vice
versa? We have no historic experience to guide us
but anxieties about it form a common part of the
reasoning behind parents, teachers and others
wanting to exercise greater control over the sorts
of pictures and other matter that can appear on
computer screens in their homes or classrooms.
It would be illiberal and anyway pointless to call for
a ban on legal pornography on the internet. It is
not, however, pointless or illiberal to suggest that
the internet industry ought to do all it can to help
parents, carers and teachers by giving them the
tools to control the sorts of images their children
might view. Naturally one would wish that such
tools were as sophisticated and as effective as
could be. At the moment many are not, but that is
no reason to give up on the hope and expectation
that they might get better, and soon.
What is clearly unacceptable, or at any rate
undesirable, is to allow the agency of the internet
to enforce, de facto, a single view or regime in
respect of pornography. Everyone is entitled to an
internet that suits themselves and their family. To
be fair, most of the leading consumer-facing
internet companies now accept this idea in
principle but we still need to make more progress,
more rapidly, in putting it into effect for all families
with children and young people who use the
internet at home.
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Child pornography child abuse images
As well as facilitating contact offending against

children, and access to a range of both legal and
illegal pornography, the internet now also provides
wider and easier access to child pornography or to
child abuse images as they are becoming known.30
Such images are to be found on the web, via
newsgroups, through peer 2 peer applications, via
spam, and in other ways.
The publication or exchange of these images may
or may not be commercial in nature but, as we
shall see, the key point is that, compared with preinternet days, there seems little doubt that many
more people are now encountering and looking at
child abuse images. In turn, as the arrest figures
are starting to show, this seems to have led to an
increase in the number of people who have
become involved in collecting and in the
possession of these images.31
This report argues that this increase in looking,
collecting and possession is leading to more
children being abused than otherwise would have
been the case, because
(i) it is very likely to cause a proportion of this
enlarged population of lookers, collectors and
possessors to go on to abuse children32
(ii) it also creates a demand for new child abuse
images to be produced, and in order to
produce these new images more new children
will be recruited to be abused33
Many of those who start looking at child abuse
images on the internet, or who start collecting
images they have obtained from the internet, may
already have a direct sexual interest in children of
which they were aware, or they may believe their
interest is limited only to looking and collecting.
For others, the internet will provide their first ever
introduction to the idea of having sex with children
or to child abuse images. They may find the images
initially by accident.34 Some will go looking for child
abuse images deliberately, out of what they think is
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simple curiosity, without necessarily knowing that

by doing so they are committing a crime. The key
point is that many of those who come to it for the
first time, and even many of those with a preexisting interest, would almost certainly never have
got involved with the images in the real world,
perhaps for a mixture of reasons but probably
mainly because the amount of effort needed to
obtain such images would be a major disincentive,
or because of their fear of getting caught.35 The easy
access the internet now provides, possibly linked to
an erroneous belief that they can use the internet
anonymously or with very little realistic prospect of
being identified, is what opened the door.
Some of those with a pre-existing and acknowledged
sexual interest in children may already be involved
in contact offending, but even for them there
remains a question about whether or not the
internet might be responsible for accelerating,
expanding or deepening their involvement.
However, irrespective of the details of the route by
which they arrived there, is it really possible to say
that, having had their sexual interest in children
stimulated, extended or created by the kind of
exposure to the images the internet allows, some
of these same people will, in turn, go on to abuse
children directly because of that? If it is, the
implication is clear: but for those prior processes,
any children thus abused would have been spared.
Can it be that straightforward?

It has to be said it seems very unlikely that it all
works in such a neat and predictable way, ie a
person starts looking at child abuse images, then
goes on to start collecting and possessing them,
then inevitably goes on to commit contact offences
against children.
Very little is known about those who only look at
child abuse images and do not also start
collecting and possessing them. Collecting does
seem to signify an important developmental
phase or is a crossover point but, as we shall see,
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some collectors will become involved in hands-on

child abuse and some will not. The truth is no
one knows for sure exactly how the different
activities are connected. Very few academics are
researching this area and there are major
methodological and ethical problems associated
with researching it.
What do paedophiles say?
The link between possession and abuse

Of course knowing there is a link between
possession and abuse is not the same as
knowing the cause. We need to understand the
pathology a lot more thoroughly if we are to be
better able to protect children in future. All the
available studies really tell us about, therefore,
are levels of probability.
There are as yet no published large-scale studies of

paedophiles online behaviour but, based on their
clinical experience, people like Donald Findlater of
the Lucy Faithfull Foundation36 make some incisive
points. A number of Findlaters clients are very
clear that the internet was where they first found
child abuse images, sometimes initially by
accident, later deliberately. Others say they were
always aware of their sexual interest in children but
were too scared to do anything about it until the
internet provided them with the means. They fell
for the myth of online anonymity or felt driven to
take huge risks.
Thus, assuming the US Postal Inspection Services

results are accurate, two out of three people
arrested for possession of child abuse images will
not, at the time of their arrest, be abusing children,
and they will have no history of abusing children or
will not have declared or shown an intention to
abuse children. However, because one in three is
too high a level of probability to ignore, and
because you cannot know in advance who the
other two are, law enforcement officials have to
investigate all three, being mindful of the
possibility that they are also investigating a handson abuser.
Joe Sullivan, a colleague of Findlaters,

encapsulates many peoples views when he says
Men who collect child abuse images do so
because they want to have sex with children, but
some of them may not have realised it yet.
Findlaters clients are certain that, for many men
like them, looking at and collecting child abuse
images dramatically increases the likelihood of an
individual going on to offend against children in
the real world.
The message to would-be possessors is therefore

clear: if you are caught you have put yourself in the
frame to be investigated as a potential paedophile.
But, according to Donald Findlater, the message is
gloomier than that. A good proportion of the two
out of three who were not abusing at the time they
were caught by the US Postal Inspection Service,
or who did not declare or show an interest in
doing so, might well have gone on to do so. In
other words the true ratio is likely to be higher
than one in three in terms of an actual or potential
risk to children.
There is also objective evidence from elsewhere that

seems to support this view. Police sources in
Canada and the UK, and a published study within
the US prison service,37 suggest there is a definite
link, but the probabilities seem to range widely from
between 10 per cent and 70 per cent. The biggest
single published study, carried out by the US Postal
Inspection Service, puts it around 35 per cent, ie a
little over one in three men arrested merely for
possessing child abuse images will also be child
molesters.38 As a result of the US Postal Inspection
Services operations 530 children were rescued from
further sexual abuse and exploitation.39
Of course there are classes and types of

paedophiles for whom child abuse images will play
little or no part in causing or sustaining their
offending behaviour. Other analysts see the use of
child abuse images and the sexual abuse of
children as behaviour that is simply at the far end
of a continuum of male sexuality and male power
(female paedophiles are not unheard of but they
are very rare). Findlater believes that very few
people are born paedophiles. The problem may
manifest itself initially as curiosity, but in the end
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most men become paedophiles as part of a

process that can be understood. A key part of that
process is access to material that fuels sexual
fantasy. Take away the material and you reduce the
risk.40 In that context the fact that, within the UK,
the law seems to be only concerned with
photographic images and seems to turn a blind
eye to explicit paedophile texts, continues to be a
concern.41 Some paedophiles are drawn much
more to words than they are to images, but these
words can have an equally serious effect.
The images are important in their

own right
Every republication of a child abuse image, in a
way, re-abuses the child depicted within it. Partly
for this reason, some people worry about the focus
on investigating child abuse images solely because
they might lead to an actual abuser. They say this
diminishes the importance of the possession
offences and ignores the fact that possessors are
simply active abusers by proxy. They could not
possess or look at the images if someone else did
not do the abusing for them. If they did not do
what they do, fewer children would be abused.
If it were true that possession offences were in any
way regarded as being trivial matters, it would
indeed be highly undesirable, but at the same time
knowing that you might be able to remove a child
from an abusive situation has to be a worthwhile
and very immediate target.
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Looking at numbers
We have no reliable way of knowing how many

child abuse images existed before the internet
arrived in our midst as a mass consumer product.
Neither, for that matter, do we know exactly how
much child abuse was going on in pre-internet
days and whether this was or was not linked to the
existence of child abuse images. Maybe there has
been some displacement of offending behaviour
from the real world to cyberspace. It is therefore
theoretically possible that the internet has changed
nothing, or very little. It is merely giving us a better
insight into a situation that has existed, possibly
for a very long time. However the growing weight
of evidence makes this seem highly unlikely.
We have seen that some paedophiles say that
exposure to child abuse images increases the
likelihood of offending against children, and we
have seen that several large-scale studies appear to
support that idea, even if the exact causal chain is
not, as yet, fully understood. It therefore seems to
follow that if we can establish, at a macro level,
that more child abuse images are in circulation
and are being seen or collected by more people, it
is very likely the net effect is that more children are
being abused now than was the case before the
internet became what it is today.
Volume of child abuse images

