ABSTRACT

This chapter will explore issues relating to the collection and distribution of child abuse images, acknowledging the considerable level of overlap between this and other forms of online exploitation. It will look in detail at the changing nature of the problem and some of the key political and practical moves being taken to tackle the production and distribution of such images. Examples are given where genuine progress is being made in reducing access to child abuse images over the Internet and it is argued that these concrete examples need to be taken up and acted upon more widely. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the true nature and scale of this problem lies largely hidden and argues that a more concerted and collaborative international effort from governments and industry is urgently needed. In order to bring this about it is further suggested that new ways need to be found to focus public attention on the issues. Lessons need to be learnt from the environmental and other successful civil society global movements. Child abuse images are visual representations of a child being sexually

abused.1 The abuse usually takes place in the offline world, although some forms of sexual abuse which involve the capture of images can take place remotely, for example, through the use of web cams. The Internet facilitates the mass distribution of the images, often for profit.2 This, in turn, creates an incentive for abusers to harm yet more children in order to create new images for sale. Within our definition of child abuse images we also include realistic

simulated representations of sexually abusive activity or representations of the sexual parts of a child for sexual purposes. Such images can be created either by editing or ‘morphing’ a genuine image of an actual child to make it appear as if they are being sexually abused. Alternatively the image might have been generated entirely by a computer, but nonetheless is for all practical purposes indistinguishable from a genuine image. In some jurisdictions, for example, in the USA, in principle the image is illegal precisely and only because it depicts actual harm being done to a real child. In other jurisdictions,

for example, the UK, it is not necessary to establish or prove that an actual child was harmed. The image is illegal if it is sufficiently realistic to convince a jury, as a finding of fact, that it looks like a real child is being sexually abused. This change in the law was introduced in the UK and several other countries in order to keep pace with technological changes which made it possible to edit existing videos or photographs or create new ones which are indistinguishable from genuine images of real events.3 It is hard to know with any great precision how much ‘pseudo’ child pornography of this kind is in existence but it is thought that it is only a very small part of the total, that is, the great majority of child abuse images in circulation on the Internet are of real children being criminally assaulted or abused for sexual purposes.4