Research: Child Pornography

To gain an holistic understanding of this complex and highly misrepresented topic, it may be necessary to start from our main article on the subject.

The discourse on "child pornography"/"CSAM" (erotica featuring a minor, usually a teenager) is dominated by law enforcement agencies, regulators and NGOs who have a vested interest in exaggerating its extent and impact. The actual rates of conviction depend more upon law enforcement activity than any underlying changes to the severity of the material, or its production, which as this article reveals, is now predominantly done by minors.

The almost mythical child pornography hysteria appears to have started with moral entrepreneurs such as Judianne Densen-Gerber, now considered a disgraced puritanist zealot of the 1970s. It is her to whom the famed, and often reincarnated "multibillion dollar industry" quote is ascribed. Nevertheless, even crusaders such as ECPAT have admitted for decades that organized crime is rarely present within the "child pornography" sphere. As this page will show, claims about child pornography in the popular media rarely stand the test of academic scrutiny. As explained in Bill Thompson's report for the Thames Magistrates Court below, it's very hard to find any relationship between this kind of imagery and contact offending. Some limited evidence hints at an inverse relationship similar to that involving adult porn.

For legal implications, see Child Pornography Laws.

The effects of "CP"

The criminalization of "child pornography" is, in part, justified by the assumption that it will cause viewers to commit contact offenses against minors. No conclusive evidence substantiates this assumption. On the contrary, "child pornography" sometimes appears to have a cathartic effect on the user.

The association of CP consumption with offending is largely anecdotal and based on a simple kind of "backwards logic". After selecting a sample population who are already implicated in unlawful sex with a minor, it should not be surprising to unearth regular use of pornographic material - often considered a lesser offense, or "release valve" by those disposed towards seeking contact. This tells us nothing about CP users as a whole - a population whose scale is impossible to fully determine, despite what we already know about the lack of commercial activity. To be accurate, research needs to survey the wider population, its use of different kinds of pornography, and then look for contact-offending behavior over a fixed time-period.

The usually biased Wikipedia, comes to largely the same conclusions as us. In effect, this field of study is characterized by a battle over interpretations of correlational data between moralists, advocacy scientists and rational scientists.

• Thompson, W. (2018). "Child pornography, pedophilia, and contact offending: the empirical research.", (Expert Report, presented in the Thames Magistrates Court).

  Summary by the Percy Foundation. "Mere possession of child pornography (which includes images of sexually mature adolescents) – with charges often upgraded to “distribution” if one freely shares the images, or to “production” if one in any way alters or captions them – is one of the most rapidly growing offenses prosecuted in the U.S. federal system, earning those convicted an average sentence of 12.5 years (according to Department of Justice statistics). Often, the images in question are old and feature mere nudity, little different from what is found in naturist literature and legitimate art photography. This severe punishment is not based on the actual harm done to the minor portrayed, but the widespread perception that interest in such images is a mark of “pedophilic” (or hebephilic or ephebephilic – which categories together include most males) orientation and thus useful in detaining would-be sex criminals before they commit a contact offense. In this brief, a well-known criminologist and expert witness reviews the most recent scholarship on the question, and concludes that there is no credible link between viewing such images and committing hands-on offenses against minors. The analysis summons evidence that minor-attracted males are more likely to be child-pornography offenders, but not contact offenders, most of whom are opportunistic rather than men with primary affective focus on children or adolescents. The brief is a useful summation of where the scholarship now stands."

• Babchishin, K., Hanson, R.K., and VanZuylen, H. (2015) Online child pornography offenders are different: A meta-analysis of the characteristics of online and offline sex offenders against children. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 44, 45-66.

  "Sex offenders against children and mixed offenders were found to score higher on indicators of antisociality than online child pornography offenders (CPOs). CPOs were also more likely to have psychological barriers to sexual offending than sex offenders against children and mixed offenders (e.g., greater victim empathy)."

