413047-Underground-Commercial-Sex-Economy

The sample was almost evenly split with offenders who would store images and videos to their hard drives
(n = 11, 52 percent) or burn them onto CDs or DVDs (n = 10, 48 percent). Of the eleven offenders who
saved to their hard drive, four of them (19 percent) used an external hard drive.
Online file sharing methods, as well as increases in download speed and home data storage, enable
offenders to obtain massive amounts of files. The National Juvenile Online Victimization Study found the
portion offenders with over 1,000 images grew from 14 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2006 (Wolak et
al. 2011). In our sample, however, 67 percent of offenders possessed collections with over 1,000 images.
Law enforcement stakeholders observed the increase in the size of collections, as some collections now
near a terabyte (1,000 gigabytes):
I am waiting for the lab forensics to come in on one [case] and I guess when that’s gonna
come in, I am probably up toward the terabyte. They are getting bigger, and bigger, and
bigger. I remember when I first started, if I got a DVD with like five thousand images, I
was like we need to put that bastard away. And now … (Federal Law Enforcement
Official)
Due to technological advances and the nature of peer-to-peer networking, users can download large batch
files. One offender, with a collection of 16 gigabytes, shared that he did not view all the images he
possessed: “Honestly, I don’t have this catalogued in my brain. I honestly didn’t look at 85 percent of what
I had. A lot came in clumps, [I would] look at one or two” (A12).
While the interview did not ask about the content of child pornography images and videos, one offender
disclosed that he organized his collection into three folders: clothed, unclothed, and HC (hardcore).
Serious, longtime offenders were extremely knowledgeable about series, which are sets of images. These
offenders knew when series became available and would look to specific clues to identify the location of
images. Results from the 2000 National Juvenile Online Victimization Study found that 27 percent of
child pornography offenders were “organized child pornography collectors,” which researchers defined as
intentional cataloguing organization or files. They determined that these offenders were more likely to
have larger collections and use advanced methods to secure their collection (Wolak, Finkelhor, and
Mitchell 2005).
In their interviews with 13 men convicted of downloading child pornography, Quayle and Taylor (2002)
found that offenders compared collecting child pornography to collecting stamps or baseball cards, which
served to normalize the activity by equating it to an innocent pastime. Jenkins (2001) reports the common
terminology on child pornography bulletin boards is to refer to collecting as a “hobby.”
As Taylor and Quayle (2003) describe, indexing collections and completing series could be pleasurable in
itself, even when the offender was not attracted to the material. This was evidenced by one offender, for
whom the act of collection became an obsession, even though he rarely looked at all the images within his
collection:
I was addicted to the collecting aspect of it. [It was] all so stimulating. It’s funny, all
during collecting, I’d rarely ever go back and revisit what I collected. [It was] about
acquiring more and more. (D23)
Private images or videos were highly valued, therefore individuals would be more selective with whom
they traded this material. As will be discussed in the next section, the quality of an offender’s collection
could determine their networking ability, specifically in terms of access to closed trading groups.
However, two of the six offenders who produced child pornography did so for private use, not to share.
Technological Savviness
A large variation existed in terms of offenders’ technological savviness. Technological savviness affected
numerous facets of offender behavior, including methods to acquire and distribute material, access to
closed groups, and data storage. Through offenders’ descriptions of their familiarity with the Internet, we
classified nine offenders (43 percent) as technologically savvy. These offenders had advanced
understandings of computers, either having studied computer-related subjects or worked as
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