413047-Underground-Commercial-Sex-Economy

particular series When did this come out” They would teach you, tell you the
background. They had been doing it for years obviously. If someone got a new one that
was private, they would give it to everyone in the group. (A11)
Through Jenkins’ (2001) research on online child pornography communities, he found that the elite, most
technologically savvy offenders were in closed trading groups. These groups were believed to have original
material that is not easily available through more mainstream mediums.
Social Hierarchy
Past literature demonstrates a social hierarchy within online child pornography communities (Jenkins
2001; Taylor and Quayle 2003). Individuals enter as newbies (inexperienced users) and can progress up
the hierarchy to more senior members, which hold higher status. Jenkins (2001, 94) quotes a post on a
child pornography bulletin board which instructs new users about the different roles in the hierarchy,
which include, from lowest to highest: newbie, lurker, regular, chat member, poster, newsgroup poster,
trader, and wise one. Taylor and Quayle (2003) describe the IRC channel operator’s control in
establishing policies and philosophies and how differing opinions can lead to intra-community conflict
and fracturing of groups.
IRC channel operators or chat room administrators run the group and have varying levels of control, such
as the ability to ban users from the group. These individuals are constant presences in the chat room and
ensure the chat room’s longevity:
Who was running chat rooms The people that created the rooms. If taken down, they’d
put them back. They were always there whenever you showed up. (C7)
Some IRC channels contain bots, programs that can act in a moderator capacity. These bots, as one
offender described, are “a program moderator, essentially” and there to oversee “who is in the chat room,
what data is being sent, et cetera” (A6).
Social Pressure
In addition to providing a sense of community for members, chat rooms and IRC channels produce their
own form of social pressure. In order to impress others, some users would boast about their sexual
exploits with children. One offender described how the chat room culture encouraged him to make up
stories about molesting family members:
People will lie. They will lie to say they do stuff with kids … I said the same damn thing.
Say that you have a nephew, daughter, or son to develop a rapport. So they don’t think
you’re a cop, because you’re talking about this. I’ve never done anything physically, it was
to make me seem more experienced than I was … It’s like in the prison, you have to be a
badass. Be ghetto, talk like a gangster. It’s that thing, sense of community. People lie to
include themselves in that community. (A12)
Stakeholders believed these networks served to encourage those that possess child pornography to
commit sexual abuse of a child. Recording this abuse and sharing the images allows offenders to maintain
their status within online communities and guarantee access to child pornography. As a Seattle law
enforcement officer stated, “There are even some networks that require you make contributions of more
and more graphic pictures in order to maintain your status of being able to download from their site.”
A federal attorney with experience prosecuting child pornography cases described how social networks
fuel the demand for more graphic images and encourage child sexual abuse:
I think there is a constant demand to show new material … It’s because they are offering,
or report to offer new content, more severe content. There is a demand. Even when I first
started, individuals who every once in a while would give a statement to the police that,
“You know, I felt like I need to try get this picture of my daughter, or these neighbors
down the street, or whatever, because they were demanding it of me, because I had
already shown them everything else …” I had two or three cases like that where they
admitted doing that. (Federal Prosecutor)
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