child pornography and sexual exploitation of children online

Over the last few years we have also seen ready access to social networking sites, which
demonstrate the convergence of many aspects of computer mediated communication.
Livingstone (2008) has remarked, “In terms of their affordances, social networking sites
enable communication among ever-widening circles of contact, inviting convergence
among the hitherto separate activities of email, messaging, website creation, diaries, photo
albums, and music or video uploading and downloading…” (p. 394). Along with this has
come an increasing anxiety that such convergence provides relatively easy access to a wide
range of information about a young person, as well as affording the opportunity to create
content that may be construed as problematic. While some researchers have construed this
as a ‘moral panic’ (eg, Cassell and Cramer, 2008) for which there is little actual evidence,
Brazil has seen a growth in the use of sites such as Orkut as a context for grooming,
diffusion and interchange of pornographic material and as a means by which adults can be
intimately in contact with children and adolescents (Gonçalves, on behalf of Childhood
Brasil, personal communication).
However, it must not be assumed that as technology advances this means that ‘old
technology’ is simply abandoned. Newsgroups provide one example of ‘old technology’ that
is still used by many, including those with a sexual interest in children. A recent study by
O’Halloran (2008) can be used to illustrate this. Usenet is an example of a newsgroup and
simply stands for ‘user’s network’. It began in the early 1980s as a means of information
and idea exchange for users and programmers of the UNIX operating system (Harmon
and Boeringer, 1997). At the time of writing, Harmon and Boeringer (1997) reported the
existence of over 15,000 newsgroups on Usenet. A more recent figure offered by Joyce and
Kraut (2006) puts the number of public groups at 190,000, which are made up annually of
250 million messages from over 9 million unique users. Usenet, or the ‘newsgroups’ as it is
commonly referred to, is a Bulletin Board System (BBS) that allows users to post messages
that can be read and responded to by anyone with access to the group. They are easily
accessible, and newsgroups exist for such divergent topics as support for baseball teams,
magic, anarchism, sharing recipes and alternative groups of a sexual nature. In 1999 Durkin
and Bryant conducted a study analysing the justificatory accounts offered by paedophiles
communicating on a Usenet group dedicated to the support of ‘boy lovers’ (Durkin and
Bryant 1999). The study sought to identify exculpatory and justificatory accounts of those
with a sexual interest in boys in order to supplement existing knowledge about paedophilia.
The online Usenet group ‘alt.support-boy.lovers’ was identified as a ready pool of people
who were not necessarily active as contact offenders, but who could offer insights into
how those with a sexual interest in children accounted for their deviant sexual orientation.
O’Halloran (2008) repeated the study with a sample made up of contributors to the same
Internet support forum. The text of 23 contributors with a self-identified sexual interest
in children was analysed. All of the contributors had been members of the support forum
34|Child Pornography and Sexual Exploitation of Children Online