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• Seto, M., Ahmed, Ag (2014) Treatment and Management of Child Pornography Use. Psychiatric Clinics of North America. DOI 10.1016/j.psc.2014.03.004

  “In contrast to these long-term findings for pedophilic sex offenders with child victims, the emerging evidence on child pornography offenders suggests they are relatively low risk to reoffend in the first few years of opportunity, especially if they have no prior criminal history and no history of contact sexual offending. 32,33 These results suggest that pedophilic disorder, which is expected among the majority of child pornography users, is not a necessary or sufficient cause of sexual offending in the future; variation in antisocial tendencies is critical, with more antisocial child pornography offenders being more likely to sexually offend. ”

• Hamilton, M. (2012) The Child Pornography Crusade and its Net-widening Effect, Cardozo Law Review

  "The policy and the initiative rely on a presumption that child pornography consumers are in reality undetected pedophiles and child molesters who are at high risk of sexually abusing children. This article challenges the presumption by comprehensively analyzing certain of the most commonly cited studies that purport to empirically support correlations between child pornography, pedophilia, and child molestation. It also highlights other empirical evidence, as well as some practical considerations, that instead tend to show that most child pornography offenders are at low risk of committing contact sexual offenses. In sum, the concentration on child pornography crimes appears to be a misinformed policy that fails to directly protect real children from harm."

• Graf, M., and Dittmann, V. (2011) Forensic-psychiatric treatment for Internet sex offenders, in D. P. Boer, R. Eher, L. A. Craig, M. H. Miner and F. Pfäfflin (Eds.), International perspectives on the assessment and treatment of sexual offenders: Theory, practice, and research (479-488).

  “a certain number of Internet sex offenders tend to escalate to hands-on offenses. This number seems to be quite low, fortunately, however it’s not zero! Only a few studies cover this question, they mostly show low rates of escalation from Internet sex offenses to contact sex offenses within the range of 0.8 % (Endrass et al., 2009) and 1.3 % (Seto & Eke, 2005) in contrast to the at least tenfold higher specific reconviction rates for hands-on child abusers (Seto & Eke, 2005). Our own recent whole population-based study showed that from a total of 4,658 offenders with a criminal record for illegal pornography offenses in Switzerland in November 2008 during a median observation time of 5 years the reconviction rate for illegal pornography offenses was 2.9 % and the fraction with a progression to physical child abuse was 0.3 %. In the same sample, the group with concomitant illegal pornography as well as contact child abuse, reconviction rates for illegal pornography were 11.4 % and 6 % for contact child abuse (Goller, Graf, Frei, & Dittmann, 2010).”

“Forensic sciences continue to contribute with progress in definitions, 486 Assessment and Treatment of Sexual Offenders diagnoses, risk assessment, and treatment. This should help to destigmatize and categorize harmless people with socially unacceptable sexual preferences (Fiedler, 2004) from those with a high risk of progression.”

• Henshaw, Marie (2017) The Demographic, Mental Health and Offending Characteristics of Online Child Pornography Offenders: A Comparison with Contact-Only and Dual Sexual Offenders, Centre for Forensic Behavioral Science Faculty of Health, Arts and Design Swinburne University of Technology Melbourne, Australia. Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Psychology.

  "In contrast, fewer than six per cent of CPOs reoffended with child contact sexual offences. Taken together, the findings of this research support prior characterisations of CPOs as a distinct type of sexual offender who are primarily defined by low levels of antisocial behaviour and high levels of sexual deviance."

• Magaletta, P. R., Faust, E., Bickart, W., & McLearen, A. M. (2014) Exploring clinical and personality characteristics of adult male Internet only child pornography offenders. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 58, 137-153.

  "Results indicate that interpersonal deficits and depression featured most prominently in the profiles of the ICPOs [Internet-only Child Pornography Offenders]. Consistent with prior research, they also obtained lower scores on aggression and dominance compared with the child molesters and the male normative sample."

Sex crimes dropped markedly in Denmark following porn legalization.

• Seto, Michael C., Hanson Karl R., & Babchishin Kelly M. Contact Sexual Offending by Men With Online Sexual Offenses. Annals of Sex Research. December.

