Federal Ombudsman for Victims of Crime
Heard. Respected. Victims First.
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Special Report:
Scope of the Problem
“Child pornography has…grown into a massive industry that systemically promotes the abuse of children.”5
FAST FACTS
- Commercial child pornography is estimated to be a multi-billion dollar industry worldwide.6
- There are over 750,000 pedophiles online at any given time.7
- Tens of thousands of new images or videos are put on the Internet every week8 and hundreds of thousands of searches for child sexual abuse images are performed daily.9
- Offenders may have collections of over a million child sexual abuse images.
- An image of a 4-year-old girl in diapers has been shared an estimated 800,000 times.10
- Most child sexual abuse image producers are known to the victims:
Impact of the Internet
“The Internet is not ‘creating a sexual interest in children’ but ‘it’s creating victims.’”
–Dr. Peter Collins14
“The menace that distribution of child pornography through the internet poses cannot be underestimated. The internet provides an unregulated, instant world-wide distribution network that is immediately accessible for viewing, downloading and even wider distribution.”15
“We were trading pictures…kinda like trading baseball cards. There was also the thrill in collecting them. You wanted to get complete sets so it…was kind of like stamp collecting as well.”
–Collector of child pornography16
The impact of technology and specifically the Internet on child pornography images cannot be overstated. It can be seen most strikingly in three areas: production, distribution and community. The illusion of anonymity and the near universal accessibility of the Internet enable a vicious cycle: the creation of a community of like-minded individuals who share and “collect” images, the eventual desire of those individuals to obtain higher numbers of more shocking images and finally, the willingness of members to create more violent images. Once completed, the cycle begins again. Currently, an estimated 500,000 individuals are actively involved in the trafficking of child sexual abuse images on the Internet.17
Since the creation of the Internet, the volume of child sexual abuse images has grown exponentially. Images and videos are traded like baseball cards every minute of every day, and the sheer volume is staggering. It is estimated that there are over 5 million unique child sexual abuse images on the Internet.18
User as abuser
“…they trade them just like hockey cards. Just like a sports fan would try to collect an entire team in a sport, they will try to collect all 20 images of this young girl. It’s called a series.”
–OPP Detective Paul Schambers19
On May 12, 2003, 10-year-old Holly Jones was abducted while walking home from a friend’s house. Minutes before he forced her into his home, sexually assaulted and murdered her, Michael Briere was looking at child sexual abuse images online.
Briere pled guilty to first degree murder and is currently serving a life sentence. At his sentencing hearing, Briere told the court he was consumed by desire after viewing child pornography and that, “Viewing the material does motivate you to do other things. The more I saw it, the more I longed for it in my heart…. I really wanted to have sex with a child. And that was all-consuming.”
20
Everyone who knowingly views and accesses child sexual abuse images for gratification purposes is an abuser. Whether it is the very act of degrading that child by viewing the image, or the niche market that viewers create for those producing the material, or the hands-on abuse inflicted by the offenders themselves, in each case a child is being abused.
The creation and distribution of most images is generally not motivated by commercial purposes. Some abusers take photographs so they can use them for sexual gratification in the future. Others use these sexually abusive images to groom children for future abuse or to coerce their child victims into silence. In recent years, a growing number of offenders indicated that they were motivated to produce these vile images to enhance their status with other child abusers on the Internet.21
There are those who may argue that viewers are “just looking at pictures.” However, research suggests it is not that simple. In R. v. Sharpe, Chief Justice McLachlin of the Supreme Court of Canada stated that “the link between the production of child pornography and harm to children is very strong.”
22 According to Jonah Rimer, Research Assistant with the BOOST Child Abuse Prevention & Intervention Centre, more than half of child pornography offenders either abuse or attempt to abuse children.23
Child pornography offenders average 20 victims each—more than double that of contact offenders.24
Dr. Michael Bourke and Andres Hernandez (Federal Bureau of Prisons) suggest the numbers may be even higher than 50 percent. Their study, which looked at prisoners serving sentences for child pornography offences (as opposed to contact offences), found that child pornography offenders had in fact molested thousands of children, none of whom had reported the abuse.
“The dramatic increase (2,369%) in the number of contact sexual offences acknowledged by the treatment participants challenges the often-repeated assertion that child pornography offenders are only involved with pictures. It appears that these offenders are far from being innocent, sexually curious men who, through naiveté or dumb luck, became entangled in the World Wide Web….”25
The study found that less than 2 percent of subjects who entered treatment without known hands-on offences were verified to be “just looking at pictures.” Instead, 85 percent of the sample admitted to being child abusers which, as the study points out, calls into question whether it is useful to discriminate between child pornographers and child abusers or even pedophiles.26
Similarly, a study conducted by the Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health compared men who were convicted of molesting children and others who were convicted of possessing illegal photos. Researchers found that the offenders who were convicted of the possession offences had a higher chance of exhibiting a pedophile attraction to children than men who actually molested children. Dr. Seto wrote, “Our results indicate that child pornography offending is a valid diagnostic indicator of pedophilia…. In fact, child pornography offenders, regardless of whether they had a history of sexual offences against child victims, were more likely to show a pedophilic pattern of sexual arousal than were a combined group of offenders against children.”
27
Finally, while the reasons behind the abuse may not be clear, some suggest that the desire for new pictures can “lead some consumers to abuse their own, or neighbouring children, in order to supply fresh images for barter or sale.”
28
Younger victims and increasing violence
“Daddy, it hurts. It hurts so bad.”
–Audiotape of a young girl as her father abuses her
“Many of the images which I see on a regular basis show severe vaginal and anal assault against toddlers, bondage of these children with gags in their mouths, ligatures around their necks, and on occasion, physical beatings in conjunction with video clips of brutal oral, vaginal and anal penetration.”29
–Dr. Sharon Cooper, Speech to U.S. Congress in 2006
In addition to their growing number, child sexual abuse images are getting more and more shocking. As Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) Detective Inspector Angie Howe explained to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee, “The images are getting more violent and the children in the photos are getting younger. As recently as one year ago, we did not often see pictures with babies, where now it is normal to see babies in many collections that we find. There is even a highly sought after series on the Internet of a newborn baby being violated. She still has her umbilical cord attached, she is that young.”
30
- Younger children:
- More violent content:
- Over 80 percent of the images involve penetration.34
- Over 70 percent show sexual contact between a minor and an adult.35
- 20 percent of the images involve torture or bondage.36
- The number of images of “serious child abuse” has quadrupled between 2003 and 2007.37
- 87 percent had images of prepubescent children that were highly graphic.38
Examples of this violence are being seen across Canada. In an Ontario case, a father pled guilty to possessing and accessing child sexual abuse images, which included a five-minute video in which a naked 9-year-old girl is anally, vaginally and orally penetrated and another in which an adult male attempts to penetrate a 6-year-old girl. Police in Winnipeg arrested an American man who had videos of girls between the ages of 4 and 12 performing oral sex on adult men. In Quebec, provincial police arrested several men alleged to be involved in an international child pornography ring that operated over the Internet. The victims of this ring included those of elementary school age and a baby who was just a few months old.39 Sadly, these examples are not even the worst of the material available.