Porn Portal

WANT to find the cheapest flight to Barcelona? No problem. Find out when Abraham Lincoln was born or get your shopping done at Tesco?

Easy. Or fancy looking at graphic pictures of babies or children being abused, tortured or raped? It’s just a click away.

The dawn of the internet has made it easier, faster and cheaper for people to access information from around the world in seconds. Through chat rooms and other meeting grounds it also facilitates discussions about common interests, whether that’s about what lip gloss Britney Spears uses or the best sports car of all time.

However, there is a darker side to the net. It also facilitates adults with a sexual interest in children to view obscene material and trade it. It allows them to order images to their taste, which is one of the reasons why there has been a surge in the number of babies and toddlers appearing in increasingly violent and abusive images. It helps to normalise their behaviour by allowing them to make contact with other people who like to look at and trade abusive images of children and it helps them to groom potential victims and offend.

Project manager at UCC’s COPINE (Combating Paedophile Information Networks in Europe) Project Dr Ethel Quayle believes the internet is changing the way adults with a sexual interest in children are offending and also increasing their capacity to offend.

“The internet lessens social risk and lowers inhibitions. You can be who you want to be on the net. The internet helps to rationalise and normalise this behaviour for offenders and can be used as an aid to seduce and abuse more children because the offender can download the image and show it to a potential victim and say ‘look, it’s not that bad. She’s doing it, she’s smiling in the photograph so why won’t you do it.’ This is how you can groom more victims,” Dr Quayle said.

While anyone working in the area of abusive images of children on the internet will tell you that pornographic images of children have been with us for centuries, the internet is adding a new dimension to this crime.

“Child pornography has always been with us, but the internet is a new factor to consider. The internet is not just a fancy mail system, it provides access to virtual communities. But virtual communities are real, they just aren’t meeting in the local pub. You cannot go into a pub and say ‘I like little boys,’ but you can say it on the net. It facilitates the distribution of these abusive images and allows things to happen that never happened before,” said Professor Max Taylor, who heads up the COPINE project.

“The whole Tim Allen debate was on the man, but the real issue is that the pictures he had were of real children. Legally it is called pornography, but it is really images of child abuse.

“Pornography implies the top shelf of a newsagents, it implies consent or at least an age where consent can be given, a bit of fun. Child abuse is not something fun. It is not mild and the children cannot give consent.

“These are real children being abused, but no one sees the images because, if you see them, you have done something illegal. This means it is a world outside the understanding of people.”

COPINE technical adviser Eoin Kelly, who last year joined the unit, agrees: “There is nothing to base an explanation of these pictures on. You simply can’t imagine what these images are like.”

Mr Kelly also points out that speedier internet connections and cheaper digital cameras and camcorders means the number of people able to make, view and download video footage of children being sexually assaulted and raped on the internet is growing.

While photographs of abuse still account for the majority of material available on the internet, video clips which depict moving images of the abuse with real sound is a growth area for adults with a sexual interest in children.

“There has definitely been an increase in the number of video clips available on the internet. This is due to increased bandwidth, the greater accessibility to digital cameras and camcorders in terms of both price and ease of use,” Mr Kelly said.

Detective Superintendent Jon Hesketh of the British West Midlands Police, who headed up the recent Operation Ore which targeted people downloading abusive images of children, has noted an increase in the number of video clips seized as part of on-going investigations.

“Moving images are certainly a growth area,” he said. “The fact the child is moving in real time and you can hear their voice intensifies the impact of that image.”

“We have also seen an increase in the number of sound files that are being downloaded from the net. This allows the person to hear the screams of the child being raped and, in many countries, you cannot be prosecuted for owning a sound file,” Det Supt Hesketh said.

Dr Quayle, who has interviewed many offenders, believes the internet is also changing the pattern of offending. Before the internet, people found it hard to access the type of material that particularly interested them and anything they bought was very expensive. They were also isolated because they had no one to talk to about their predilection.

With the internet, adults with a sexual interest in children are quickly able to find material and download images for their own particular tastes, discuss their tastes with other like-minded individuals, and set up a marketplace to trade these images. Their tastes, in the majority, are for white children, aged between six and 12 years of age, usually blonde, in a variety of sexually explicit poses or being molested and raped.