  "The second meta-analysis revealed that 4.6% of online offenders committed a new sexual offense of some kind during a 1.5- to 6-year follow-up (k = 9, N = 2,630); 2.0% committed a contact sexual offense and 3.4% committed a new child pornography offense. The results of these two quantitative reviews suggest that there may be a distinct subgroup of online-only offenders who pose relatively low risk of committing contact sexual offenses in the future."

• O'Carroll, Tom (2000). "Sexual Privacy for Paedophiles and Children: A Complementary Background Paper."

  "Such an effect has been proposed in relation to Denmark during the few years when child pornography was openly and legally available: in that period sex offences against children were significantly lower than either before or after. (5) A similar phenomenon occurred during a period of liberalisation in West Germany, where from 1972 to 1980 the total number of sex crimes known to the police in the Federal Republic of Germany decreased by 11%. (6) Sharpe himself, whose possession of pornography was in contention, made the astute point in an interview that if child pornography led to sexual assaults, then there would have been a huge increase in assaults as a result of the allegedly much greater availability of child porn on the Internet. (7)"

• Diamond, Milton, and Uchiyama, Ayako (1999). "Pornography, rape, and sex crimes in Japan", International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 22, 1-22.

  "However, there are no specific child pornography laws in Japan and SEM depicting minors are readily available and widely consumed. [...] The most dramatic decrease in sex crimes was seen when attention was focused on the number and age of rapists and victims among younger groups (Table 2). We hypothesized that the increase in pornography [in general], without age restriction and in comics, if it had any detrimental effect, would most negatively influence younger individuals. Just the opposite occurred. The number of juvenile offenders dramatically dropped every period reviewed from 1,803 perpetrators in 1972 to a low of 264 in 1995; a drop of some 85% (Table 1). The number of victims also decreased particularly among the females younger than 13 (Table 2). In 1972, 8.3% of the victims were younger than 13. In 1995 the percentage of victims younger than 13 years of age dropped to 4.0%."

• Diamond, Milton; Jozifkova, Eva; Weiss, Petr (2011). "Pornography and Sex Crimes in the Czech Republic", Archives of Sexual Behavior, 40(5), pp. 1037-1043 (Ipce archive).

  "Following the effects of a new law in the Czech Republic that allowed pornography to a society previously having forbidden it allowed us to monitor the change in sex related crime that followed the change. As found in all other countries in which the phenomenon has been studied, rape and other sex crimes did not increase. Of particular note is that this country, like Denmark and Japan, had a prolonged interval during which possession of child pornography was not illegal and, like those other countries, showed a significant decrease in the incidence of child sex abuse. [...]

  "Issues surrounding child pornography and child sex abuse are probably among the most contentious in the area of sex issues and crime. In this regard we consider instructive our findings for the Czech Republic that have echoed those found in Denmark (Kutchinsky, 1973) and Japan (Diamond & Uchiyama, 1999) that where so-called child-pornography was readily available without restriction the incidence of child sexual abuse was lower than when its availability was restricted. As with adult pornography appearing to substitute for sexual aggression everywhere it has been investigated, we believe the availability of child porn does similarly. We believe this particularly since the findings of Weiss (2002) have shown that a substantial portion of child sex abuse instances seemed to occur, not because of pedophilic interest of the abuser, but because the child was used as a substitute subject."

This linkage between porn (in general), sexual "responsibility" and celibacy is also supported by evidence following the advent of the internet.

• Howitt, Dennis (1995). Paedophiles and Sexual Offences Against Children, p. 161-162.

  "Common-sense theories tend to be contradictory. For example, there is a lot to be said for the notion of fantasy as substitute for action, a largely separate stream of experience or a substitute for reality. The original psychoanalytic view of fantasy as wish fulfillment took a similar stance. [...]

  One cannot simply take evidence that offenders use and buy pornography as sufficient to implicate pornography causally in their offending. The most reasonable assessment based on the available research literature is that the relationship between pornography, fantasy and offending is unclear."

• Ferguson, J. and Hartley, R. (2009). "The pleasure is momentary…the expense damnable?: The influence of pornography on rape and sexual assault", Aggression and Violent Behavior, 14(5), pp. 323–329.

