413047-Underground-Commercial-Sex-Economy

One offender believed he knew what steps were necessary to secure his collection, which he hid as an
encrypted volume to deter detection from law enforcement. From his perspective, a lapse in his process
led to his arrest:
I don’t know if I was just being lazy or what. I knew what had to be done, a certain
amount of maintenance when using encryption. If 99 percent is encrypted and 1 percent
isn’t, might as well have nothing … I understood how forensics work, and knew how
housekeeping had to happen, and I just wasn’t doing it. (E9)
Another offender, who spent ten years collecting child pornography through online search engines, never
took any steps to avoid detection by law enforcement though he was aware of advanced techniques. He
expected to be apprehended since he was not technologically sophisticated:
Interviewer: Did you know you would get caught
Respondent: If you’re computer savvy, probably not. If you’re like me, yes. [There are]
guys that have a computer website and they route it all over the world and when they
finally do find them they are not there anymore. (B1)
To secure their child pornography collections, a third (n = 7, 33 percent) of the sample used encryption or
password protection. This percentage is larger than findings from the National Juvenile Online
Victimization Study, which found that 19 percent of 605 arrested child pornography possessors in 2006
used sophisticated methods to hide images (Wolak et al. 2011).
Networking
For over half the offenders (n = 13, 62 percent), acquiring and sharing child pornography had a social
component. For these individuals, social networking facilitated access to material and created a sense of
community with other child pornography offenders. Jenkins (2001) describes this community as a
subculture with its own values, social hierarchy, and specialized language. In addition to passing down
technological expertise and directing offenders to new sources of child pornography, these communities
also normalize this behavior (Taylor and Quayle 2003). Bourke and Hernandez (2009) point to the role
child pornography cyber-communities play in providing support and social validation. Few studies have
identified the portion of child pornography offenders engaged in online communities. Seto and colleagues
(2010) found that across a sample of 68 offenders, 58 percent participated in online child pornography
communities. The United States Sentencing Commission (2012) reported that approximately 25 percent
of offenders have some level of involvement in online child pornography communities.
Through interviews with 13 offenders, Quayle and Taylor (2002) found that for many individuals, social
relationships were more important than the child pornography images. Surjadi and colleagues (2010),
however, found that function to be absent within their sample of 43 Dutch Internet offenders.
Offenders in our sample pointed to social relationships as an important component of their Internet
activity. Though a sense of community was not the initial impetus to find child pornography, it was a key
part of keeping individuals engaged in offending behavior. One offender valued relationships more highly
than the pornography:
Trading
The pictures were a secondary thing. You traded pictures to meet people. I’d go until I got
a group of people to talk to, then I wouldn’t need to collect so much. (C7)
Sharing child pornography is reciprocal; both parties must provide material to conduct the trade. File
sharing on mIRC generally ensures users give and take equal numbers of files by counting the number of
bytes transferred, though users could inflate the number they shared by renaming duplicate files:
It counts how many bytes [go] back and forth, so you have to trade equally … Duplicates
are hard because people rename the files so they seem like a new file and then trade with
them. Some people rename photos that aren’t that type of file and then just trade it so it
counts as bytes (A11).
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