“Most of these images are not in hotels or staged venues, they are taken in the bedrooms of family homes and taken by people in the child’s immediate family circle. They are expressions of fantasy. Some of the pictures would appear in any family album. Pictures of young children taking a bath, running naked on a beach, but, in the context of people who have collections of these images and have no connection with the children, that’s when these pictures become problematic,” Dr Quayle said.

She said there is a growing number of teenagers and young people accessing abusive images. In fact, the average age of an internet sex offender is 25.

COPINE is currently looking for funding to develop a treatment programme for young offenders. It is also piloting a treatment programme it developed for internet offenders for use within the sex offender treatment programmes in Britain and eventually Ireland.

“These are new types of offenders. Many probation officers in Ireland don’t even have access to email, how are they supposed to deal with these offenders? If you don’t know how to turn on a computer, how can you understand how someone organises their entire life around one. We know their world, we know where they came from. Often we have been involved in their prosecution,” Prof Taylor said.

But what about the vehicle for these men’s fantasy? Who polices the internet and allows these images to be downloaded and traded and what penalties do they face?

Ex-chairman of the Internet Service Providers Association of Ireland Cormac Callanan said a network of hotlines called www.inhope.org is working to shut-down child pornography sites around the world, including Ireland.

Members of the public are urged to contact the hotline at www.hotline.ie if they come across any such material on the net while they are surfing. The hotline then investigates the content to see if it is legal or not. If the site offering illegal material is based in Ireland, the hotline reports it to the gardaí who can shut down the site and prosecute the distributors of the material. If it is not based in Ireland, the investigators report it to www.inhope.org, an umbrella organisation for all the 17 hotlines operating around the world, who will in turn pass it on to the local authorities.

“We have had a lot of success. One such example is Operation Hamlet which helped smash a paedophile ring in Denmark. Illegal material was detected by the Swedish hotline, which passed it on to the Danish police. It resulted in 17 arrests in the US, a further 12 arrests around the world, one suicide and 100-plus children were identified and rescued,” said Mr Callanan.

Internet service providers (ISPs) here, such as Eircom, Esat and IOL, co-fund the hotline in Ireland with the EU and work to identify those distributing illegal images of children. However, Mr Callanan said the difficultly lies in trying to identify the collectors of this material.

“If we want to catch all the collectors, we have to let ISPs intercept all the information on the internet, your emails, attachments and photographs. Should the actions of a small minority limit the freedom of everyone else? I don’t know. That’s a society decision.”

He also points out that another difficulty is the lack of global standards on illegal material: “I could go on to an adult porn site in Germany and download an image of a 16-year-old girl. It is not illegal there and I may not even know she is 16. But it is illegal here to possess such an image. I may not even realise I have an illegal pornographic image on my computer. We need a global response and global standards to illegal internet material.”

Taking up his new role as secretary general of In Hope.org, Mr Callanan believes it is impossible to clean up the entire area, because there are always going to be new offenders and new ways to produce, publish or distribute this material.

“We can’t make this issue go away,” he said. “If we catch an offender there is always going to be another one. Internet use is quadrupling every nine months or so, we just have to keep changing the technology to keep pace.”

However, Paul Thornton, customer services manager at Accuris, an Irish company working with countries around the world on the lawful interception of emails of suspected child pornographers, believes ISPs here should be working harder to stop this illegal trade on the net and should be regulated, at least in part, by the Government.

He points out that, in Australia, if a member of the public sees an internet site they believe should be restricted, they can complain to the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA), which will investigate. If the complaint is upheld and the site is hosted within Australia, the ABA can order it to be taken down and the ISP can be fined Aus$27,500 per day if they do not comply. If the site is hosted outside Australia, filters can be updated to exclude the offending site so that it cannot be accessed from that PC.

“In Europe, ISPs tend to be self-regulated, but the sector must be co-regulated in agreement with the Government and the wider community.

“In Australia, the ISPs can block external websites hosting illegal material. It’s not a perfect system, but at least it is better than doing nothing and trotting out the same old line that you cannot police the net. You can and we must,” Mr Thornton said.

With the soaring levels of abusive images of children on the internet, Ireland may have to take a tougher stance on ISPs if we are to clamp down on an industry thriving on stolen childhoods and broken bodies.