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The phenomenon of child pornography
are no indications that groups in the Netherlands are involved in commercial production and distribution.
The NDB also showed that there is little insight into the involvement of Dutch groups in the production of
child abuse material in other countries. What is clear, however, is that Dutch payment processing companies
are involved in processing the flow of funds 210 and that servers located in the Netherlands are being
used to host child abuse material. 211
Distribution within amateur networks, also known as ‘paedophile networks’, usually takes place within
more or less organised networks or newsgroups that use protected areas of the Internet (see also §1.4.2).
Within these networks, encrypted e-mail and files, group-based communication via chat channels such
as Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and Microsoft Network Messenger (MSN) and peer-to-peer (p2p) exchange
programs are used in which documents never actually appear on the network and are therefore more
difficult to trace. 212 These p2p programs enable shared folders to be created (automatically) in which
files can be shared with other users of an exchange program. From a legal perspective, material in this
situation is supplied on the one side and acquired on the other. 213 It is not known what proportion of
child abuse material is distributed on the Internet via which route and it is likely that p2p programs such
as Gnutella and BitTorrent are the ones that are most popularly used for distribution purposes. 214 What
is clear, however, is that the means of distribution is subject to change, partly due to the fact that the
suppliers of child abuse material are responding to repressive measures and partly because new technical
means are always emerging. 215
‘Possession’ and ‘obtaining access to’
<strong>Child</strong> abuse material in analogue format was and still remains fairly bulky 216 and a large quantity of
hard-copy material occupies a considerable amount of space. With the introduction of ICT and the
subsequent shift from analogue to digital, the access to and storage of child abuse material has been
vastly simplified. It is frequently the case that individuals are tracked down who have many hundreds
of thousands and sometimes even millions of digital images in their possession. Previously, large collections
reflected the time and effort that someone had spent on them, but today large quantities are
more likely to reflect the speed of an individual’s Internet connection. 217 Some perpetrators deliberately
store large quantities of digital data relating to sexual violence against children on the computer.
210 KLPD – International Police Information Service [Dienst IPOL], 2008.
211 AK Zensur [German Working Group Against Internet Blocking and Censorship], 2010, p.7. This study refers to a
Russian-language child pornography website with an Indian domain name (.in) that is hosted from
within the Netherlands.
212 Van der Hulst & Neve, 2008, pp.51-52; O’Donnell & Milner, 2007, pp.36-40.
213 See Court of The Hague, 23 November 2010, LJN: BO4955. Prior to the legislative amendment of January
2010 (Act of 26 November 2009, Dutch Bulletin of Acts and Decrees 544, entered into force on 1
January 2010, Dutch Bulletin of Acts and Decrees 578), a legal precedent was set (Van Koppen, 2009,
pp. 91-95) in which the court ruled that this form of supplying child abuse material constituted a form
of (passive) distribution, see for example Court of Appeal of Den Bosch, 5 October 2005, Dutch Law
Reports 2005, 558.
214 Liberatore et al., 2010.
215 Leukfeldt et al., 2009, p.26
216 Taylor & Quayle, 2003, p.199.
217 O’Donnell & Milner, 2007, pp.57-58.
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