ABSTRACT
It would not be unduly dramatic to claim that, of all the issues that elicit public and political concern about the Internet and new communication technologies, the problem of child-oriented sexual offending has been paramount. In the early and mid-1990s, when the Internet was undergoing a period of exponential expansion, public and media attention fell upon the circulation and possession of computerised images of child sex abuse and sexualised representations of minors (child pornography). Sensitivity to this issue was heightened, firstly, by a number of high-profile cases in which public figures were arrested and convicted for possession of such images (the pop stars Gary Glitter (Paul Gadd) and Pete Townsend being two such individuals in the UK). Secondly, there were a number of extensive international police investigations of online paedophile rings who shared child pornographic images (such as the Wonderland Club (1998) and those targeted by Operation Ore (2003)). Since 2000, concerns about Internet child pornography have been paralleled by the attention directed to online interactions between sex offenders and children, primarily through the online chat rooms and social networking sites that have become increasingly popular among children and young people. Police investigations and academic studies appear to indicate that children are extremely vulnerable to such predation, be it virtual abuse that occurs in the online environment (the exposure of children to sexually explicit
speech) or grooming in which offenders use online interaction to prepare minors for subsequent face-to-face meetings. The emergence of online sex offending as a crime problem has incited a wide range of new legal innovations that have served to further tighten the definition of child sex offences and created new categories of offence oriented to the electronic environment (such as chat room grooming and the prohibition of electronically generated, so-called pseudophotographs of minors in sexual scenarios). Equally, a whole range of new preventive and protection initiatives have emerged, often making recourse to a wide range of non-state and voluntary actors who are now charged with policing the Internet for child sex offences.