We do know certain things for definite; for example
in 1995, arguably the last year before the internet
started to take off in the UK, the Greater
Manchester Police Abusive Images Unit42 seized the
grand total of 12 indecent images of children, all of
them on paper or on video. In 1999 the same squad
seized 41,000, all bar three of which were on
computers and had come from the internet.43 Preinternet a typical arrest for possession of child
abuse images would involve only a handful of
pictures, all printed on paper or on tape of some
kind. A haul of hundreds would have been
sensational. In December 2003 a UK man was
convicted of having 450,000 images in his
possession, easily beating the record, set earlier in
the year, of 250,000 images. In the Wonderland case
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in 1999 police seized 750,000 images from around

100 men44 in one operation. In New York, in a single
raid on one address, police seized an estimated one
million images. All of these numbers are a very long
way from the 12 seized in Manchester in 1995.
Now it is obviously true that the internet has
increased the volume of every type of (legal and
decent) material being created and circulated, but
the sorts of differences we are seeing here
represent such a quantum leap that it seems very
unlikely that it could have happened but for the
internet. On the contrary it seems likely that the
internet has had, and continues to have, a major
effect on both supply and demand. The new
possibilities it has opened up have created and
taken us into entirely new terrain. The internet, in
some ways, seems also to be creating a snowball
effect. A volume of material is out there, stored on
computers, constantly being accessed, distributed
and re-distributed. The material is always being
added to; rarely will anything be permanently
removed as it reaches out to more and more
people who in turn get drawn in and start adding
to the material themselves. In other words, unless
we find a new way, technically, of remotely locating
and removing material from the internet,45 it is very
likely that the problem will continue to grow and
be cumulative in its effects.
Collecting, cataloguing, trading and swapping is
itself part of the pleasure for many of the men who
get involved with child abuse images on the
internet, and computers and the internet provide a
trading, swapping and cataloguing environment
without equal. The traffic in swapping and the
associated communications make the men who do
it feel part of a community of like-minded
individuals, comrades, whom they embrace and
join. It normalizes their behaviour. They might rise
in status in that community if they become more
proficient and prolific. Abusing more and more
children, recording and then showing that abuse to
their cyber circle, has been shown to make them
heroes in a world that otherwise would not even
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give them a second glance or, if they knew the

truth, would lock them away or kill them. In other
words, for men like these, computers and the
internet have created a welcoming world that
otherwise could simply never have existed for them.
At a more detailed level

Numbers recently released by the University of
Corks COPINE project (Combating Online
Paedophile Networks in Europe) lend further weight
to the idea that more child abuse images are now
being made than before and more children are
being abused in order to provide them.
Newsgroups
Usenet newsgroups are one of the lesser known
parts of the internet. They are not as user-friendly
as typical web-based applications so, historically,
they have tended to be the preserve of internet
aficionados. Newsgroups were for many years the
principal source of child pornography on the
internet and they remain very important even today.
Since the mid-1990s COPINE has been monitoring
newsgroups that are known to contain child abuse
images on a regular basis. It has built up a massive
database of these images, and it now contains
around 500,000 unique pictures, some of which
might be 30 years old or more.46
In 1999 COPINE found, on average, four new
children per month were appearing in new abusive
images in a subset of newsgroups. In 2002, in a sixweek period covering August to mid-September, 20
new children appeared in the same newsgroups.
During the same period a total of 140,000 child
abuse images were posted to these newsgroups, of
which 35,000 were new images not already part of
COPINEs database. That represents an average of
1,750 images per child. According to COPINEs
analysis the newer images it is seeing show younger
children than before, and they are being abused in
ever more grotesque or violent ways.47
Might all this merely mean that now that digital
cameras are more commonly available, and the
images are easier to process at home and post to
12
the internet, so more people are doing it but that,

actually, there has been no change in the amount
of abuse going on, or in the number of abusive
images being made? That is possible, but it is just
as likely that more adults are abusing more
children and that is what is being reflected in all
these higher numbers.
One of the difficulties of trying to assess volumes
and scales in an area such as this is that, because
all of the relevant activity is illegal and therefore
clandestine, we only get a glimpse of the truth
when the police finally manage to make arrests
and then, in court, produce all or some of the
evidence they have obtained. So is it possible that
all we are seeing now is an increase in police
efficiency in bringing offenders to court? That
again is possible, but equally it seems improbable
that that is the entire explanation. It might equally
be the case that the police are making more
arrests because more illegal activity is coming to
their attention and that is because there is more of
it going on.
Arrests and prosecutions for possession

Recently released Home Office statistics48 show
that, between 198849 and the end of 2001 there has
been a 1,500 per cent increase in the offences of
making and taking or possessing child pornography
in England and Wales, up from 35 in 1988 to 549 in
2001. By comparison, in the US the number of
indictments and informations laid by the FBI,50
which is only one of three federal agencies with
jurisdiction in this area, increased by 629 per cent,
from 99 to 722, and the number of arrests and
convictions each increased by around 1,000 per
cent, so we can see that the rate of growth in these
sorts of crimes in the UK is in no sense an isolated
or unusual phenomenon. In the same period the
number of new cases opened by the FBI rose from
113 to 2,430, an increase of 2,050 per cent.
In the UK, during the period 1988 to 2001,
altogether 3,022 people were either cautioned
or proceeded against in the courts for making,
taking or possession related child pornography
offences. Taking a spread of years since 1995, the
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annual rate of increase in cautions and

prosecutions for child pornography offences was
well in excess of 33 per cent but, of course,
Operation Ore changed everything.
In 2002, under Operation Ore, in a single action,
police were handed the names of 6,500 suspects,
of whom 5,700 were in England and Wales. The
remainder were in Scotland, Northern Ireland or
the Islands. Of the 5,700 names in England and
Wales, at the time of writing over 2,300 have been
arrested, 723 have been charged and 38 have been
cautioned. There is a considerable backlog of
computers waiting to be examined by forensic
experts. So far only 277 court cases have been
completed but no central database exists to show
what levels of sentences have been handed out.
The statistics for this class of offence will therefore
change dramatically when the arrests and
prosecutions from 2002 and 2003 start to feed
through and when the remaining 2,400 individuals
are visited by the police.
Operation Ore
Operation Ore started in the US. The United States
Postal Inspection Service had mounted Operation
Avalanche to target a website housed in Texas that
was owned by a company called Landslide Inc.
Landslide, in effect, provided access to some 300
other websites that sold child abuse images. The
postal inspectors seized Landslides servers, which
contained the names of over 75,000 individuals
who had bought child abuse images from them
using credit cards. After sorting them out into
national groups, the postal inspectors handed the
lists over to the police in the various countries. To
deal with this list the UK police, through the
National Crime Squad, established Operation Ore.
being a vastly increased number of people looking

at and collecting child abuse images. Meanwhile
we should not forget that Operation Ore was not
the only police operation concerned with child
abuse images during 2002. Several other discrete
operations, some of them large scale, were also
running alongside Ore and this will have the effect
of inflating the annual figures for 2002 and 2003
even further. Moreover it is a sobering thought that
Operation Ore is unlikely to be the last of its kind
in the UK.
Levels and types of images

A worry that has been brought into sharp relief by
the resource and time pressures caused by
Operation Ore arises in relation to the way in which
the police, the courts, the probation service and
possibly other agencies, eg the Crown Prosecution
Service, are making decisions about the disposition
of cases, or the treatment of offenders, based solely
and exclusively on the nature of the content of the
material found in the possession of the individual
concerned. Of course the nature of the material has
to be taken into account but, from a child
protection perspective, of even greater importance
ought to be considerations about whether or to
what extent an individuals involvement with such
material indicates that he poses a threat to children
in the future, or that he may have been involved in
abusing children in the past.
The principal origin of the problem lies in the
decision of the Court of Appeal in November 2002,
in the case of Oliver and others.51 In that case the
Court of Appeal received and considered a report
from the Sentencing Advisory Panel52 on
sentencing in child pornography cases. The court
adopted a modified version of the typology of child
abuse images that the panel had put forward.
Working with various statutory authorities the

police identified persons on the Ore list who either
worked with children, were in a position of trust in
relation to children, or were known sex offenders.
These were arrested first and then they steadily
worked their way through the remainder of the list.
The evidence from Operation Ore, all drawn from
a single law enforcement operation, points to there
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According to the courts decision, illegal child

abuse images are now divided into five different
categories or levels:
1. images depicting erotic posing with no
sexual activity
2. sexual activity between children or
solo masturbation
3. non-penetrative sexual activity involving
an adult
4. penetrative activity with an adult
5. sadism or bestiality
In determining the sentence the Court of Appeal
indicated that the judge or magistrate should look at
the nature of the material and the extent of the
offenders involvement with it, remarking that the
seriousness increases with proximity to, and
responsibility for, the original abuse. Any element of
commercial gain will place an offence at a high level
of seriousness; swapping of images is a form of
commercial activity, albeit without gain, because it
fuels demand; wide-scale distribution, even without
profit, is intrinsically more harmful than a
transaction limited to two or three individuals, both
by reference to the potential use of the images by
active paedophiles, and by reference to the shame
and degradation of the original victims. Merely
locating an image on the internet will be less serious
than downloading it, and downloading will be less
serious than taking an original film or photograph.
In relation to sentencing the court advised that:
a fine would normally be appropriate where

