413047-Underground-Commercial-Sex-Economy

With an availability of child pornography and a culture encouraging information sharing, offenders found
it easy to learn where to get more material. As one offender recounted: “It’s all sharing of info; you pick up
bits and pieces and figure out what to do” (A6). Contacts would share websites and other sources of child
pornography: “I traded with folks, almost from the beginning. I can’t remember any websites I went to on
my own. I met guys on Yahoo, met them on different chat rooms” (C7). A Spanish-speaking offender
received guidance about file sharing programs and chat rooms in Russian:
Some people from Russia sent me programs in Spanish and instructions in Russian and
told me to use a translation program to translate the instructions. They sent it for free.
You go to one chat room and they send you to another and then another and it goes on
from there. I went to the Latin chat rooms for adult pornography. They told me where to
find more stuff. (C6)
As users were accepted into the child pornography culture, they became privy to other websites, which
would constantly change locations in order to evade discovery from law enforcement:
The bulletin board—Felixxx—will disappear and come up. 4Chan was a way to find it.
Every day it would move to a different site. You learn when you get on the board how it
will work—you can scroll forwards and backwards and figure out when it would
disappear. I understood it would disappear because it was illegal and a way to evade law
enforcement detection. (G2)
Jenkins (2001, 181) reports that vigilantes, private hacking groups dedicated to eliminating child
pornography, may embed viruses in child pornography files. This threat often resonates more strongly
than the danger of law enforcement detection: “Though viewing child porn sites might, theoretically,
attract massive punishment from the federal government, the odds of detection are felt to be slim, say,
one chance in many thousands. In contrast, the odds of encountering a virus or Trojan planted by a
vigilante are very strong indeed, perhaps 10 or 25 percent, and this high likelihood of damage is clearly
enough to make one stop and think.”
One 60-year-old offender, who collected for a year, found that many images were not actually child
pornography, but corrupt files:
I don’t think most of the images downloaded were child pornography. Sometimes when
you get a file that’s not corrupt and it looks like a functional video, you could put it in a
queue and it would download similar things. When you find something that is not
corrupted, you’d have to manually put it in the queue. About 10 percent of child
pornography was corrupt, but it could infect the whole machine. (F5)
Offenders varied in how often they would go online to download child pornography. One respondent
would always search for three to four hours on Fridays. Another would go online between 15 to 20 hours a
week, generally on the weekends or late at night. With peer-to-peer trading, a user does not need to
actively send files. For this reason, one offender would leave his computer running at all times for trading.
Collections
The size of offenders’ collections varied greatly, with many offenders only learning the exact size after law
enforcement involvement. Collections ranged from less than a dozen to hundreds of thousands of images.
The largest collection reported in the sample contained between 300 to 400 gigabytes. Similarly, Webb,
Craissati, and Keen (2007) found that offenders in their sample of 90 Internet offenders had between 2 to
921,000 images, with a median of 318 images.
Offenders built their collections for different amounts of time before getting caught. Seven (33 percent)
offenders collected for a year or less, seven (33 percent) collected for 1.5 to 5 years, four (19 percent)
collected for 5.5 to 10 years, and three (14 percent) collected for over ten years.
Three offenders (14 percent) went through periods of building and deleting their collections. These
offenders would vow to stop collecting and erase their images and videos. After time, however, they would
start collecting again. For some longtime offenders, this cycle repeated numerous times: “Through the
years, I'd copy the images onto CDs and then I’d feel guilty and destroy them” (B2).
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