The internet has transformed our lives. Adults - and children - have previously unimagined access to knowledge, culture and conversation with people all over the world. Yet the online revolution has a darker side. It has given paedophiles a window to groom potential victims and a forum to market child abuse images, on an ever-increasing scale and of ever younger children.
There are no accurate figures for the number of such images in circulation, but statistics in a recent report by the children's charity NCH give a chilling glimpse of this growing menace. Child abuse, child pornography and the internet notes that in 1995, just before the internet took off in the UK, the Greater Manchester Police Abusive Images Unit seized 12 indecent images of children, all on paper or video. In 1999 they seized 41,000, all but three of them on computers.
In December 2003 a UK man was convicted of possessing 450,000 images, while New York police seized an estimated one million images of abuse in a single raid on one address.
NCH gloomily predicts that 'unless we find a new way, technically, of remotely locating and removing material from the internet, it is very likely that the problem will continue to grow and be cumulative in its effects'.
Max Taylor, professor of applied psychology at the University of Cork, where he runs the Combating Online Paedophile Networks in Europe (COPINE), says that trying to gauge the number of images is 'not meaningful' because as well as those on the web, 'there is also a pool of highly illegal secret material that circulates between people and about which we know nothing'.
The project, which monitors online newsgroups known to contain child abuse images, has an archive of nearly 600,000 images. COPINE staff noted a huge increase in new images during 2003 and have spotted 60,000 individual child victims.
Finding out how many children are affected, and who they are, are key concerns. 'We know the identity of only a few, because until recently this was not seen as a very high priority,' says Professor Taylor.
Identifying the children
Professor Taylor says that the impetus to identify children was not prompted by concerns about child protection but by a court ruling in the US. This stated that to prosecute for possession of child abuse images, there had to be proof that the victim was 'real'.
Shockingly, the NCH report states 'perhaps fewer than 300 children have ever been identified from images that have fallen into the hands of police authorities anywhere in the world'. But through a Childbase Initiative, the UK's National Crime Squad is developing a database system to help identify new images more rapidly in future.
The NCH report refers to COPINE's analysis that the newer images 'show younger children than ever before, and they are being abused in ever more grotesque ways'. Growing numbers of babies and toddlers are involved, maybe because they cannot understand or disclose what has happened to them.
Several studies identify 'a definite link between possessing and collecting child abuse images and being involved in abusing children', with up to a third of those arrested for possessing images likely to be involved in 'hands-on abuse', says the report.
Professor Taylor emphasises that the two are inextricably linked. 'People producing this material are sexually assaulting a child. The images themselves are evidence of a crime, they are a crime scene.' Donald Findlater, deputy director of the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, which works with sex offenders, their families and victims, says, 'We know from our work with sex offenders against children that the biggest feature in terms of re-offending is deviant sexual arousal. Because child abuse images on the internet do this, we have to assume that people choosing to view these images are likely to have their personal boundaries eroded and they may act out what happens in these images.' Typically, internet child sex abusers can make up a quarter of those on the sex offenders' register in local authorities, he says.
Internet paedophiles are most interested in moving images, says Professor Taylor. They make videos, digitise them and then break them down into images. These are unlikely ever to be removed because they are continuously being circulated to feed an ever-expanding global market.
There is also a growing market for live images of children being abused, with abusers using file-sharing technologies and encryption to avoid detection. A new Barnado's report, Just one click, says that typically a victim is lured to the perpetrator's house and sexually abused, 'only to discover that the abuse was photographed and distributed live via the net and that the perpetrator was paid for this by his online peer group'.
While initially, most child abuse images were produced domestically by someone known to the victim - a parent, carer or friend of the family - commercial interests and organised crime have now muscled into this grisly trade. Before the US authorities closed it down, the Texas-based Landslide child pornography pay-per-view website took nearly $1.5m in its last month of trading.
Most of the criminal gangs involved in the US, south-east Asia and, increasingly, eastern Europe, are first and foremost abusing children online for profit, and not sexual gratification. NCH says that authorities in the UK have been 'uncovering many new commercial sites, all housed overseas'.
The UK element of Operation Ore, which was prompted by the FBI providing British police with the names of 6,500 people suspected of making or distributing child abuse images, has resulted in around 2,300 arrests. However, because of legal obstacles, barely 200 people have been arrested of the 35,000 on the equivalent US list and, according to NCH, America 'remains the world's number one exporter of child abuse images'.
Community of abusers
Sexual arousal through the exchange of fantasies appears to be the chief reason why adults, and an increasing number of young people, download child pornography. A 13-year-old boy was prosecuted by Manchester police recently for possessing and distributing child abuse images.
NCH says that those who collect, catalogue, trade and swap images 'feel part of a community of like-minded individuals, comrades, whom they embrace and join. It normalises their behaviour. They might rise in status in that community if they become more proficient and prolific'.
Donald Findlater says that some of his offender clients told him that the internet was where they first viewed child abuse images, sometimes by accident and then later deliberately. 'Others say they were always aware of their sexual interest in children but were too scared to do anything about it until the internet provided them with the means,' the NCH report states.
The Barnado's report points to the lack of research on how the dynamics of family life change when, for example, a father downloads abusive images of children. However, common sense suggests that family life will be affected, inappropriate attitudes may emerge, and children exposed to such abuse images may get the message that 'this material is perfectly normal'.
Child victims are reluctant to disclose their abuse because often they were made to smile and look 'happy' in images by their abuser. Then they feel guilty and ashamed for 'letting it happen', and fearful of being recognised.
Friends and family
Donald Findlater, who also manages the Stop It Now campaign's Helpline, says that young victims are reluctant to go to the police because there is an 80 per cent chance that their abuser is a family member or friend whom they care about. They just want the abuse to stop.
Only a quarter of abuse victims tell anyone, according to the NSPCC. A fraction report it to professional agencies. Less than 5 per cent of offenders are convicted.
However, 95 per cent of sex offender treatment is in the hands of the police and probation services. It can only be accessed once someone has been convicted of abuse.
'We create a climate where it is very difficult for sex offenders to come forward and acknowledge their guilt,' says Mr Findlater. 'I want resources developed and I want agencies with permission to create internet offending treatment programmes that actually help people deal with the problem early on, before it gets bigger and out of control.' He adds, 'Sex offending is learned behaviour. It's not something people are born with. The internet is providing a tool for that learning.' The government's Internet Taskforce on Child Protection is developing a child safety agenda and more co-ordinated police action is planned, especially with the creation of a British FBI to fight the trade in internet abuse images. Given the scale of the task ahead, many more children are at risk of abuse before it succeeds.
More information
* Just one click by Tink Palmer and Lisa Stacy, published by Barnardo's, priced 5. To buy a copy, call 0870 603 9079. or see www.barnardos.
org.uk
* Child abuse, child pornography and the internet, published by NCH. For a four-page summary (4) and the full 32-page report (15), call 08457 626579. See also www.nchafc.org.uk