the offender was merely in possession of
material solely for his own use, including
material which he has downloaded from the
internet, and either the material consisted
entirely of pseudo-photographs, the making of
which had involved no abuse or exploitation of
children, or there was no more than a small
quantity of level 1 material
14
a conditional discharge might be appropriate

where there was a plea of guilty and no
previous convictions offences involving
pseudo-photographs will generally be less
serious than those involving real photographs
because the element of corruption of children
will be absent
a community sentence may be appropriate in a

case of possession of a large amount of level 1
material and/or a small amount of level 2
material, provided that it has not been
distributed or shown to others
the custody threshold will usually be passed

where any of the material has been shown or
distributed to others, or for simple possession
of a large amount of level 2 material or a small
amount of level 3 material
Leaving aside the courts comments on pseudoimages, which with respect were not properly
thought through or considered, no one disputes the
fundamental basis of the Court of Appeals system
of classification of the images, or the reasoning
behind it. There ought to be some sort of deterrent
element to sentencing that relates to the nature of
the material found in a persons possession, ie
people ought to be discouraged from collecting the
worst kinds of images because this implies a
requirement for there to be even more gross acts of
abuse against children in order to produce them.
What is less clear is the real significance that ought
to be attached to the quantities of material a person
has in their possession.
However, what seems to be happening in some
areas, and perhaps this is largely because of the
pressure on resources caused by Operation Ore, is
that decisions are being made about a suspect or a
convicted person solely by reference to the nature
of the material found in their possession. This may
be impacting, for example, on decisions on
whether or not to offer a caution rather than insist
on taking a person to court, or it may subsequently
affect decisions about a persons treatment under
the Multi Agency Protection Panel Arrangements.
In other words the Court of Appeals hierarchy of
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images is being used for purposes and in contexts

that were never intended. It is perhaps an
understandable, almost intuitive, response to the
existence of such a hierarchy, ie if you are found in
possession of level 1 material, at a commonsense
level it may seem obvious that you must be less
reprehensible than someone found in possession
of level 5 material.
The problem is that there is absolutely no research
evidence that supports the idea that, in terms of
being a greater or lesser threat to children in the
past or in the future, level 1 and level 5 have any
significance at all. There could even be an inverse
ratio because, according to Donald Findlater of the
Lucy Faithfull Foundation, situations portrayed in
the lower levels are likely to be much closer to
potential fulfilment in real-world situations than
levels 4 and 5. The point is that no one knows with
any degree of certainty. Anecdotally some arresting
officers are convinced that a number of the people
they have arrested who only have level 1 material
in their possession at the time, display
characteristics that suggest they already are or may
be about to become active abusers, but because of
the pressure of work, on the evidence they have
before them, the police cannot justify any more
intrusive and time-consuming forms of enquiry.
More research is needed into this area and in the
meantime it is argued that everyone found in
possession of any quantity of any kind of child
abuse images should be investigated with a view
to establishing whether they have been involved in
abusing children in the past, and a risk
assessment needs to be carried out to determine
whether they represent an on-going threat to
children in the future. This may lead to more
serious charges being laid and other action being
taken but, either way, post-sentencing their
treatment should be determined by the outcome of
the risk assessment. This may also require a new
model to be developed for risk assessing people
caught in possession of child abuse images as the
model currently used for most sex offenders, the
Thornton Matrix, was not designed with these
sorts of offences in mind.
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This, of course, potentially has huge resource

implications as it would require a major expansion
of the probation service and of psychiatric
counselling and analysis services. At the moment,
even the relatively small number of people given
custodial sentences cannot be guaranteed to
benefit from treatment programmes within prison
because the waiting list is so large. This situation
is very unsatisfactory. Everyone convicted or
cautioned under Ore will go on the sex offenders
register, but in practice it might mean very little
else. The root cause of their offending behaviour
may never be addressed and thus many of them
may continue to be a danger to children.
The UKs National Crime Squad tells us that a very
high proportion of those being arrested under Ore
have no previous convictions and are not known to
the authorities. Final figures are not yet available
but preliminary indications are that somewhere
between 70 per cent and 95 per cent of everyone
arrested under Ore had no previous contact with
law enforcement or social services. In other words
the police or social service authorities would have
been very unlikely to find these men in any other
way. Thus, paradoxically, while it seems that the
internet is contributing to an increase in abuse, it
is also potentially making it easier for the
authorities to apprehend some of those who are
involved with it. The internet is opening a window
that was previously closed and it allows us to
glimpse into a world we never saw other than in
the flimsiest or most ethereal of outlines.
But is all this evidence of an increase in
possession offences leading to an increased
number of prosecutions for hands-on child abuse
reaching the courts? Not yet, but it very well may
do quite soon.
Within Operation Ore different police forces,53 but
not all police forces, seem to be initiating very
thorough and comprehensive investigations of the
men arrested, in an attempt to determine whether
they are also simultaneously engaged in abusing
children in the real world, or whether they have
been in the past. At the time of writing, 54 children
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have been taken into care following arrests under

Ore. This is some way short of matching the levels
of probability indicated in the studies mentioned
earlier54, but these are early days and they are only
preliminary numbers.
Moreover there is an additional difficulty in
monitoring the outcome of the activity generated
by Operation Ore: the way crime statistics are
compiled and court data are published gives no
indication of whether a computer was involved
in a particular crime, let alone whether or not the
internet was also involved. We have to rely on our
ability to track individual cases as they are reported
in the local or national press or on one-off
attempts to record data in this way by the police.
Different academics are thought to be monitoring
activity and outcomes under Operation Ore and in
March 2003 the Home Office announced that they
were to undertake a specific study of data
collection issues in relation to internet crimes.
When thinking about current levels of prosecutions
for hands-on abuse arising from Operation Ore, or
other police actions, we also need to think about
time lags. It could just be that our current
knowledge, or lack of it, underestimates what is
going on because of the period of time that almost
always elapses between a process of abuse starting
and the child finally finding the wherewithal to
disclose it, or it being discovered. We have always
known that there are major disincentives to children
disclosing abuse, not the least of which is fear and
shame. The fear and shame factor might be
significantly increased where the child knows that
pictures of their humiliation exist. Alternatively, as
before, they might worry they will simply not be
believed by the authorities. In the past, various
prevalence studies have suggested that perhaps as
many as one in 10 children are being or have been
sexually abused in some way or other, yet the level of
prosecutions has never been anywhere near
reflecting that level of offending.55 A second factor in
relation to time lags are those caused by the legal
system itself. There always has been a time lag
between the moment of arrest, the completion of the
investigation and the moment when the decision is
16
taken to prosecute, or not. With Ore some of these

time lags appear to have been extended, not least
because of the pressure on forensics. In some
forces, if a computer is seized today, it might be
twelve months or more before forensics can analyse
it. Then there is a delay waiting for a court hearing.
Again the overwhelming numbers coming through
from Ore may have lengthened these delays, with the
suggestion in some areas that, for the sake of
administrative convenience, Ore cases have been
bunched together.
Criticisms of Operation Ore

There has been some criticism of the police tactics
over Operation Ore and there is no doubt that they
do not want a repeat of it. Other more proactive
strategies are being implemented eg. Operation
PIN which involves managing a number of fake
sites that enable the police to capture the IP
addresses of visitors. The police do not deny that,
initially, they were caught on the hop by the huge
and unprecedented amount of intelligence that
suddenly arrived on their desks via Operation Ore.
But the criticisms go beyond that.
Firstly it has been suggested that the police were
wrong to put so many resources into arresting and
prosecuting people who might be guilty only of
downloading images, perhaps drawing police officers
off other important work in the field of child
protection or other forms of cyber crime. It has been
argued that it is far more important to focus on
identifying the victims shown in the abusive images
and rescuing them from the situations they must be
in in order to have ended up being abused for the
purpose of producing the images.
Secondly it has been suggested that pay-per-view
websites are yesterdays technologies and that the
more serious criminals and child abusers are
moving off into peer 2 peer networks, using
encryption and other means to disguise themselves.
Both of these criticisms are fundamentally
misguided. Firstly it implies that mere
downloading is not such a serious matter,
whereas of course people who download child
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abuse images are simply abusers by proxy. If there

