The Dark Net (13 page)

The prohibition of child pornography is a surprisingly recent phenomenon. During the sexual liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s child pornography was openly sold over the counter in some countries – most notably in Scandinavia – and in certain US states; an interregnum that is now referred to as the ‘ten-year madness’. By the late seventies many governments started passing tougher legislation to
stamp it out, and by the late 1980s, child pornography had become very hard to find. The biggest-selling child pornography magazine in North America had a circulation of approximately eight hundred, and was distributed via a handful of shops to small, close-knit networks of dedicated collectors. In the UK, many paedophiles would travel overseas in order to smuggle it in. Law enforcement agencies in the US considered the matter more or less under control. In 1982, the US General Accounting Office reported that: ‘As a result of the decline in commercial child pornography, the principal Federal agencies responsible for enforcing laws covering the distribution of child pornography – the U.S. Customs Service and the U.S. Postal Service – do not consider child pornography a high priority.’ In 1990, the NSPCC estimated there were 7,000 known images of child pornography in circulation. Because it was so hard to come by, the numbers that were accessing it were vanishingly small. It required effort and determination, which limited it to the most motivated individuals. Even during the ‘ten-year madness’, you didn’t – you couldn’t – just stumble across it.

The arrival of the internet changed everything. By the early nineties, the opportunities of networked computing were quickly exploited by child pornographers as a way to find and share illegal material. In 1993, Operation Long Arm targeted two Bulletin Board Systems that were offering paid access to hundreds of illegal images. Anonymous Usenet groups alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen and alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.schoolgirls were both used to share child pornography in the late nineties. In 1996, members of a child abuse ring called the Orchid Club were committing and sharing live abuse using digital cameras connected directly to computers in the US, Finland, Canada, Australia and the UK. Two years later, the police
uncovered the Wonderland Club, which comprised hundreds of people in over thirty countries who were using powerful encryption software to secretly trade images over the net. Prospective members had to be put forward by existing members, and possess at least 10,000 unique child pornographic images to join. In total, the police uncovered 750,000 images and 1,800 videos. Seven UK men were convicted for their role in the network in 2001.

As more countries went online, new production hubs sprang up. The infamous Lolita City in the Ukraine flooded the net with half a million images in the early 2000s, before it was shut down in 2004 – although two leaders of the agency were taken into custody and then released.

By October 2007, Interpol’s Child Abuse Image Database – made up of images seized by the police – contained half a million unique images. By 2010, the UK police database, held by the specialist Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), stored more than 850,000 images (although they have since reported finding up to two million images in a
single
offender’s collection). In 2011, law enforcement authorities in the US turned over twenty-two million images and videos of child pornography to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Twenty-five years on from the NSPCC’s estimate, there are today huge volumes of child pornography online, easily accessible and efficiently distributed. Between 2006 and 2009, the US Justice Department recorded twenty million unique computer IP addresses who were sharing child pornography files using ‘peer-to-peer’ file-sharing software. CEOP believes that there are approximately 50,000 people in the UK today sharing or viewing indecent images of children.

It turns out that I wasn’t alone on the Hidden Wiki. According to hackers that took control of the Hidden Wiki over one three-day period in March 2014, 100,000 other people had also visited the index, and one in ten of them had visited the link that I’d seen. According to the same source, between 29 July and 27 August 2013 there were thirteen million page impressions on Tor Hidden Services – and 600,000 of them were visits to the child pornography pages: the most popular group of pages after the index page itself.

Given the scale it is not surprising that there is no such thing as a ‘typical’ consumer of child pornography. Although there are some broad trends – nearly all are men and often well educated – they come from all walks of life. One academic has recorded nine different types of offender, including the ‘trawlers’ who seek out images, the ‘secure collectors’ who obsess over secrecy and build large collections, and the ‘producers’ who create images themselves and disseminate them. Many of these offenders would have sought and collected illegal images before the advent of the internet: it’s just that the net is now the most convenient place to do it. But there is now another type of offender, one unique to the internet age: the browser.

‘I have absolutely no idea how this happened, I really don’t. In fact, I don’t even understand
me
entirely.’ Michael
^fn1
seems genuinely
bewildered as he explains to me how he was recently convicted of possessing almost 3,000 indecent images of children on his computer. Although most of the material was categorised as ‘Level 1’ – the least serious category, which is erotic posing but no sexual activity – his collection stretched into the more serious and obscene Levels 2, 3 and 4, and most was of girls aged between six and sixteen.

Michael is in his fifties, smartly dressed and clean-shaven. He strides confidently into the room and greets me with a friendly handshake. Until recently, he had a busy job at a medium-sized business just outside Birmingham. A married man with one grown-up daughter, a football fan who enjoys an active social life. ‘A very ordinary, heterosexual bloke,’ he tells me. ‘I was never –
never!
– remotely curious about young girls. It never even crossed my mind.’ He started watching pornography occasionally in his twenties, and dipped in periodically in his thirties. ‘But it was only in my forties that I started watching pornography online habitually, for sexual relief.’ He claims that the death of a close friend and a flagging sex life provided the prompt, but that his habit was nothing out of the ordinary. Apart from a preference for teenage girls. ‘I was just attracted to the youth; younger faces, younger bodies. I just find teenage girls more physically attractive than women my age.’

The slightly unsettling truth about sexual desire is that the law and social preferences don’t neatly converge. In the UK, although the legal age of consent is sixteen, any pornography that includes someone under the age of eighteen has been illegal since the Sexual Offences Act of 2003. Yet there is a very significant and sustained demand for pornography featuring female teenagers. ‘Legal teen’ content has always been the most competitive and populated niche market in the
adult industry. According to the Internet Adult Films Database, a central repository of commercial adult films online, the most common word in film titles is ‘teen’. In 2013 two American academics, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, analysed almost fifty million sexual search terms that internet users had made on a popular search engine between 2009 and 2011. One in every six related to age, and the most popular by far was ‘teen/teens’, followed by ‘young’. Ogas and Gaddam also collected instances where a specific age was included in the search. The three most commonly requested ages that men search for online are, in order of popularity, thirteen, sixteen and fourteen.

