child pornography and sexual exploitation of children online

distinction are significant, however, and can be seen in the way in which investigative
agencies frequently divide evidential material into three categories:
• Indicative – material depicting clothed children, which suggests a sexual interest in
children;
• Indecent – material depicting naked children which suggests a sexual interest in
children;
• Obscene – material that depicts children in explicit sexual acts.
In a similar fashion, Tate (1990), commented on how the material ranged from, “posed
pictures of naked and semi-naked children, through more explicit shots of their genitalia
thumbed apart to still, film and video recordings of oral, vaginal and anal sex” (pp. 203–217).
As we will see, legal definitions of child pornography have to be objective and expressed in
terms that allow for the proper application of due process. However, it becomes apparent
that not all of the material that is currently circulating on the Internet would meet any
legal definition of child pornography, and the definition of such images as ‘abusive’ is a
largely subjective one. Svedin and Back (1996) defined child pornography as, “a text or
an image – i.e. photo, slide, film, video or computer program – that is intended to evoke a
sexual feeling, fantasy or response in adults” (p. 9). However, expressing criteria in terms of
a capacity to generate fantasy may be problematic when objective definitions are required,
as the range of materials that might evoke fantasy includes photographs that can be found
in any family album or clothes catalogue.
If we look at the kind of material found in the collections of offenders, the kinds of
pictures that can be identified range from pictures of clothed children, through nakedness
and explicit erotic posing to pictures of a sexual assault of the child photographed. We
can make some objective sense of this by thinking of them in terms of a continuum of
increased deliberate sexual victimisation (Taylor et al., 2001). This continuum ranges
from everyday and perhaps accidental pictures involving either no overt erotic content, or
minimal content (such as showing a child’s underwear) at one extreme, to pictures showing
actual rape and penetration of a child, or other gross acts of obscenity at the other. Taking
this perspective focuses attention not on just illegality as a significant quality of pictures,
but on the preferred type of pictures selected by the collector, and the value and meaning
pictures have to collectors (Taylor and Quayle, 2003). The images then are seen as not only
reflecting the ways in which children are victimised but also how such victimisation is
mediated by the use to which the images are put. Such a perspective does not require that
the picture depicts an actual assault on a child for it to be used in an abusive way.
Outside of high-tech crime units, the majority of people working in the area of Internet
offending will have never seen child pornographic images from the Internet (Quayle and
12|Child Pornography and Sexual Exploitation of Children Online