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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.