413047-Underground-Commercial-Sex-Economy

One prosecutor expressed concern over the link between child sex tourism and child pornography and the
belief that not enough was being done to fully investigate these cases:
I just get a sense, and this is a gut feeling, that there is more we could be doing on the sex
tourism front. Getting folks going over to Thailand and Cambodia and really exploiting
kids over there, exploiting kids on cruise ships, on sex cruises, and stuff like that.
Especially ones going to the Far East, or India, and really, name any poverty stricken
country. (Kansas City Law Enforcement Official)
Content Changes
A 2010 report to Congress documented law enforcement’s and prosecutors’ observations that child
pornography has become more violent and displays increasingly younger victims, such as infants and
toddlers (US Department of Justice 2010). Law enforcement stakeholders reported similar trends, though
both a local and federal investigator were clear to distinguish that while there is new material, the
majority is recirculated older material. While offenders in our sample noted that many images had been
traded for decades—one offender said the images his IRC group traded were from the 1960s to 1980s—
there was agreement across offenders and stakeholders that the newer images are more explicit. Some
stakeholders described the proliferation of freely downloadable child pornography as responsible for
driving the demand for newer, more graphic images or videos. In one offender’s estimation, this change is
due to the ease of production, which does not require a third party to develop images:
Because of the digital images, you don’t have to go through developers to get pictures—it
is more explicit than it was 30–40 years ago. It was tame—not pornography at the time.
Just nude images. There were magazines you could buy back then. (A10)
Another stakeholder noted that concomitant with an increase in graphic content, child pornography
producers are producing child erotica in order to create a commercial enterprise that can evade law
enforcement:
I have also seen a softening to where they are trying to make it a little bit more appealing
commercially to where they are trying to get more of an acceptance … I’ve seen it, one
where they are trying to soften it up, where it is not as graphically bondage and torture
and stuff like that. You know we’re starting to see more bestiality and more torture, but
I’ve also seen the other side of that where they are trying to make it more commercial by
softening it up a little bit. I feel like they are making it more commercial to where they can
slide for a little while without being picked up by law enforcement and then you have to
dig a little deeper. But that’s been the standard for a long time; you got to spend $9.99 a
month to get into a membership like this, now you want to get into the really good stuff
you got to spend another $9.99 and so on … until you get in there. (Federal Law
Enforcement Official)
Technological advancements also improve the image quality of child pornography, as it allows for more
high quality video footage:
Respondent: The changes I mostly noticed were technical.
Interviewer: In the way technology was used to capture images and videos
Respondent: You would see film images transferred to video. More low level video, and
then high quality video, just like that. Just like higher quality equipment finds its way into
the main stream, it finds itself into that too. (A6)
Perceptions
Risk and Illegality
While some longtime, technologically savvy offenders had complex strategies to avoid law enforcement,
the majority of offenders were unaware that law enforcement could or would police the Internet. The
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