By Susan Brinkmann*

October 2008 – Almost all experts agree the dramatic increase in the sexual exploitation of children is directly linked to the advent of the Internet.

Since setting up its Cyber Tipline in March of 1988, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) has had almost 600,000 reports of all sorts of child exploitation on the Internet. Of that number, 90% – 523,000 – concern either the possession, manufacture or distribution of child pornography.

“Pre-Internet, most of these sexually abusive images of children would be found in print – magazines,” said John Shehan, NCMEC’s director of Exploited Children’s Services. “With the boom of the Internet, it has facilitated the ability of people to post and trade content rather anonymously. And it’s prolific.”

The numbers are horrific. The International Association of Internet Hotline Providers (INHOPE), an international organization that tracks global increases in Internet child pornography, records 9,600 reports of child pornography per month from 29 countries – and most of the traffic is coming from the U.S.

“The vast majority of people who want to purchase or find access to this content are U.S. customers,” Shehan said. “And when they talk about where the content is coming from, the vast majority is coming out of the U.S. Of course, the Internet was born in the U.S. and there are thousands of providers here compared to abroad, but absolutely, a lot more needs to be done domestically to address this issue.”

Patrick J. Trueman, former chief of Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section/Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, who is now working as a private attorney in Virginia, has spent most of his life prosecuting these crimes.

According to Trueman, the most graphic criminal content is now being shared daily on the World Wide Web, peer to peer, Newsgroups, Usenet, chat rooms and other deep Web locations. What once took weeks and sometimes months to acquire through the mail can now be had on the Internet with the click of a mouse.

“I’ve actually seen how this happens when a postal inspection service agent joined one of these online child-porn clubs,” Trueman said. “As soon as he joined the club, his e-mail went to hundreds of people and his inbox filled with not only child porn but lots of solicitations for trading collections.”

“Collections” are prized by pedophiles and molesters and include original video or photographs of sexual crimes being committed against children. The Internet makes it easy for traders to buy, sell or trade their “collections,” all of which must be original and not what can be had on the Internet.

“They want pictures they can’t get elsewhere,” Trueman said. “What happens is a man will have an overpowering desire for one of these ‘original’ collections but doesn’t have anything to trade for it. How does he get material to trade for it? He molests his own daughter, or his brother or sister’s children, a neighborhood kid, and photographs it.”

This is how the proliferation of child pornography fuels the wave of sex crimes against children. Although not everyone who views child pornography molests children, statistics show that a very large percentage will do so at some time.

For instance, a special report on pedophilia published in 2007 by the Mayo Clinic determined that from existing case studies and reports, anywhere from 30% to 80% of individuals who viewed child pornography, and 76% of individuals arrested for Internet child pornography, had molested a child.

This is certainly what Trueman found in his many years prosecuting these crimes. “No one collects child pornography without molesting children,” he said. Even though many claim to be just a collector, this prosecutor says, “What we know from experience is that he’s never been caught molesting a child. No one just collects. Maybe someone who is just beginning to collect may not yet have molested, but by the time you catch them as a collector they’re usually well down the road. If you let them go and give them a light sentence, they will molest children.”

Pornography
Trueman has watched the whole cycle start with men viewing adult pornography on their computers without realizing that there are no walls separating child and adult porn on the World Wide Web. Anyone who cruises the Internet in search of pornography will find as much child pornography as adult material.

“It might not be three year olds,”  Trueman said, “It might be 15- or 16-year olds. These images get posted by the guy who broke up with his 15-year-old girlfriend with whom he’d been having sex and photographing it. He gets mad at her when they break up and posts the photos. There are thousands of these images on the Internet.”

These images are easy to find and a man can quickly develop a liking for younger and younger images. “They won’t say ‘gee, she’s only 14. I can’t look at this.’ When you give your mind over to this kind of material, if you don’t set any limits, you’ll gravitate to whatever’s out there,” Trueman said.

This is why it’s so important for law enforcement to crack down on not only child pornography, but “garden variety” pornography as well, Trueman says.

Unknown to most, the combination of the Internet and child pornography is quickly creating a vast network of abused children who experts say will grow up to become abusers themselves. Most child molesters were molested themselves as children and usually prey upon children of the same age as when they were first molested. In other words, the children being molested today will grow up to be tomorrow’s abusers.

“This combination of factors – the Internet leading to more abuse, the more who are abused becoming abusers themselves – has snowballed and you have a situation today where law enforcement can’t keep up with it,”  Trueman said.  

*Susan Brinkmann is a staff writer for Women of Grace. She can be reached at [email protected]. This article is reprinted with permission from The Bulletin – Philadelphia’s Family Newspaper.

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Somebody’s Daughter: A Journey to Freedom from Pornography is a new DVD from Music for the Soul (MFS; www.musicforthesoul.org.) The Nashville-based ministry produces music to help victims find freedom from addictions and other personal crises, e.g., cancer, eating disorders, depression, aging or special needs children).

Most of us, at one time or another, have probably found music to be soothing, therapeutic and encouraging. The goal of MFS founder Steve Siler is to harness the power of music in products that will lead people who are victimized or suffering to find hope and help.

Somebody’s Daughter is a powerful combination of documentary and music video segments. Five people, including one married couple, detail their stories of porn addiction, then how they came to freedom.

 “This project is so well done that it’s almost overwhelming” said Tim Wildmon, AFA president. “I believe it has great potential to bring people back to hope.” Wildmon said he could see MFS projects being used for special observation Sundays, teaching in small groups, counseling and pastoral care and topical workshops.

 Christian recording artists Clay Crosse, Scott Krippayne and John Mandeville perform four music videos on the DVD. One uses the gripping imagery of a raging fire destroying home and family as the husband/father struggles with porn addiction; another depicts the victim drowning.

 “People will hear things in music that they won’t hear any other way,” Siler told AFA Journal in an interview earlier this year. “Music has a way of washing over us and seeping through the cracks in the walls of our defense and opening our hearts.” (AFA Journal, 6/08)
by Randall Murphree