ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the sexualised content considering why people need laws for child pornography and focuses on how domestic law and international law have sought to tackle this behaviour. As technology advances new forms of child pornography have begun to exist and since the turn of the millennia the focus has turned to so-called virtual child pornography, that is computer-generated images of children depicting sexual abuse. The first reason for criminalising child pornography is that harm is caused to the participants and the additional harm can also be used to justify criminalising the distribution of child pornography. The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is one of the most important international documents that is designed to given an overarching system of rights to children. The only offence relating to sexual exploitation contained within the Cybercrime Convention relates to child pornography. The principal distinction that needs to be drawn for our purposes is between computer-manipulated images and computer-generated images.