was no market for downloaded images fewer
children would be abused in order to supply it. It
would be a grave strategic error to send out a
message that said or implied that downloading
child abuse images was not regarded as being a
serious offence. Moreover if there is the possibility
of a strong link between possession offences and
hands-on abuse then it is vital that all evidence
relating to possession is followed through.
Secondly, critics seem to think that there is or
could be a trade off between following through on
the evidence provided by Operation Ore and
similar web-based actions, and doing other related
things. The truth is, however, that to crack open
peer 2 peer networks and the use of encryption
normally requires different skills and different
types of resources.
Finally while the idea of identifying the victims is of
course powerful and hugely important, it is in fact
far, far harder to do than some of the rather glib
references seem to acknowledge. On some
estimates perhaps fewer than 300 children have
ever been identified from images that have fallen
into the hands of police authorities anywhere in
the world. Many of the images currently circulating
on the internet may be 30 years old or more, and
dealing with the victims of historic abuse is by no
means the same as rescuing children who are
currently under threat. The UKs National Crime
Squad, through its ChildBase initiative, is
developing a database system that ought to enable
the police to identify new images coming onto the
internet very rapidly.
Clearly where there is something in the image that
gives a clue as to who the child might be or where
they might be found, then this ought to be picked
up as quickly as possible and a strategy agreed for
locating the child and a course of action for
effecting a rescue, and possibly also a related
arrest. In Germany the police posted pictures of
the faces of two children in newspapers asking
anyone who recognised them to come forward. In
the UK an experiment was tried, working with local
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social services departments and schools, in

another attempt to locate children who had
appeared in abusive images on the internet. Both
approaches were variously criticised or praised by
different groups, but this simply serves to
underline the practical difficulties of engaging in
this type of work.
Organised crime steps in

Whereas traditionally the exchange of child abuse
images was largely an amateur affair, largely
thanks to the Landslide website, some very serious
criminals have realised there is big money to be
made in it. In its last month of trading, before the
authorities closed it down, the Landslide child
pornography pay-per-view website took US$1.4
million dollars via credit cards. Of the revenues, 70
per cent went to the producers of the images and
30 per cent to the US-based company that had
been hosting the website.
And so it is that criminals, mainly in the US,
Eastern Europe and South East Asia, are organising
for children to be abused for profit. There are signs
that this is starting to happen on a systematic and
regular basis in order to keep up a plentiful supply
of new material. Every order received by the website
anticipates the possibility of another order,
providing there is something new to sell. Some of
the new images making their way into COPINEs
database may have originated this way.56 Very few of
the criminals involved in this business will
necessarily be paedophiles themselves. Their
objective is simply to make money.
Today in the UK the authorities have been
uncovering many new commercial pay-per-view
sites, all housed overseas. Most of these sites use
credit cards to pay for the child abuse images they
sell. The credit card companies in the UK are
genuinely distressed by this illegal misuse of their
facilities and they have affiliated to the Internet
Watch Foundation as part of a wider series of
measures they are taking that are aimed at closing
down the trade. Nonetheless the trade continues
and the producers of the child abuse images seem
to have found ways of letting their clientele know
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the addresses of the sites where the images are for

sale, mainly through spam. But what is shocking is
how, even a considerable time after the existence
of a child abuse website has been reported to the
police, many of them still appear to be operating.
In the case of websites housed in Eastern
European and a number of other countries this is
deplorable but not exactly novel. However, the fact
is that many of these sites seem to be housed in
the US, and the US law enforcement community
has been made aware of them.
The importance of the US

The invention and development of the internet was
very much an American affair. In almost every
department American companies and American
technologies are pre-eminent. As we have seen,
the law enforcement authorities in the US have
been very active domestically in pursuit of child
abusers and people engaged in making or
distributing child abuse images. Our own
Operation Ore was only possible because of the
initial investigation and arrests made in the US.
However, whereas in the UK we have arrested over
2,300 of the names on our list of 6,500 Ore
suspects, in the US from their equivalent list of
35,000 names so far only about 200 have been
arrested. This is because US laws of evidence
require more than ours do to justify issuing a
search warrant or making an arrest. Everyone is
aware of the huge frustration felt by the US law
enforcement communities about their inability to
act against these suspects in the same way that
other police forces can. In the main the US list has
been used principally as a source of intelligence to
target specific individuals through sting
operations, and these are very time-consuming
and resource-intensive forms of policing activities,
hence the comparatively small number of arrests.
However, there are other weaknesses in the US
legal framework that are also a cause for concern.
The UKs Internet Watch Foundation annually
publishes details of the sources of all child abuse
images that are reported to it by members of the
public.57 In 1997, 43 per cent of all child
pornographic images being reported in the UK
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originated in the US. This was at a time when over

75 per cent of all the worlds internet users lived in
the US. In 2002 the USs share of child abuse
images being reported to the authorities in the UK
stood at 52 per cent, having fallen back from a
high of 64 per cent in 2001. However, this is in the
context of the USs share of the global number of
internet users having fallen to less than 30 per
cent. It is also in the context of an increase in the
total volumes of images being reported, ie
everyone is producing more child abuse images,
including the US. Over the same period the
proportion of child abuse images being reported
that had originated in the UK has fallen from 18
per cent to two per cent. There is a very good
reason for this.
Newsgroups were, for many years, the primary
source of child abuse images on the internet. Even
today they remain an important source. On some
estimates, in 2002, over 1.2 million child abuse
images moved across the internet solely within a
small sub-set of Usenet newsgroups, and these
images were being downloaded, viewed, stored
and redistributed by an unknowable number of
people. But it is now much harder to find the child
abuse newsgroups, or post to them, if you live in
the UK. This is thanks to the work of the Internet
Watch Foundation.
The IWF was established by a tri-partite
agreement made in 1996 between the UK internet
industry, the police and the then government.
Under the agreement the industry agreed to fund
the IWF as a cyber hotline that allows anyone to
report any illegal images they find online. The IWF
looks at the images, assesses them and if it
judges them to be illegal, it gets them removed
from UK servers and reports the content and the
author to law enforcement.
It did not take long to realise that the IWFs staff
were going back to exactly the same newsgroups
time after time. The IWF finally settled on what
was then a bold new policy, but which now seems
utterly obvious choke off the supply and you
effectively suppress demand. The ISPs operating
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out of the UK were simply asked to stop carrying

the identified newsgroups. There is now not a
single UK-based ISP known to the IWF that is
carrying any of these groups. This does not mean
it is impossible for a determined UK-based
individual with sufficient technical knowledge to
gain access to child pornography newsgroups via
an overseas server, but it has massively reduced
access and more or less completely eliminated the
possibility of people, including children, tripping
over them accidentally. It has also disrupted many
of the paedophile networks who use these
newsgroups as an organising focus and largely
explains the dramatic drop in the UKs numbers
referred to above.
Seemingly because of anti-trust worries the US
internet industry is powerless to act in the same
way. The overall effect of all this is that the US
remains the worlds no. 1 exporter of child abuse
images. The problem is that taxpayers, police
forces and children all over the world are left
paying the price. And the situation is getting
worse, not better. Before Operation Ore, child
abuse websites were almost unheard of. Since
Operation Ore, new pay-per-view child
pornography websites have been coming on
stream at the rate of up to 80 per week. Not one
has ever been located in the UK, and again over
half are in the US alone, but the UK internet
industry and the UK credit card industry, through
the IWF and the UK police, still have to investigate
and track them.
A number of countries, especially Russia and
others in Eastern Europe and Asia, are now
gaining notoriety as major new sources of child
abuse images on the internet. They are still
dwarfed by the USs output but they are gaining
fast. It will be impossible for the UN or for the
world community generally to persuade the
governments of these countries to crack down on
their local criminals when the government and law
enforcement agencies of the best equipped, richest
and most powerful nation on the planet have so
far failed to make a decisive impact.
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An agenda for reform
The UK governments task force

