413047-Underground-Commercial-Sex-Economy

One offender shared how pressure to confirm his identity as a father led to producing child pornography:
My production started, actually, by meeting guys and saying that I’m a father. They’d say,
“Everyone says that; prove it.” Then over a year and a half, I’d prove it more
inappropriately. (C7)
Another offender initially believed that everyone must be lying about their behavior, since he was making
up stories about his activities:
Part of this whole thing is that you get into a thing where you think people are making
everything up. There aren’t that many people doing that stuff. You get into this thing. The
stuff we were talking about I wasn’t doing. You get into a complacent place, you think it’s
all bullshit. Then all of a sudden you meet someone and it’s not. (C7)
Since trades are reciprocal, offenders would need to possess material of relatively equal “value” to what
they wanted to acquire. One offender began producing child pornography in order to access private
material, which is highly valued:
Underground even deeper—people traded private collections [that are] not on the
Internet. In order to see stuff that had never been seen before, [they] needed to offer
something that had never been seen before.” (A10)
Another offender, who used chat rooms to acquire child pornography, felt pressure to produce child
pornography, but he refused out of fear: “I was asked to produce new images, but I was scared. I never did
it” (C6).
Network Size and Growth
None of the offenders reported membership in large networks similar to the notorious “W0nderland
Club,” a child pornography ring which contained approximately 200 carefully screened members across
over thirty countries. To join, members had to proffer 10,000 images (Jenkins 2001). Rather, offenders in
this study tended to have smaller networks, possibly due to the perceived safety in limiting trading
groups.
Eight offenders (38 percent) had small trading groups with whom they regularly traded. These groups
could be based on a specific type of child pornography, but would also be determined by social networks.
While the majority of trading groups were limited to no more than 10 people, one offender, who had been
trading for over ten years, had a larger trading network of 30 to 50 individuals. He believed that due to the
increased number of child pornography collectors, groups have splintered into smaller cells:
I would say the community that were really serious traders, back in 2009, would have
been in the tens of thousands across the world. Even that community is so fractured. Not
only what you’re interested in, but unlike using an AOL chat room or Yahoo, you have to
know someone who knows someone, or know what you are looking for. Because of that,
the individual cells of the community are 30 to 50 people. My specific trading circle was
30 to 50 people at one time. Always new people coming in. (E9)
Groups could grow quickly. As one offender shared, “The first site I went on to, I was the eighth member
and then there were 200 or 300 members on it. It was quick; I remember talking to the guys about it” (I1).
Relationships could be sustained throughout chat rooms and IRC channels, which could change over
time, as explained by one longtime offender: “Sometimes the chat room names would change, but I had
people I was friendly with for years that I would stay in touch with through IRC” (E9).
Hacking Within Networks
Trading groups could also foster competition, especially regarding technological prowess. One offender
had a “friendly” competition with a trading partner to try to crash each other’s computer. Hacking into
another offender’s computer to find child pornography could afford bragging rights and also enable
acquisition of private material:
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