Last month, disgraced glam rocker Gary Glitter was deported from Vietnam after serving a two-and-a-half year prison sentence for sexually abusing young girls. He had fled Britain nine years earlier after receiving a two-month sentence for possessing child pornography.
Despite the length and breadth of his subsequent offending career, the apparent ineffectiveness of his brief first sentence hardly rated a mention. Yet just days after his deportation, Scotland Yard issued a warning. The problem of child abuse is a far greater threat to society than first thought, it said, with “huge” numbers of pedophiles now scouring the Internet.
Since 1998, Internet crime involving sexual exploitation of children has risen by more than 400 percent; downloading, possessing and trading or distributing child pornography has also grown rapidly. Ever more sophisticated technologies have facilitated illegal online activities, making it easier to avoid detection.
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As a result, illegal material can move faster and in significantly greater quantities than before. And it is a highly profitable business: commercial child pornography was estimated two years ago to be a US$20 billion industry worldwide.
Yet it is not only the quantity that is disturbing. There is also the increasingly extreme nature of the material, as reported in the Internet Watch Foundation’s (IWF) study earlier this year.
Detectives for the London-based Child Exploitation Online Protection center are uncovering evidence that pedophiles are concentrating more on pre-verbal victims. Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in the US, said recently that child pornography has become “a global crisis.”
Child sex offenders are usually habitual fantasists. They are prone to distorted thinking; dissembling and deceit go with the territory. And it seems they are particularly skilled at disowning and evading responsibility, a trait prevalent among sexual abusers generally.
Partly as a result of this, less is known about online child pornographers and their treatment than almost any other group of offenders. And even less is known about the correlation between the use of pornography and hands-on offenses. So despite some recognized advances in policing and containment recently, this lack of empirical knowledge is thwarting the professionals who seek to tackle the problem. The damage, meanwhile, continues to escalate.
Psychologists Michael Bourke and Andres Hernandez conducted a study two years ago at a federal correctional institution in the US, in which they compared two groups of men in a voluntary treatment program for sex offenders. All 155 had been sentenced for the possession, distribution or receipt of child-abuse images. Only 40 of them were known to have committed any hands-on sexual offenses previously, averaging 1.88 victims each. The others claimed never to have committed such offenses: Their activities, they said, had been restricted to viewing images.
But after participating in an 18-month therapeutic program, a very different picture emerged. It was a picture that not only belied the normal, law-abiding lives depicted by most of these men prior to their arrest, but one that also contrasted with the frequent assertion that such offenders are “only” involved with images.
It emerged that the number of men admitting to hands-on sexual abuse increased from 40 to 131. Their average number of disclosed victims rose to 13.56 (8.7 for the 115 men who had previously denied any offenses). Overall, the number of admitted contact sexual offenses increased by 2,369 percent.
Far from being innocent or sexually “curious” bystanders whose interest was reserved to Internet images, the vast majority of these men emerged as hands-on offenders with longstanding sexual interest. Not only were they significantly likely to have sexually abused more than one child, they were also likely to have experimented with both genders, and a variety of age groups.
The other 24 men were offered a lie detector test; some refused. Only two of these men passed, both of whom admitted that with continued opportunity and online access they would have been in danger of molesting a child.
Perhaps this should not surprise us. Among other things, online communities provide marginalized individuals with a feeling of solidarity, while at the same time maintaining the illusion of anonymity. Fertile grounds, you might think, for the awakening of any dormant or repressed sexual fantasies. Indeed, perhaps the act of repression creates its own vulnerability, rendering such individuals more susceptible to external triggers.
It would be rash to conclude that the Internet causes contact sexual crimes. But the research puts paid to the idea that the desire to view images is easily distinguishable from the desire to act them out. And they also corroborate prior findings: The manifestations of deviant sexual arousal are seldom limited to fantasy. It is opportunity more than anything that dictates how many Internet offenders also rape and molest children.
What is beyond doubt is the harm caused. Child abuse images dehumanize children and desensitize offenders, and child/adult sexuality is normalized in the process. Yet such a profitable business will not suffer exposure easily, nor welcome scrutiny.
The above survey was among the first of its kind in the US, and doubtless proved discomfiting to many. It has yet to be published. Those experts who have seen it say privately that it could have enormous implications, both for law enforcement and public safety.
What is becoming apparent is that the Internet has opened the way for new types of offending. The real issue is not whether viewing these images will make someone a pedophile — a label liable to vast misunderstandings. The real danger is that those who do so will be encouraged to reoffend — and that the proliferation of online child-abuse images will dramatically increase the incidence of child abuse.
As the IWF has stated, there is urgent need for “a coordinated global attack on these websites.”
This is undoubtedly so. But as Bourke and Hernandez’ report shows, our lack of awareness in this area is very dangerous. Particularly, it seems, when it comes to our knowledge of sex offenders. If nothing else, Glitter’s case shows that his initial prison sentence achieved little apart from delaying the next onslaught. Clearly a more enlightened approach toward the treatment of victims and offenders is not only long overdue but vital.
This dark underbelly of society has fed on ignorance for too long. It is only through addressing why these things happen, as well as how to stop them, that we might shrink its appetite. This untold damage needs telling.
Philippa Ibbotson is a professional musician and freelance writer.
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