Sitting alongside this vast ‘legal teen’ content is an enormous grey area of pornography known to experts as ‘pseudo child pornography’ (although the sites themselves usually call it ‘jailbait’ or ‘barely legal’ pornography), which features teenagers that are, or appear to be, around the ages that Ogas and Gaddam found. The reason it’s a grey area is not because the law is unclear, but because it’s extremely difficult to determine how old teenagers are, especially as some try to look younger and others try to look older. The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) is a UK-based organisation that works with the police and internet service providers to try to remove online child pornography. It was set up in 1996, after the Metropolitan Police told UK internet service providers to close down around one hundred Usenet groups that they suspected of sharing child pornography. The providers proposed the IWF as a system of industry self-regulation. Every day the IWF receives dozens of reports from people who have come across what they suspect might be illegal content online. On receiving a report, each analyst carefully studies the URL content to determine whether
the site contains images or videos that are likely to be illegal. The analyst will attempt to grade the severity of the material into one of the five levels. If it is judged to be illegal, the analyst will alert the police and contact the internet service provider or site administrator and request that the material be swiftly removed. If it’s based in the UK, the IWF can usually get material taken offline within an hour. If the site is hosted overseas, which it nearly always is, they will do their best to work with the local internet provider or police to get it removed. They also maintain a list of blacklisted URLs to help internet service providers keep the material off. As a rule of thumb, however, the IWF can only process a referral if they believe the subject of a photograph or video is aged fourteen or under. No one knows precisely how much of this jailbait material there is, but according to Fred Langford, Director of Global Operations at IWF, they have received an increasing number of reports of it over the past ten years.

Langford claims that it is surprisingly easy to get from legal to illegal pornography simply by following website links and pop-ups. Click a link on a legal site – such as the sprawling set of ‘Tube’ video sites – to a slightly more shadowy teen page; this in turn offers a link to a ‘jailbait’ page; and there you might be offered yet another link . . . In this way, jailbait pornography acts as something of a gateway, both metaphorically and practically. According to research conducted by the charity the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, nine out of ten internet sex offenders did not intentionally seek out child images, but found them via pop-ups or progressive links while browsing adult pornography.

It is extremely difficult to verify these accounts. It might be an attempt by an offender to distance himself from his crime. But this
is, Michael claims, exactly what happened to him. He began to visit teen pornography sites more and more regularly. And whenever he clicked on a new link – especially a free site – he provoked a ‘pornado’ of other unrequested sites opening on his computer, caused by ‘pop-up’ or ‘pop-under’ sites and advertisements. These pop-up sites offered him an almost infinite array of fetishes and fantasies – and he was drawn to the jailbait categories, girls of perhaps fifteen or sixteen. He started to click.

Michael says that, after a while, he found he was spending more time in the jailbait category, and less in adult, mainstream porn sites. He never used Tor, or encryption software – his searches were all on the surface web. But he started to save and keep the images or links to sites he’d found. He felt guilty after masturbating – but never enough to delete what he’d found. They were under eighteen, but they weren’t
children
, he says. He struggles to explain what happened next. ‘I can’t tell you precisely when it happened, although I absolutely accept there was a point when I did cross a line.’ He had moved from viewing photographs and videos of teenagers, to images that, he says, were clearly of children. ‘It happened in tiny increments,’ he goes on. ‘I really don’t remember when I moved from teens to children. But I did.’

Several academic studies have examined the links between ‘teen’ and child pornography. According to Professor Richard Wortley, Director of the Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science at University College London, a lot of men get as far as the jailbait category. Some view websites once and never return. Others dip in at irregular intervals as the mood takes them. But for some, like Michael, it stimulates a sexual desire towards children of younger and younger ages. Another academic study found that adults exposed
to jailbait pornography make stronger links between youth and sexuality. When Ogas and Gaddam reviewed the data they’d collected on sexual search terms, they discovered to their surprise that many people looked for taboo subjects, like incest and bestiality. The authors suggest that this is because forbidden acts also have the power to arouse, but that it’s more of a psychological than a physical stimulus. Michael tells me that each time he reached one taboo, he would search for another one. ‘Sometimes I would see an image or website and shut it down immediately thinking how awful it was, but it remained in the back of my mind,’ he says.

On one occasion, around three years after his first encounter with jailbait pornography, he clicked on a pop-up that led him to a site featuring two files that he downloaded and saved. One was a video of a male adult having penetrative sex with an eight-year-old. ‘I remember thinking at the time that it was terrible. That I never wanted to look at it again. But I kept it, just in case.’

Michael considers himself to be a deeply moral man, and repeats several times that he’d never harm or hurt anyone, especially not a child. ‘It didn’t seem real,’ he tells me. ‘I accept this is a false distinction now, but in the videos or images, they always looked like they were not being harmed. I made excuses in my head as to why it was OK. For a while I told myself what I was doing wasn’t even illegal.’

Elena Martellozzo is an academic who has worked closely with CEOP. She explains to me that offenders like Michael often claim
there is a distinction between the real and the digital, and will even construct wild justifications to convince themselves that their online behaviour is somehow acceptable. One important aspect of John Suler’s famous Online Disinhibition Effect is the ‘dissociative effect’ – the idea that a screen allows you to disassociate your real self from your online behaviour, to create fictitious identities and alternative realities, in which social restrictions, responsibilities and norms do not apply: as if the online space is somehow separate and different.