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THE fifth estate: Landslide
child porn on the internet > Printer Version
Broadcast
November 5th, 2003
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
the fifth estate:
Landslide
child porn on the internet -
porn laws in Canada - child
porn and sexual abuse
the landslide case - profile
of a pornographer - resources
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