Within the UK, the Home Secretarys Internet Task
Force on Child Protection58 has become a very
welcome and extremely important focus for much
activity and reforms aimed at making the internet a
safer place for children. Established in March 2001,
the Task Force brought together, for the first time,
many of the key players in the UKs internet
industry: ISPs, other online service and connectivity
providers, computer equipment manufacturers and
retailers, child protection agencies, several different
law enforcement agencies and the relevant arms of
central government. In particular the DfES59 is a
member of the Task Force. The DfES has been
pursuing a very substantial programme of safetyrelated activities within and around schools,
including a range of actions aimed at reaching
parents, seeking to help them improve their
understanding of the internet so they are then in a
better position to help their children get the most
out of the internet, while also staying safe.
Progress
Definite progress is being made by and because of
the Task Force.
New laws on internet chatroom grooming and
other online activities related to child safety have
been developed and are now law, including new
laws on child abuse images. For example, the
minimum age at which a person can consent to
take part in pornographic depictions that are to be
shown or distributed to third parties is 18, whereas
previously it was 16, or 17 in Northern Ireland, the
same as the age of consent to sex.60
The penalties for possessing or making child
abuse images have been dramatically increased
from six months and three years respectively, to
five and ten years.
New procedures have been introduced to allow
companies that employ chatroom moderators to
initiate police checks on their staff through the
Criminal Records Bureau, and a code of practice is
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being developed that helps to define standards in

respect of moderated services of all kinds.
A common set of safety tips and advice is being
developed, drawing on the best of what is already
widely available on many different websites.
A booklet has been published that provides
guidance to internet companies on the
presentation of a range of online services aimed at
or used by children. A related booklet for parents
that deals with spam is also in hand.
A major advertising campaign on chatroom
dangers was initiated with peak-time advertising on
TV and radio, in cinemas and in the printed media.
Various proposals are being considered to develop
new institutions or mechanisms that can perform
independent evaluations of safety software
products and of how different ISPs approach safety
issues. The fruits of these evaluations will then be
made available in accessible language to parents
and the public.
A proposal is also being considered to establish a
one stop shop, ie a focal point where the internet
industry itself, other organisations or members of
the public can quickly and easily be directed to the
proper place to progress a range of potential
queries or complaints arising from online activity,
whether these relate to consumer issues or
concern potentially criminal matters.
A significant increase in police training is already
underway in respect of a range of child protection
issues raised by the internet, and an increase in
the training of social workers, probation staff and
the related professions is also being planned.
New approaches to risk assessing offenders
and new forms of treatment for them are
being developed.
Crucially, UK law enforcement agencies are
developing closer links with overseas police forces
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as part of a growing international effort to fight

online crimes against children. New international
mechanisms and resources are being developed,
principally through the G8 machinery.
A programme of further reforms

The Task Force has an impressive list of
achievements under its belt, but a number of
other and larger suggestions made by the
Childrens Charities Coalition for Internet Safety61
have yet to be acted upon in a major way. These
measures include:
1. Every new PC sold into the family environment
should arrive with easy-to-understand safety
advice and information for adults and for any
children who will also be using it. Several
formats could be used to provide the safety
information but included among them should
be a written, paper-based format so as to be
usable and easily understood by people who, at
that moment, are unfamiliar with or not yet
comfortable with computers and the internet.
Such information could be included in the box
or issued at the point of sale, or both.
2. While accepting the primacy of educating
children about the internet and of finding new
and better ways of helping parents and
teachers to improve their own understanding
of the internet so they can provide better
direct, personal support and supervision to
their children, every new PC sold into a family
environment should nonetheless also arrive
with safety software packages pre-installed and
set to a high level.62 At the time of writing, only
one major UK retailer has agreed to this
proposal: from December 2003, every new
own-brand PC sold by Comet will have a trial
version of Cyber Patrol pre-installed and set to
a high level of security.
3. While existing safety software packages can play
a valuable part in helping parents and teachers
keep children safe online, few of these packages
are entirely satisfactory.63 But just because these
packages are not yet perfect is no reason for
22
refusing to use them at all. They can still help,

perhaps particularly in families with younger
children. However major investments are still
required to develop new and better technical
solutions for protecting children online. Ideally
these would be free at the point of use, or the
cost ought to be factored into the price of the
basic service. Child safety ought not to be an
optional extra, not least because, if history is
anything to go by, those who need it most are
also the least likely to have it.
4. One alternative, and some might think rather
extreme, scenario might be to require parents
to pass an internet proficiency test of some
kind before they can buy a computer or an
internet connection for use by their children. In
this test the parents would be expected to
prove that they understand the risks they may
be about to expose their children to, and they
would be asked to undertake to minimise
those risks. People are not allowed to drive a
car on the ordinary highway without passing a
test. Perhaps it should be the same for the
virtual superhighway.
5. Especially for younger children, very large
walled gardens64 are the kind of technicallybased solution that could play a major role by
providing a protected online environment that
is also enough fun for children to want to be
there, and not just because their parents or
teachers prefer it.
6. There is a very strong case for people being
able to use the internet anonymously in certain
circumstances, but equally it is plain that
anonymity, and the ease with which one can
adopt false identities and addresses,
have become a cloak for abuse. This
conundrum needs to be resolved. LINX, a key
UK internet industry body, puts it thus in its
best practice paper:
anonymity should be explicitly supported by
relevant tools, rather than being present as a
blanket status quo, open to use and misuse. 65
Thus the UK internet industrys policy is to
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improve traceability wherever possible. This

recognises the sad reality that people tend to
behave badly when they believe there is little
or no chance of them being caught or held
accountable for their actions. It is a problem
that lies at the heart not only of online
paedophile abuse, but also spam and other
kinds of fraudulent online activity. Sooner or
later the industry in the UK and more widely
will have to devise a system that allows there
to be a much greater degree of certainty about
who, exactly, is initiating any online activity. In
the meantime, in the interests of child safety,
ISPs, the mobile telephone operators and
other online service providers should verify the
identities of everyone opening accounts with
them. This will start to become critically
important if, or rather when, accessing the
internet via mobile telephones starts to
become more commonplace and especially if
the mobile network operators allow pre-paid
mobiles to use such resources. Some of the
services that the mobile network operators
appear to intend to allow, eg location-based
services, will also heighten the importance of
having greater certainty about who users are
and what legal relationships they have with
other users.
7. Part of this process of verifying users
identities must, at the very least, involve
developing a reliable means of verifying
peoples age. ISPs and other online companies
should then abandon the fiction that only
adults may legally open and operate internet
accounts on their pay-as-you-go services and
the increasingly dubious fiction that children
and young people can only hold a sub-account
given to them by an adult, thus making the
adult solely responsible for any and all actions
by that child on that account. Perhaps as the
government develops its separate post-Laming
proposals for providing a unique identifier to
every child, an online component could be
created which would help with this and related
issues where identity, age and legal
relationships are important.
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8. Where an adult does open an account and

hands on a sub-account to a child, ISPs, mobile
phone operators and other online companies
should verify the relationship of that adult to
that child.
9. The mobile telephone companies need to
revisit the way they interpret the Stewart Report.
The Stewart Inquiry looked into the effects on
childrens physical health and brain
development of certain kinds of radio waves
associated with mobile phones and mobile
phone masts. Following publication of the final
report, the mobile phone operators adopted a
self-denying ordinance whereby they would not
market their services to children or promote
greater use of mobile phones by children. In
practice this has been interpreted as meaning
that the mobile phone companies cannot speak
to children at all, ever, about anything. Given
how many millions of children use mobile
phones this is plainly absurd. No one wishes to
give the phone companies carte blanche to
promote commercial services to children, but
there are existing ethical codes around
advertising that deal with that. However, it
cannot be right for the phone companies not to
take a major responsibility for explaining
directly to children and young people how to
use their services safely, especially when
internet access becomes an integral part of it.
10. The data privacy laws and data protection laws
need to be revisited to take account of the new
realities of the digital age and childrens and
young peoples regular use of a variety of
devices that can connect to the internet. For
example, the standard advice that the Office of
the Information Commissioner gives out is that
at aged 12 or above a child is generally deemed
capable of understanding the implications of
giving information about themselves to third
parties. Twelve was developed as the standard in
the days when children commonly cut up a
cardboard cereal box to fill in an application to
send off for a free Action Man. There appears
to be no clear or research-based evidence that
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supports the notion that 12 remains relevant in

the age of the internet when two mouse clicks
can reveal everything to everyone. Moreover, as
the discussions on location-based services with
the mobile network operators have revealed,
there is in fact no defined lower age limit at
which a child can properly give information
about themselves to third parties, or agree to
join various kinds of service without parental
consent. The test is a subjective one, ie the third
party is meant to satisfy themselves that this
particular child is in fact capable of
understanding the significance of what it is they
are being asked to disclose. Large companies
and remote service providers are not very good
at administering subjective tests. Moreover
there are also potential issues around possible
conflicts of interests in respect of data privacy
between parents and their own children in
respect of location-based services, for example,
for the avoidance of doubt, the Finnish
parliament is intent on passing a new law that
would make it clear that, irrespective of the
wishes of the child, a parent of a child aged 14
or under could insist that their mobile telephone
is placed on a tracking service. To put it another
way, at the moment the Finns appear to believe
that a child aged 14 or under has a legal right to
withhold their consent, even when their parents
are almost certainly paying all the bills for the
use of the mobile telephone.
11. Greater use of encryption and related
technologies is beginning to emerge in
circumstances that suggest it is very likely it is
being used as a means of hiding evidence of
criminal wrongdoing.66 New and better tools
need to be developed to enable law
enforcement to see this evidence and thereby
apprehend and prosecute the offenders.
Similarly there seems to be a shift towards
greater use of peer 2 peer networks as a means
of exchanging illegal images or sustaining a
variety of forms of communication. This too
raises new technical challenges that the
industry should address with vigour.
24
12. At one stage there was a great deal of

