National Threat Assessment 2008. Organised Crime - Politie

The commercial production of images of child abuse mostly involves organised
criminal groups, as far as we know mainly from countries in the former Soviet
Union, such as the Ukraine and Belarus, and other countries from the former
Eastern Bloc. Production takes place in the countries of origin of these
organisations and local children are abused. The children are often runaways living
on the streets or they come from children’s homes, and they vary in age from 2 to
14. The distribution of the images of abuse is also controlled from abroad.
The scale of commercial production is unknown, but it is clear that it generates
a great deal of money. The United Nations reported on a worldwide
investigation in 2006 that criminal profits of 6 billion dollars were generated.
Non-commercial production of images of child abuse involves images of child
abuse by individuals, usually by relatives and acquaintances of the victim’s family.
Victims are also recruited under false pretences (this is known as ‘grooming’).
There are many possibilities for grooming on the Internet; contact can easily be
made via chatboxes, for example. The abusers pay attention to the children and
sometimes give them presents, with the ultimate aim of sexually abusing them.
There is no commercial purpose in these cases. However, the material is often
distributed online, mainly by exchanging it for other material. This form of
non‐commercial production is also found among sex tourists, who make
recordings with their digital cameras in countries with limited monitoring, such
as Thailand or Cambodia.
The scale of the non-commercial production of images of child abuse is difficult
to determine. The investigating authorities often fail to reach the source. The
relationship with the Netherlands or Dutch nationals is also difficult to establish.
Distribution of images of child abuse
The production of and distribution of images of child abuse tend to go
together, although the driving forces are not always the same. The Internet is
an important medium for distribution among the target group. The consumers
are usually very well aware of the fact that their sexual values are deviant and
they use the possibilities offered by the Internet to remain anonymous.
The IPOL document reports four types of distribution of images of child abuse
on the Internet:
1. Peer to peer
In the publicly accessible sections of the Internet you can still find people who
download images and distribute them independently. Some of these people use
so-called ‘peer-to-peer’ programs such as Kazaa to exchange images. These
cases do not involve distribution for commercial purposes.
86 National Threat Assessment 2008 – Organised crime