child pornography and sexual exploitation of children online

as the Internet has become more available to a larger group of people, and the ability to
access child pornography has become easier, so we are more likely to see the convictions
of people who appear similar to the general population. A recent study by Middleton (in
press) of 72 Internet sex offenders found that, “It should also be noted that almost half of
the coded sample could not be assigned to any of the five aetiological pathways outlined
by Ward and Siegert (2002). These individuals recorded no problems with intimacy or
dealing with negative emotions, no distortions in their sexual scripts, and no anti-social
cognitions, regarding the appropriateness of sexual contact with children, and yet have
been prosecuted for using the Internet to access abusive images of children. This appears to
suggest that there is a population of Internet offenders who do not share the psychological
vulnerabilities typically displayed by sex offenders”. Middleton (in press) concludes that
more research is needed, “to develop offence specific assessment tools and in analysing
the particular factors that can lead an individual from seeking to view indecent images of
children to moving into the commission of contact offences”.
Seto et al. (2006) suggested that child pornography offending is a stronger diagnostic
indicator of paedophilia than is sexual offending against child victims. However, such a
conclusion poses problems for us in how we make sense of the many thousands of people
who seem to be accessing abusive images of children every day. Those engaged in sexual
exploitation through the production, distribution and possession of abuse images may not
be driven solely by their paedophilic interest but by other motives: or do we conclude from
this that our understanding of the numbers of people who may be classified as paedophiles
is a gross underestimate of the prevalence within the general population? Another possible,
or at least partial, explanation for the results of this important study may lie in the nature
of the stimuli themselves, and that for men who have spent long periods downloading and
accessing child pornographic images and masturbating to ejaculation to them, the visual
stimuli themselves are highly salient, and perhaps more so than for men who use private
fantasies or actual children as the focus of their arousal (Quayle, 2008). A more detailed
discussion of the role of fantasy in both contact and Internet offenders can be found in
Sheldon and Howitt (2008).
The section concludes by examining the, at times, conflicting research about the
relationship between viewing abusive images and the commission of further offences
against children in both the online and offline environments. There is a clear need for
further research to explore the inherent aspects of the new technologies that appear to
increase the likelihood of sexually exploitative and sexually abusive practices towards
children in relation to the new technologies.
38|Child Pornography and Sexual Exploitation of Children Online