optimism around the idea that internet
publishers could be persuaded to label or
describe their own content prior to or at the
time of publication. This would then provide
the potential for software to be able to detect
what kind of material or activity was taking
place at a given internet location and allow it
or block it on a particular computer according
to criteria that had been previously set,
typically by the parent. A group of major
players67 in the global internet industry
announced they would back improved labelling
as part of their self-regulatory, public domain
contribution to improving online child safety.
In 1999 a new global body, the Internet Content
Rating Association68 (ICRA), was formed to
advance this cause and produce software that
would be free to the end user. Today this
system has still not taken off. It should. ICRA
has recently received new and substantial
industry backing and plans are in hand to
accelerate the emergence of ICRAs proposed
solution. The timeframe for this ought to be
ambitious as, sooner or later, peoples patience
will be exhausted.
13. The UKs Internet Watch Foundation,69 is
another industry-based initiative. It does
excellent work as the UKs hotline but in the
past it has been chronically under-funded and it
still relies on public bodies, especially the EU,
for significant amounts of its revenues.
Hotlines in other countries are in a similar
position. Either these bodies should be properly
funded by the industry, with secure longer-term
finances, and properly established within a selfregulatory or co-regulatory framework, or their
functions should be taken over and carried out
by the police.
14. Schools should be given greater resources to
enable them to play a leading role in a
sustained campaign to help their pupils
parents improve their understanding of the
internet. In schools children use the internet
extensively, but they generally do so within the
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confines of a heavily protected and constantly

supervised environment where some of the
riskier interactive technologies are simply
blocked, and where websites with ageinappropriate material are filtered out. Schools
are one of the main drivers for children
accessing the internet at home (eg to do their
homework) but at home similar types of
protected internet environments are often
absent. Within the UK eight out of 10 home-PCs
were found to lack adequate safeguards against
harmful materials and 67 per cent of children
were found to be more knowledgeable about
computers than their parents. Of 1014 year
olds, 52 per cent are spending more than five
hours per week online but 66 per cent of that
time is unsupervised.70 Schools are beginning
to grasp their responsibility for ensuring that
their pupils internet experience at home
approaches the same level of safety as that
enjoyed within school. The DfES now also
accepts it has a key role to play in reaching out
to parents to ensure they are aware of the
internet safety issues and that children are
properly protected at home. Perhaps school
networks should be opened up and made
available to children working from home so
they can enjoy the same level of protection in
both places?71
15. Existing international institutions need to be
further strengthened to help in the global fight
against child abuse images on the internet and
the related hands-on abuse. In particular, ways
need to be found to assist the police forces in a
number of countries where involvement in
producing or distributing child abuse images
appears to be growing very rapidly.
Proportionate responses
In discussing the programme of further reforms
one is always mindful of the importance of keeping
things in proportion to the size or nature of the
problem they seek to remedy. However, discussing
what is or is not proportionate is just another way
of discussing different views of different groups
priorities or interests. It is just as hard to be exact
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about what might constitute a proportionate

response regarding child abuse and the internet as
it is to be exact about so much else connected to
the growth and current usage of the internet. In
the end it often simply comes down to how
important you think these issues are.
It is clear that many of the problems we discuss in
relation to child safety and the internet were not
foreseen or intended. Nonetheless the internet
industry has a large degree of the moral and
possibly also the legal responsibility for creating
the problem so naturally we look to them to
provide solutions to it, and ones that do not in
turn create further problems. By default, the
government also has an obligation to show that
they are doing all they reasonably can to make the
internet as safe as possible for every child who
uses it, today and tomorrow.
Some will argue that the number of cases of child
sex abuse whose origins can be traced back to the
internet is small, but where does that leave us? It
would be no consolation to a child, or to her
parents, to be told, after the event, that they were
just unlucky.
Who will deliver the further reforms?

The UK internet industry is an increasingly
amorphous body. Nonetheless, because of the role
they play, the ISPs remain the natural focus for
much of the discussion about how we improve the
safety of the online environment for children. But
ISPs are highly competitive, they do not like
sharing information, profits are down and margins
are tight. Despite that, several of the major ISPs
active in the UK home market have continued to
take steps to reach parents and children with
improved safety messages and improved technical
tools. It is central to AOLs whole marketing
campaign and position as a company and AOL
currently has about 20 per cent of the market
share for home use within the UK.
Yahoo, MSN, Freeserve and BT have also been very
aware of their responsibilities in this area. All these
companies, and others, have contributed their time
25
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Page 26
and expertise generously to the Home Office Task

Force and the series of subsidiary working groups
that have been looking at aspects of online child
safety. But some of the key safety issues that the
child welfare agencies have outlined, and which are
detailed above, are perhaps seen as being beyond
the power of any individual company to resolve.
Maybe this is a classic example of where the free play
of market forces does not meet a wider societal
need? This whole area is about to be further
complicated by the large-scale arrival of the mobile
internet on a new generation of handsets, with GPRS
and 3G, new generation networks, underpinning
them. Happily the mobile network operators have
joined the Home Office Task Force to mark their
acceptance of that fact and they are now making
their own distinctive contribution.
With the possible exception of Microsoft, probably
no single commercial player could address the
issues raised in the programme for further
reforms outlined above. On the other hand, if
Microsoft were seen to be taking the lead, lots of
people would start protesting about an abuse of
monopoly power, and a rival camp might well
form to produce alternative solutions, thereby
confusing the message and the market further.
Online child safety ought not to be the subject of
commercial competition.
Some companies might worry that if reforms are
introduced piecemeal and on a voluntary basis,
with no apparent determination on the part of
government or law enforcement to see them
universally adopted, they may simply be burdening
themselves with additional costs that will
undermine their competitive positions vis--vis
their less fastidious rivals. Perhaps the
government, and therefore the Task Force, need to
be more explicit about its intentions to intervene,
and legislate, if the reforms are not adopted on a
very wide basis.
Other companies may even see further reforms as
being disadvantageous to their short-term
commercial interests. If the perception started to
gain ground that the internet was now a much
26
safer place for children, all the investment different

companies had made in developing and selling
their own technical tools and creating their own
brand image as a family-friendly provider might be
wasted. Against that, if the internet were to
become a much more trusted medium, one would
expect overall use to increase and therefore
everyone would benefit.
Perhaps there is a feeling among a number of
companies that this is all simply an example of
the child welfare lobby justifying its own
existence and seeking to build ever-larger
empires. They say that the predicted crisis
around child safety has not happened and they
think it never will. They say parents are not
ringing up demanding the sorts of measures
advocated in this report: they say parents just do
not care enough, or at any rate they do not care
enough to pay. This is very short-sighted. Time
and again opinion polls show that there is deep
parental concern about these issues, but for now
very many parents simply lack the confidence to
confront what they see as being a complex
technical question. That situation will change,
and it might change sooner than we think.
Historically the leadership of many of the UKs
leading internet firms were heavily influenced by
US first amendment thinking. It continues to exert
a powerful influence. In the United States it is
largely the Christian fundamentalist right that
champions the causes espoused in this report so
European liberals and libertarians are
understandably wary of acknowledging a common
agenda. But, to paraphrase George Orwell,
Just because something appears in the Daily
Telegraph, it doesnt necessarily mean it isnt true.
In other words, it is more important to address the
fundamental issues that lie behind peoples
concerns than it is simply to dismiss them
because of their provenance.
www.nch.org.uk
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Page 27
Conclusions
Modern society has always found it difficult to

detect and prevent child sex abuse, the majority of
which has taken place within existing family or
social circles or in certain institutional settings,
and the arrival of the internet has added to this
difficulty by opening up new ways for paedophiles
to reach and abuse children.
The internet has also provided new means of
distributing images of the sexual abuse of children.
This seems to have encouraged an increase in the
production and circulation of such images and
has, in turn, fed through into an increase in the
sexual abuse of children, either for the purposes of
producing the images or because users of the
images have sought to fulfil the sexual fantasies
that have been fuelled by their use of the images.
The global nature of the internet brings with it
jurisdictional and logistical problems that add yet
another layer of complexity. Detection, prevention,
the identification and rescue of victims are all
made even harder. The speed at which the
technology has grown, and can change, adds
another twist.
The internet is facilitating a major increase in
children and young people being exposed to a
wide range of age-inappropriate or illegal sexual
and other kinds of material. No one knows what
the long-term effects will be of this exposure but
parents, teachers and others with a responsibility
for children are greatly anxious about it.
It is clear that parents, teachers and others with
responsibility for children must educate their
children about the internet and how to avoid or
deal with problems they may encounter on it.
Parents and teachers can also be reasonably
expected to take steps themselves to supervise and
protect children, but it seems equally clear that the
internet industry in the widest sense must similarly
accept that they have a continuing duty to do all
that they reasonably can at a technological level to
maximise the probabilities that children using their
www.nch.org.uk
services will not come to any avoidable harm.

