Proceedings [PDF] - Measurement and Analysis of P2P Activity ...

International Conference Advances in the Analysis of Online Paedophile Activity Paris, France; 2-3 June, 2009
by one leading UK Internet Service Provider suggested that in July 2004 they blocked more than
20,000 attempts per day to access child pornography on the Internet. More recent data from the
Swedish and Norwegian blocking of access to known sites carrying child abusive images reveal as
many as 15,000 – 18,000 daily attempts in Norway (Quayle, Lööf and Palmer, 2008). Such use of the
WWW as a possible means of accessing child pornography was investigated by Demetriou and Silke
(2003) who established a website to examine whether people, who visited for the purposes of gaining
access to legal material, would also attempt to access illegal or pornographic material if it was
offered. Over an 88-day period, 803 visitors entered the site and it was found that the majority of
visitors accessed those sections purporting to offer illegal or deviant material. However, material that
is produced legally can also be used in a problematic way. This was demonstrated by Lehmann,
Cohen and Kim (2006) in relation to the detection and management of pornography seeking in an
online clinical dermatology atlas. During the study period, one third of the search queries related to
anatomical sites and over half specified children.
So are the anxieties expressed about the new technologies, and in particular about the use of
abusive images of children, simply part of a moral panic Mears et al., (2008) in a survey examining
US views towards sex crimes indicated that the public supports incarceration as an appropriate
response to prosecuting child pornography offenders. The suggestion made by these authors was that
Americans may support incarceration because of a belief that behaviour such as downloading abuse
images will lead to a contact offence against a child. This might also be the case why convictions
sometimes attract long sentences within the US, with Greenhouse (2007) giving details of a US
Supreme Court decision declining to review a case in which an Arizona man was given a 200-year
sentence for possessing 20 ‘pornographic’ images of children. Yet Jenkins (2009) has argued that we
see nothing constituting moral panic. It may be that while we have seen increasing anxiety about
children’s agency online, which result in displays of sexual behaviour or the establishment of sexual
relationships, we show much greater ambivalence towards child pornography. We are concerned with
the relationship between the use of images and harm against ‘real’ children in the offline world
(largely our children), but we seem to demonstrate a much more complex level of interest in the
photographic depiction of abusive and exploitative practices towards children.
Jenkins (2009) attributes what he calls this ‘failure to launch’ to several factors. He argues that
one main reason is technical in that law enforcement agencies work at a technological level that is too
low to comprehend trade in images as it actually is. But perhaps one factor, mentioned by Jenkins, to
explain some of our ambivalence towards abusive and exploitative images of children lies in our lack
of knowledge on the one hand of what these images are, and an overexposure on the other to
sexualised visual materials. It is not simply that we lack concern about the illegality of images, or, as
demonstrated by the 200-year sentence, the potential of such offenders to pose a further threat. Adler
(2008, p3) reflects that, ‘Claims about the changing nature of child pornography are difficult to verify
for a number of reasons: above all, it is extremely hard, if not impossible, to measure accurately the
online environment; in addition, no one outside of government can fully assess these claims because
child pornography law prohibits researchers, academics, or anyone outside of law enforcement from
looking at child pornography’. Yet sexualised images of children, clearly not defined in law as child
pornography, are often found in contexts such as advertising, (described by Rush and La Nauze, 2006,
as examples of corporate paedophilia). Adler’s (2001) argument is that as we legislate more and more
to control abusive images of children we potentially create a ‘a vast realm of discourse’ in which the
image of the child as sexual is not only preserved but multiplied. Child pornography law socially
constructs the child as sexual and one result of this construction may be that more people feel sexual
desire for children.
If we look at the material found in the collections of offenders, the kinds of pictures that can
be identified range from pictures of clothed children, through nakedness and explicit erotic posing to
pictures of a sexual assault of the child or children in the photograph. We can make some objective
sense of this by thinking of them in terms of a continuum of increased deliberate sexual victimisation
(Taylor et al., 2001). This continuum ranges from everyday and perhaps accidental pictures involving
either no overt erotic content, or minimal content (such as showing a child’s underwear) at one
extreme, to pictures showing actual rape and penetration of a child, or other gross acts of obscenity at
59