child pornography and sexual exploitation of children online

for a minimum of several months, with some holding membership for up to 10 years. On
sampling it was found that there were 1570 subscribers to the group, and it was categorised
as a medium-level activity group.
One of the most notable findings of this research was the increase in activity on the support
forum since Durkin and Bryant studied it in 1999. The number of members on the site
had grown significantly, with a current active membership of over 1,500, attracting over
1300 new posts per month on average. These figures represent an almost tenfold increase
in the size and activity of the group, which in 1999 received between 150 and 200 unique
posts per month. The intensified use of the site raises questions as to why this growth has
occurred, given that newsgroups are a relatively basic and outmoded medium for Internet
communication. While the Usenet newsgroups were popular in the 1980s and 1990s, their
unattractive interface and low signal-to-noise ratio had web users predicting that they
would be obsolete by the twenty-first century. Newsgroups, Non-stop (2008) writes that
innovations accompanying the rise of Internet technologies should have challenged the
existence of the newsgroups as a communication tool, yet their popularity has remained
steady. They conclude that the reason why usage of the Newsgroups has not declined is
because the forums are mostly uncensored by hosts and thus groups can exist on any topic
and host almost any type of content. Because of this, the success of the Usenet forums is
the fact that they fit the ideal of Internet communication in that they are uncensored, peermoderated
spaces for sharing information. Although the forum studied in this research
does not claim to host illegal child abuse imagery, O’Halloran (2008) suggested that the
content of its discussions is objectionable to most of the general public and thus it could
expect to be censored if located in a different medium on the Internet. Because Usenet is
peer-moderated, there is no external individual to regulate its content so members are free
to discuss whatever they wish in relative privacy.
The continued proliferation of child abusive images through old and new channels follows
the pattern that has emerged on the Internet, where demand for different items will be
satisfied by the very existence of a world-wide audience. Demand for child abuse images is
one where a local market, which pre-Internet was practically non-existent, functions due to
the very nature of the medium itself. In any single community there may be few individuals
driving the demand for a specific kind of child abuse image, but on a global level, there
will always be likeminded individuals to connect with. In this way, the demand for child
abuse images follows the ‘Long Tail-theory’ (Anderson 2006). The costs of consumption
have been lowered drastically by the democratisation of production. However, as Anderson
emphasises, content production is only meaningful if others can enjoy it. The link between
supply and demand is crucial in all Internet-based exchanges, and in the case of child abuse
images is facilitated by different ways of locating content.
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