Neither should the industry be indifferent to the
possibility that the service they are providing might
undermine parental preferences in respect of how
they bring up their children. The fact that children
at some time or other seek to evade rules laid
down by their parents, teachers or others in
authority, is no reason for saying that parents,
teachers and those in authority should therefore
abandon the effort and have no rules at all. Rules
describe standards.
Within the UK, the governments Internet Task
Force on Child Protection has played a decisive
leadership role in formulating new laws and
developing the child safety agenda. Most of the
UKs leading internet companies have played an
active part in the Task Force and have responded
positively to its recommendations, but there
remains a series of larger reforms that ought to be
acted upon. The industry also needs to find new
technologically based solutions to assist the police
and others in dealing with the new types of misuse
of the internet that are emerging. Furthermore, with
the advent of GPRS and 3G networks, the internet
is about to go mobile on a large scale, supported
by new, sophisticated telephone handsets. Almost
all of the issues of child safety on the internet that
exist today become much more complex when the
internet goes on the street.
Given the pre-eminent position of the US in
almost anything and everything to do with the
internet, we must look to the US government and
law enforcement agencies to increase the
effectiveness of their interventions against the
criminals who are using US-based resources to
distribute child abuse images across all continents.
We must also strengthen international efforts to
deal with the rising tide of child abuse images
starting to come out of various other countries,
often in poorer parts of the world.
Whichever way one looks at it the internet is an
enormously important and valuable technological
27
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4:03 pm
Page 28
achievement. But that is not to say that civil society

has simply to sit back and accept as inevitable
whatever is served up to it by the industry.
Finding a solution to the problem of child safety
on the internet is important in its own right, but
for as long as acceptable solutions evade us, much
that is dynamic, valuable and indisputably
legitimate about the internet is also threatened.
Put another way, the still essentially hazy
awareness of the internets dangers and the
growing perceptions of the inadequacies of
existing safeguards could suddenly crystallise
around a specific incident or series of incidents,
particularly if they came close together
chronologically. Who knows what larger or wider
damage might then be visited upon the internet?
The internet may never be completely and reliably
safe all of the time, either for children or anyone
else but, if the will is there, through a combination
of increased public and parental awareness, and
through improved technical tools, we ought to be
able to look forward to a time when it is a great
deal safer than it is today.
The alternative seems to be that we could end up
with two or more internets.72 One will be strictly
regulated and controlled. There will be a very high
level of certainty about who all the users are, and
you will pay to use it, over and above the cost of
the connection or your ISPs current subscription
level. Alongside it there will also be the internet we
know today wild and free, but with reducing
levels of e-commerce being carried out on it, and
wholly associated with a subculture of exotic or
illegal sex and crime. Respectable people will not
acknowledge that they use it and the world will
have lost something very valuable. It is not yet too
late. But time is rapidly running out.
28
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Page 29
Endnotes
1
2
3
4
5
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
In a sense the internet sits at the top of a pyramid, facilitating

communications between a range of digital devices. Computers are
the best known, but increasingly games consoles provide internet
access, as do mobile telephones, personal digital assistants and so
on. Except as the context provides otherwise, henceforth whenever a
reference to the internet is made it encompasses the relevant uses
of these or any other devices that can connect to it.
See www.cyberatlas.com
While acknowledging the importance of sexually predatory online
behaviour by some children and young people on other children and
young people, the issues it raises are outside the scope of a report of
this kind. An adult is defined as someone aged 18 or over.
The legal age of consent to sex in most of the UK. It is 17 in
Northern Ireland.
For these purposes a legal image is one that it would normally be
legal for an adult to possess. They might be videos or stills. The bulk
of the material circulating on the internet is in the form of stills but
many of them could be single shots taken from a video. However
the fact that it may be legal for an adult to possess or be exposed to
certain kinds of materials does not always mean that it would be
legal for a child to be exposed to it. The Obscene Publications Act
1959 refers to material that depraves or corrupts and the standard
for an adult is unlikely to be the same as for a child.
People Like Us: The Report of the Review of the Safeguards for
Children Living Away from Home, HMSO, Department of Health,
1997, para 9.19.
In this paper the term paedophile refers to any adult who shows an
active interest in sexually engaging with a child below the legal age
of consent.
See People Like Us, Sir William Utting, HMSO, 1997, and Lost in
Care, Sir Ronald Waterhouse, HMSO, 2000.
Thought to be no more than five or six per year.
This does not mean that the plan was not carefully and deliberately
executed by the paedophile, only that the selection of the specific
individual was more or less random and depended on who
happened to be around at the time.
See Online Victimization: A Report on the Nations Youth, Finklehor et
al for NCMEC, USA, June 2000 (see http://www.missingkids.com/
download/onlinevict_execsum.pdf). This showed that one in five
children received an online sexual solicitation. One in 33 children
received what they considered to be an aggressive sexual
solicitation, eg the other person asked to meet them somewhere,
called them on the telephone, sent them regular mail, money or
gifts. It is thought that 24 per cent of all solicitations and 34 per cent
of all aggressive solicitations came from persons aged over 18.
Approximately one in four young people who reported these
incidents said they were distressed by them and five per cent said
they made them very or extremely upset or afraid.
Whereas in the US there have been several.
See page 3 of this report.
Principally these include email, chatrooms, newsgroups, instant
messaging, peer2peer, voice-over-IP, message boards and other
online communities. To the extent that SMS and picture messaging
for mobile phones can be activated by or through the internet, these
too would qualify for inclusion. SMS in particular has been used in
the context of contact offending.
In the overwhelming majority of cases the offending adult will be a
male but we ought to acknowledge that female offenders of this type
do also exist. In the typical case involving a female she will be aiding
and abetting a male partner, but there are also a small number of
known cases where a female is the principal offender.
A chatroom is typically a small box or window that appears on a
computer screen. A user must first log-in and then one participates
in or initiates a conversation by typing in messages that appear
more or less instantaneously on your screen and on the screens of
everyone else who is also logged-in to that chatroom. Chatrooms are
www.nch.org.uk
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
generally themed in some way, but the themes can be very general
and the extent to which the theme is adhered to can vary
enormously. As with text messaging on mobile phones, chatrooms
have developed their own style and language.
It is possible in some chatrooms to log on in invisible mode so it
may not even be apparent to all users who is in there at any given
moment. This is one further reason why it is important to impress
on children the importance of not disclosing personal information
while in a chatroom. You have no way of knowing exactly who might
be reading and collecting it.
The typical scenario involves an older man and a younger girl, but a
small number of cases have been homosexual in nature and have
involved boys.
Some chatrooms allow voice communication as well, in which case
the paedophile will encourage the child to wear headphones so only
she can hear what he is saying.
This figure is based only on media monitoring and therefore may
not represent the complete picture.
Including one autistic boy.
In one case a paedophile made contact with two 11-year-old girls
who were friends. He groomed them for two years before meeting
them shortly after their 13th birthdays. He had sexual intercourse
with both of them. Had he had intercourse with the girls prior to
their 13th birthdays the subsequent charge against him would have
been rape, which carries a life sentence. As it was he only faced
charges of unlawful sexual intercourse, for which the maximum
sentence was then three years.
See for example, Prevention, Protection and Recovery of Children from
Commercial Sexual Exploitation, 2nd World Congress on CSEC,
Yokohama, 2001 and Child Sexual Abuse, Informing Practice from
Research, Jones and Ramchandani, UK Dept. of Health, 1999.
Although certain technological developments might eventually help
us to locate and destroy specific files that are being housed in public
parts of the internet, there could be no certainty that a file had not
already been taken offline and stored, thus putting it out of reach of
such programmes.
Inevitably there can be no hard and fast rules about what is or is not
age-inappropriate. Everything hinges on the childs current and
evolving capacities, and will be influenced by their family, cultural or
religious backgrounds or the context within which the material is
being viewed.
There seems to be no reliable evidence on this point.
Unsolicited bulk email. Chat rooms are known to be a major source
of email addresses for spammers.
See www.symantec.com/press
See Youth, Pornography and the Internet, Dick Thornbugh and
Herbert S. Lin, Editors, National Research Council, 2002, especially
chapters 5, 6 and 7, http://bob.nap.edu/html/youth_internet
There is a feeling in some quarters that by using the word
pornography one risks confusing what the images depict with
images of consensual adult sexual activity. The truth is that the
images we are discussing here depict rape and other forms of child
abuse so that is what they should be called. The Greater Manchester
Police were the first to start using this term.
See page 11 of this report.
Logically one would expect that the more a man looks at or collects
child abuse images the greater the probability that he will go on to
engage in contact offences, however no clear link has been
established between the frequency of looking at or collecting images
and involvement in contact offending. It is safe to say that moving
from merely looking to collecting and possession definitely marks an
important change in behaviour. Getting involved in collecting and
possession seems to denote a much higher probability of being
involved in contact offending.
This is particularly true if the images are being distributed in a
commercial context, but it is also true in other contexts as well.
29
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4:03 pm
Page 30
34 Under UK law if someone looks at a child abuse image

