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WHAT IS CHILD
PORN?
"People do not understand what child pornography
is. They often think it could be a child in a bathtub
or an 11 year old frolicking on a beach. That's
not what we're talking about," says Paul Gillespie,
an investigator with the Toronto Police Child Exploitation
unit.
He and nine other investigators have
been tracking child porn for three years. Many of
the images they've seen are shocking. "We regularly
seize hundreds of thousands of images involving
children as young as babies in diapers in pictures
and in full length movies being brutally tortured,
raped, sodomized and bleeding. This is the norm.
There are now 3 and 4 year-olds in 20 minute movies
screaming for daddy to stop."
The legal definitions of child pornography
vary from country to country. In Canada it's illegal
to distribute a picture of sex involving someone
under eighteen (see porn laws
in Canada). Unfortunately, many of the images
seized by police go well beyond that definition.
Vancouver Police detective Noreen Waters is haunted
by one particular image. "There's this one
image of a little boy that looks terrified. He's
being anally penetrated by an adult and he looks
maybe five or six years old. That angered more me
than anything. To think that this child looked so
scared and somebody was collecting this as something
sexual that stimulated them. They collect this material
and think it's alright to look at these images of
children being sexually abused."
The industry of child pornography has evolved along
with the internet. It's now possible to access live
online sex shows using Web cams and other real-time
technology. In 1996, the Orchid Club, an internet
club trading in child porn was busted after it hosted
an online, by-request assault on a 10 year-old girl
that was viewed all around the world.
HOW MUCH CHILD PORN IS ON THE INTERNET?
The internet is a sordid playground for people who
are interested in accessing, sharing and selling
child pornography; it's estimated that there are
more than 100,000 child porn web sites.
According to Terri Moore, a Texan prosecutor involved
in the Landslide case, (see
more) it's an international problem. Her investigation
into one child pornography portal revealed the names
and credit card numbers of 300,000 subscribers from
37 American states and 60 countries. "The numbers
are huge and the demand is enormous," she says.
And the problem is growing. In 1995,
a Manchester police unit found only 12 images of children
on the Internet. Now there are millions.
COPINE,
a research group at the University of Cork in Ireland,
that studies child pornography is seeing an average
of three to four new faces of abused children each
month. About 40% of the girls and 55% of the boys
are between the ages of 9 and 12. The rest are younger.
They estimate that there are 50,000 new child abuse
images being posted to newsgroups every month. That
doesn't include pictures traded in e-mails or listed
on peer-top peer sites commonly used to share music
which are other ways to share child porn.
COLLECTORS OF PORNOGRAPHY
COPINE research has shown that
collecting has become an obsession for many. Pornographic
images are collected in series and labeled by a child's
name, like 'the Heather series' or 'the Michael series'
and feature children in various stages of abuse.
Some offenders acquire many images to increase their
bartering power so that they can trade with other
pornographers to obtain images of a particular child
that they are attracted to. The more rare and complete
a collection is, the more highly regarded the offender
is by his on-line peers.
Some people have enormous collections.
After the Orchid Club bust (see above) the investigation
revealed another more sophisticated group, the Wonderland
Club, another internet club, that required 10,000
child porn images as a membership fee.
During Operation Snowball (see
more) Toronto Police raided a million dollar
home in an upper middle class neighbourhood. Behind
a door with four locks they found a vast collection
of pornography. Inside the room were 13 safes of
every size and description containing some 500,000
images. "I've never seen anything like that.
So much in one place," said Ian Lamond, a member
of the unit involved in the bust
Yet, the largest collection of child porn ever seized
in Canada was much larger - 1 million images were
found in one house.
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