  "Evidence for a causal relationship between exposure to pornography and sexual aggression is slim and may, at certain times, have been exaggerated by politicians, pressure groups and some social scientists. Some of the debate has focused on violent pornography, but evidence of any negative effects is inconsistent, and violent pornography is comparatively rare in the real world. Victimization rates for rape in the United States demonstrate an inverse relationship between pornography consumption and rape rates."

• Endrass, Jérôme; Urbaniok, Frank; Hammermeister, Lea C.; Benz, Christian; Elbert, Thomas; Laubacher, Arja; and Rossegger, Astrid (2009). "The consumption of Internet child pornography and violent and sex offending," BMC Psychiatry, 9:43.

  "Altogether, the empirical literature does not put forward any evidence that the consumers of child pornography pose a considerably increased risk for perpetrating hand-on sex offenses. Instead, the current research literature supports the assumption that the consumers of child pornography form a distinct group of sex offenders. Though some consumers do commit hands-on sex offenses as well – the majority of child pornography users do not. [...] The consumption of child pornographic material alone does not seem to predict hands-on sex offenses. [...] Similar to Seto and Eke, we found low rates of recidivism among our sample. When applying the broader definition of recidivism by taking investigations and charges into account, the recidivism rates were 0.8% for hands-on and 3.9% for hands-off sex offenses. These recidivism rates after a follow-up time of six years indicate that the risk of re-offending for child pornography consumers is quite low."

• Kirby, Stuart (2005). "No link between child porn and sexual abuse," Life Style Extra, UK, 15 December.

  "There is no link between looking at child pornography and sexual abuse of youngsters, a senior police officer told a conference today. Studies have found no correlation between those who download graphic images of youngsters via the internet and child molesters. Dr Stuart Kirby, Detective Chief Superintendent with Lancashire Police, told the International Investigative Psychology Conference: "When you look at all the research that has been done nationally, the consensus is that there has not proven to be a link between the viewing of pornography and the committing of hands-on offences. In a follow-up study by Lancashire Police, that was found to be clearly the case."

• Kendall, Todd (2007). "Pornography, Rape, and the Internet." Paper presented at the Stanford Law and Economics Seminar.

  This study found that "an increase in home internet access of 10 percentage points is associated with a 7.3% decline in [forcible] rape" of females of all ages as a group. Slate Magazine reported on this.

• Stanley, Janet (2001). "Pornography, Child Abuse and the Internet," Child Abuse Prevention Issues, 15.

  "Research to date has not determined whether child sex offenders are more, or less, likely to offend if they view and/or collect child pornography (Queensland Crime Commission and Queensland Police Services 2000; Smallbone and Wortley 2000). Although a Queensland study found that non-familial offenders reported using adult pornography (72 per cent) and child pornography (9 per cent) (Smallbone and Wortley 2000), these findings need to be treated with caution. The study sample was almost exclusively comprised of male incarcerated offenders who had low Internet literacy (88 per cent had not used the Internet). Thus, the characteristics of incarcerated offenders may differ from the wider population of offenders and it would also appear that the Smallbone and Wortley sample may potentially represent a different group to those offenders who target children via the Internet".

• Sheldon, Kerry & Howitt, Dennis (2008). "Sexual fantasy in paedophile offenders: Can any model explain satisfactorily new findings from a study of Internet and contact sexual offenders?", Legal and Criminological Psychology, 13, 137-158.

  "Internet offenders may have less need to contact offend since they can generate fantasy more easily. The contact [offending] group may be unable to generate fantasies at all or may have weak and short-lived fantasies. Sex offenders are often described as concrete and/or unimaginative (Langevin, Lang, & Curnoe, 1998), and it is possible that contact child molesters do not have frequent or vivid fantasies and require activity with a child in order to generate later masturbatory thoughts. [...] Contact offenders seem to have less sexual fantasy pertinent to their offending than did Internet offenders. Fantasy deficit may be involved in contact offending against children."

