Confronting the Reality of Child Pornography

New Zealanders who possess and distribute illegal material are being detected by law enforcement with increasing frequency.  Objectionable material, as defined in the Films, Videos and Publications Classification Act 1993 and The Films, Videos and Publications Classification Amendment Act 2005, includes a range of material but the Department of Internal Affairs Censorship Compliance Unit understandably concentrates its efforts on those New Zealanders who are involved with child pornography.  In the last 4 years, over 20% of those caught by the Department were school-age males.

Trading in children’s tragedies

Child pornography is the recording of the horrific abuse of children – usually in still images, but sometimes in videos or films with soundtracks.  Whether the subject is infant rape or forced sexual activity between 6 year olds, those moments of abuse are perpetuated by the callous global trading of these images in order to build collections.  In some overseas cases, the children did not survive the abuse that was recorded.

This material is most commonly traded in the chat channels like IRC (Internet Relay Chat), where the channels are explicitly named leaving no doubt about what is being offered, i.e. ‘baby rape’ or ‘under-two sex pics’.   Such illegal images are also now being offered in the peer to peer file-sharing environments like Morpheus, where detection is more difficult.  Child pornography can also be encrypted or embedded within other files, i.e. music files, in order to avoid detection.  [Note: There is a risk for children who are trading music files in peer to peer that they may quite innocently get more than just music when trading files.)

Many of those who collect child pornography do so by socialising in a virtual community of thousands of like-minded collectors. While some are lured to this material (young people can be offered a starter collection of images), most make an intentional decision to go searching for this material.   A trade might mean swapping fifty more common images of bestiality with children for five other images that are harder to find.  Most child pornography collections are assembled through a quite deliberate trading with other collectors, not through the inadvertent downloading of images. 

These child pornography images have tremendous ‘value’ to the collectors, who can often be curiously obsessive and protective of their collection.  Some have even gone so far as to instruct law enforcement officers about caring for the collection while it is in their custody (as though the offender will have it returned when the case is concluded).  Currently, money is not involved in most trades, but that too may be changing as child pornography becomes a more lucrative enterprise.  Overseas there are even indications that organised crime is beginning to get involved.

For many years, there was a relatively static collection of child pornography world-wide.  The Internet has now created a huge marketplace for this material and the demand for new images is increasing.  Technological improvement in ways to send images (faster broadband Internet) and store images (CD’s, zip drives, etc) mean collections can now easily grow to include thousands of images.   Digital cameras make it easier to create and quickly trade new ‘homemade’ images, which sometimes have been required for admittance into organised paedophile rings.   Web cameras have enabled a heinous marketing of abuse-to-order, where, for a fee, one can request the specific type of abuse of a child and watch it happen live.

Trading in images of abuse is obviously not a victimless crime, but there is another issue that New Zealand society must confront when dealing with this criminal behaviour.  People who traffic in such images are sexually attracted to children – they are sexually aroused by these images. Child pornography can also be used by some paedophiles to ‘groom’ children for abuse by normalising such behaviour for the potential child victim.

Assessing the risk to children

What danger do child pornography collectors pose to children?  How many child pornography collectors are already hands-on sex offenders?   How many are, as Professor Max Taylor of the University of Cork puts it, ‘embryonic sex offenders’?   John McCarthy, Director of SAFE Network, the Auckland sexual offender treatment programme, made this observation in a paper for the 2002 NetSafe symposium:

We cannot say conclusively that viewing child pornography creates a predisposition or inclination towards having sex with children.  The development of this predisposition is such a developmentally complicated matter, that it is highly unlikely that a single factor alone could cause it. However, there is little doubt that someone having such a predisposition greatly increases their chances of sexually offending against a child by viewing child pornography and sexually fantasising about it. (McCarthy, 2002)

A recent New Zealand study of 115 child pornography offenders completed by the Department of Internal Affairs concluded that there is an association between viewing child pornography and child molestation. While those convicted of committing a child molestation offence in NZ represents about 1% of the population, amongst the DIA sample of child pornography offenders the proportion previously convicted of child molestation was over 11%. They also found among these child pornography offenders a host of other worrying behaviours such as:

• watching children through telescopes 
• photographing children 
• showing sexual images to children 
• writing about their grooming or offending behaviour on the Net 
• producing sexual videos and pictures of children for collection in scrapbooks and journals.

The ISG feels that child pornography collecting must be viewed as being part of a range of sexual offences against children.  Thus, how we handle offenders who have been caught by law enforcement becomes an important child safety issue. 

Assessment of child pornography offenders by qualified sex offender treatment specialists (New Zealand is lucky to have several excellent programmes) before sentencing is essential in order to help identify those who present a real risk to children.  Child pornography offenders often have similar attitudes to hands-on sex offenders and minimise or deny the seriousness of what they have done (despite statements they make in court).  Mandatory treatment of those deemed a risk to children would mean that treatment is not optional and cannot be discontinued a few weeks after sentencing.  Community work, fines and prison terms alone, by not addressing the root causes of child pornography collecting, may in fact offer scant hope of preventing re-offending given the pervasiveness of the Internet. Already, those child pornography offenders who are being treated in these specialised programmes report a positive response to treatment.

Addiction?

Several child pornography offenders have tried to characterise the central issue of their offending as being one of addiction.  Let there be no misunderstanding, the central issue for child pornography offenders is a sexual attraction to children.

For therapists working with a client who has been involved with child pornography, there may certainly be an element of compulsion to the offending, but to treat this sort of offending solely as an addiction, in isolation from the subject matter of the images that were collected, is to risk colluding with the offender’s minimisation of the seriousness of their actions. 

An addiction response also misrepresents the criminal offending aspects of the behaviour, and may mean important elements of successful treatment such as developing victim empathy and examining the offender’s sexual arousal patterns are missed. Most importantly, to regard the behaviour solely as an addiction ignores the community safety aspect, thereby limiting the management and monitoring of these offenders that may need to occur to ensure the safety of children.

This is a very new field and you are welcome to consult with one of the specialist programmes listed in ‘Getting help’ for further information.

Response by law enforcement

While many child pornography offenders may be getting more sophisticated in their ways of trading these illegal images, law enforcement are also getting more sophisticated in their detection methods.  At the same time, international cooperation across national boundaries is helping ensure that offenders on the Internet - this global information environment - are brought to justice.

Here in New Zealand the Department of Internal Affairs Censorship Compliance handles the majority of cases involving illegal material.  The New Zealand Police and the Customs Service also handle such cases.  (See the Law Enforcement & E-Crime section of this website.)  The work of these agencies is held in very high regard internationally; they often collaborate on particular cases and regularly cooperate with overseas investigations that may involve New Zealanders.
 
The penalties under the Films, Videos and Publications Act 1993 were reviewed and updated in The Films, Videos and Publications Classification Amendment Act 2005.   These revisions now mean very serious jail time for offences which in the past might have received mere fines and community work sentences.

Intervention

One type of intervention for offenders is if they wait until DIA Censorship Compliance Inspectors come knocking on the door of their home or workplace, armed with a search warrant to seize the computer and other related equipment.  Another, far less painful avenue, is for an offender to get help and stop the behaviour before they get caught.  There is information in this section on where to get the expert help needed. 

Offenders need to realise that each trade increases the likelihood of getting that life-changing knock on the door – they need to stop now.