child pornography and sexual exploitation of children online

offending through variations in the type or severity of the criminal penalty or disposition
(Andrews, 1995). For example, Smith, Goggin, and Gendreau (2002) concluded, after
an in-depth review of 111 studies involving 442,000 offenders, of all offense types, that:
(1) harsher criminal sanctions do not deter re-offending; (2) prison sentences are related
to increased re-offending rates; (3) longer prison sentences are associated with high reoffending
rates; and (4) sentences of more than two years result in average increases of
re-offending rate of 7%. The exception may be incapacitation where the community
is protected while offenders are in prison. However, it is expected that the majority of
offenders in the context of this paper would eventually be released, if incarcerated in the
first instance” (p. 11). Adler (2001) has gone beyond this to suggest that the legal war
against pornography has already been lost, and that there is, “the possibility that certain
sexual prohibitions invite their own violation by increasing the sexual allure of what they
forbid. I suggest that child pornography law and the eroticization of children exist in a
dialectic of transgression and taboo: The dramatic expansion of child pornography law
may have unwittingly heightened pedophilic desire” (Adler, 2001, p. 4). This remains a
contentious issue.
However, in law offences related to child pornography are not all treated as the same.
Akdeniz (2008) referred to this as a ‘chain of liability’. At the top of the chain are those
who produce abusive images or content, and will be made up of, although not exclusively,
those who will have sexually abused the children in the images. Many of these will produce
images within a domestic setting where production is part of a spectrum of abusive practices.
As has been previously discussed, this group consists of sexual abusers and sexual exploiters
since the photography is always there to continue to exploit the sexual abuse in some
way. The second group that sexually exploit are those who distribute child pornography
over the Internet, either commercially (for financial gain), or non-commercially, where the
images themselves function as a form of currency (Taylor and Quayle, 2003) or possibly
as a means to raise their status in a group or to confirm their allegiance and sense of
belonging to a group. The final group are those who sexually exploit the child through the
possession of images downloaded from the Internet (or occasionally acquired via mobile
phone). This latter group are often considered the least serious of offenders and are likely
to attract a lower sentence. However, Clough (2008) has suggested that, “We have seen
that traditional notions of possession may prove problematic in the digital environment.
While actual possession may be difficult to prove, in many cases it is clearly established,
often on their own admission, that the defendant did in fact view child pornography. It
may therefore be argued that rather than being prosecuted for possession, they should be
prosecuted for ‘accessing’ child pornography” (p. 233). Clough (2008) goes on to break
accessing down into three components:
1. Displaying/viewing
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