unintentionally or comes to possess one unintentionally, say
because it arrived as spam, no crime has been committed. The
person concerned ought to inform the authorities and not copy it
or distribute it to anyone. However, if a person intentionally goes
looking for child abuse images, even if they do not then deliberately
download any but merely look at them on their screen, then in
all probability they have committed an offence because they have
acted wilfully.
35 Typically in pre-internet days child abuse images could only be
obtained via mail order, by visiting a certain kind of sex shop,
from an existing collector or by making them yourself.
36 The Lucy Faithfull Foundation is a leading child protection agency
that operates UK-wide. It assesses and provides intervention
programmes for adult and adolescent, male and female perpetrators
of child sexual abuse. It runs clinics providing intensive long-term
therapy and therapy for child and adult survivors of child sexual
abuse and their families. The Foundation works closely with the
courts.
37 Self-Reported Contact Sexual Offenses by Participants in the Federal
Bureau of Prisons Sex Offender Treatment Program: Implications for
Internet Sex Offenders, Hernandez, presented at the Research and
Treatment Conference of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual
Abusers, San Diego, CA, November, 2000.
38 This means that at the time the arrest warrants were executed the
only information in the hands of the postal inspectors was that the
suspect was likely to possess child abuse images. It was only
following subsequent and wider investigations that evidence of realworld abuse emerged, ie that the person concerned either had
previous convictions for abusing children, or acknowledged their
current or planned future involvement in abuse, or through the
review of evidence, including interviews with family members and
neighbours, it is discovered that abuse has occurred.
39 Child Exploitation Program Overview and Highlights, US Postal
Inspection Service, and in correspondence with the author.
40 In this context Findlater also emphasises the importance of
providing help to people who feel themselves being drawn to
problematic behaviour and this help should be available before the
behaviour reaches the stage where a crime may have been
committed. This was an important part of the inspiration behind the
launch of Stop It Now! They can be contacted on 0800 1000 900.
41 However the Sex Offences Act 2005, may alter that position.
42 As it is now known. It was previously known as the Obscene
Publications Unit.
43 Disclosed in correspondence with the author. The squad no longer
count the number of the images they seize.
44 The volume of images is not always the most important factor to be
taken into account in terms of assessing the likelihood of a person
being a future risk to children.
45 Work of this kind is thought to be underway in several software
houses.
46 Many dating from the time that child pornography was legal in a
number of European countries.
47 Abusive Images of Children and the Internet: Research from the
COPINE Project, M. Taylor and E. Quayle, in Medical and Legal
Aspects of Child Sexual Exploitation. A Comprehensive Review of
Child Pornography, Child Prostitution, and Internet Crimes Against
Children, edited by Cooper et al. GW Medical Publishing, St.
Louis, USA.
48 See Appendix.
49 The current law on child pornography offences was established in
1998 with the passage of the Criminal Justice Act 1988.
50 Under the Innocent Images initiative.
51 Reported in The Times, 6/12/2002.
52 See www.sentencing-advisory-panel.gov.uk
53 In England and Wales there are 43 different local police forces, each
of which has operational autonomy. Differences in approach are
therefore quite common and depend on local factors.
54 See page 8 of this report.
55 See www.stopitnow.org.uk
30
56 Because COPINE focuses on newsgroups it misses a number of

other areas of the internet where child abuse images regularly
appear or are traded, sometimes in substantial volumes, eg
websites, online communities, IRC and other chatrooms.
57 See www.iwf.org.uk
58 The author is a member of the Task Force.
59 Department for Education and Skills. The DfES also established its
own Strategic Internet Safety Group, of which the author is a
member.
60 See Sex Offence Act 2003.
61 CHIS consists of seven of the UKs largest, independent professional
child welfare agencies: NCH, NSPCC, Barnardos, ChildLine, NCB,
Childrens Society and the NCVCCO.
62 Each technology that is available on the internet requires its own
specific response. There are few blanket solutions available but there
are now a number of safety software packages on the market that
bring these different elements and responses together. The relevant
characteristics that most of them share is an ability to screen out
websites according to certain pre-determined criteria, eg they
contain pornographic, violent or racist images, and they allow a high
degree of control of the interactive elements of the internet such as
email, access to chat, peer2peer, instant messaging and
newsgroups. Some also allow for detailed monitoring of how the
computer is being used, eg they can record, store and, if necessary,
replay every keystroke and every email or other message sent or
received. These packages could, of course, be disabled or removed if
the purchaser felt they were no longer necessary.
63 Web filtering products, for example, can over block and under block,
ie keep out material that ought to be let in and let in material that
ought to be kept out.
64 A walled garden is an online environment where all the content that
is available is pre-approved and where considerable effort is put into
verifying who is using the service. A walled garden therefore provides
access to parts of the internet, rather than all of it. It could never be
100 per cent safe. Nothing can ever be that where the internet, or
indeed life, is concerned. But a walled garden could be a great deal
safer than the open system that currently predominates.
65 See www.linx.net
66 See 2002 Annual Report, Internet Watch Foundation.
67 These included Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo and BT.
68 See www.icra.org.uk
69 Of which the author was a director until 31/12/03.
70 See http://www.dixons-group-plc.co.uk/, press release, 12 November
2002.
71 See http://www.nspcc.org.uk A MORI poll, 21 January 2003, showed
90 per cent of parents were concerned about the possibility of their
child being contacted by a paedophile via a chatroom. This rose to
99 per cent for parents with very young children.
72 Arguably we already have that as more and more investments are
made in developing closed systems.
www.nch.org.uk
www.nch.org.uk
1
2
C Cautioned
D Proceeded against
Found guilty
31
Found guilty
16
2
21
39
5
44
32
5
36
35
10
44
43
3
53
39
10
40
30
13
43
44
10
46
35
4
48
37
7
42
36
7
53
27
6
40
37
11
60
44
18
53
79
16
125
69
15
80
81
17
124
103
14
111
105
19
167
82
26
116
99
34
163
139
31
175
77
25
129
218
35
284
225
1505 1730
51
25
88
723
Source: Offending and Criminal Justice Group (RDS), Home Office. Ref: IOS 503-03
3022
A+B+C+D
C+D
181
1111 1292
289 1196
38
398
All data given refer to the principal offence only. Data may include persons proceeded against in earlier years or for a different offence.
(1) Offences under the Protection of Children Act 1978, section 1 and section 6 as amended by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, section 84.
(2) Offences under the Criminal Justice Act 1988, section 160 as amended by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, section 84(4) and section 86(1).
Possession of
an indecent
photograph
of a child (2)
32
A Cautioned
B Proceeded against
A+B
4:03 pm
Take or make
indecent
photographs
of children (1)
1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 Totals
22/12/03
Offence Disposal
Number of defendants cautioned, those proceeded against at magistrates' courts and those found guilty at all courts for offences relating
to child pornography, England and Wales, 1988 2001

Page 31
Appendix
22/12/03
4:03 pm
Page B
NCH is one of the UKs leading childrens charities. We

support the most vulnerable children, young people and
their families so that they have the opportunity to reach their
full potential.
Further copies of this report can be ordered by calling
NCHs Supporter Helpline on 0845 7 626579 (calls charged
at local rate, open 9am5pm monday to Friday).
The artwork featured on the cover is by a young person
from No.28 Child and Family Counselling, an NCH project
supporting children, young people and families affected by
sexual abuse.
NCH
85 Highbury Park
London N5 1UD
Telephone: 020 7704 7000
Fax: 020 7226 2537
www.nch.org.uk
Registered charity no. 215301
As of 1 April 2004 registered charity no. 1097940/company no. 4764232
B Child abuse, child pornography and the internet
Produced by NCH 12/2003. 6464
ISBN 0 900984 80 5
www.nch.org.uk

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06 6464 pornography report

Child abuse, child pornography

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06 6464 pornography report

Child abuse, child pornography and the internet

06 6464 pornography report

Child abuse, child pornography and the internet

06 6464 pornography report

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under-18s regularly using the internet, the highest

Child abuse, child pornography and the internet

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Our task as parents, carers, teachers, law

Child abuse, child pornography and the internet

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The sexual abuse of children and young people is a

I argue that the arrival of the internet has almost

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current state of thinking, at least among those

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Child abuse through contact offences

The term contact offence describes criminal

The family and social circle

these established family or social circles or

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for a long time, or at any rate until a time when

A typical modus operandi

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public space or else leave the chatroom altogether.

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he will seek to sexualize the contact and

The scale of offending

Other forms of real-world offending

numbers are yet available but we know, for

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when it comes down to it, we have no way

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Ensnared in the manipulative clutches of an adult

Exposure to age-inappropriate material

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However, for the great majority of children and

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There is a wide variety of pornography that

requirements that mean that their parents or

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sexuality? How will it shape or influence todays

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As well as facilitating contact offending against

simple curiosity, without necessarily knowing that

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06 6464 pornography report