• Decision in R v. Sharpe by Justice Duncan Shaw in the Supreme Court of British Columbia

  "There is no evidence which demonstrates any significant increase of danger to children related to the confirmation or augmentation of cognitive distortions caused by pornography. There is no evidence that "mildly erotic" images are used in the "grooming process." Only assumption supports the proposition that materials that advocate or counsel sexual crimes with children have the effect of increasing the occurrence of such crimes. Sexually explicit pornography is used by some pedophiles to relieve pent-up sexual tension. A person who is prone to act on his fantasies will likely do so irrespective of the availability of pornography. There is no evidence that the production of child pornography will be significantly reduced if simple possession is a made a crime."

• Knudsen, D.D. (1988). "Child sexual abuse and pornography: Is there a relationship?," Journal of Family Violence, 3, pp. 253-267.

  "Perhaps the most appropriate summary of the research pertaining to pornography involving both adults and children is that there are no clear relationships that can be identified between erotica and sex crimes. Individuals for whom pornography is the primary or direct motivator of violent acts appear to be relatively rare. And most violence toward women and children is undertaken without such aids to arouse aggressive feelings, though some indirect modeling effects may be identified in lowered inhibitions. If the problem is to determine whether access to pornography directly increases the probability of sexually exploitive behaviors toward children, there appears to be a general consensus among researchers that it does not (Nelson, 1982)."

• Williams, Katherine S. (2004). "Child Pornography Law: Does it Protect Children?," Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, 26(3), 245-261.

  "It seems reasonable to conclude that, on the evidence presently available, it is not possible even to clearly link child pornography and sexual assaults, much less to prove a causative link. In this context, to control the activity on this ground is not logical. Taylor and Quayle (2003: 80-83) found that child pornography on the internet was extensively used as a means of achieving sexual arousal and as an aid to masturbation: it was therefore actively used in the paedophile's fulfilment of their sexual attraction to children and in their sexual fantasies. This use as a masturbatory aid is not in itself illegal nor is it of itself dangerous to children, though it may be abhorrent. If this were enough to feed and satisfy their sexual desire, then pseudo-images might be seen as having social utility even if most of us would be wholly disgusted by their existence and the use made of them by the paedophile. Kutchinskey's work (1973, 1985) suggests that this is more likely to be the case, so pornography (adult or pseudo-photographs) might actually protect children. The crucial point remains, that there may be no necessary link between child pornography and further abuse of children and certainly no causative link."

• Adler, A. (2001). The Perverse Law of Child Pornography. Columbia Law Review, 101(2), 209.

  "[Abs] In this article, Professor Adler argues that child pornography law, intended to protect children from sexual exploitation, threatens to reinforce the very problem it attacks. The article begins with a historical claim: our culture has become preoccupied with child sexual abuse and child pornography in a way that it did not used to be. The article traces the rapid development of child pornography law, showing that a cultural transformation in our notion of childhood sexual vulnerability has coincided with the birth and dramatic expansion of the law. Professor Adler then introduces various causal accounts of this chronological correlation between the regulation of child pornography and the growing crisis of child sexual abuse. First, she explores the possibility that the burgeoning law of child pornography may invite its own violation through a dialectic of taboo and transgression. She then presents another reading of the relationship between child pornography law and culture: the law may unwittingly perpetuate and escalate the sexual representation of children that it seeks to constrain. In this view, the legal tool that we designed to liberate children from sexual abuse threatens us all, by constructing a world in which we are enthralled -- anguished, enticed, bombarded -- by the spectacle of the sexual child."

• DutchNews.nl (2012). "‘Virtual child porn could reduce child abuse’."

  "Van Lunsen says there is academic evidence the ban on child pornography has led to an increase in child abuse because paedophile leanings can only rarely be changed. Virtual child porn has been banned in the Netherlands since 2002. Only one in 20 users of child pornography may actually go on to physically abuse children, Van Beek told the paper."

The nature of "CP"

IWF's 2021 annual report: Category A is the "most extreme" and generally the "rarest" material, yet consists of banal acts of digital stimulation

• Schuijer, Jan and Rossen, Benjamin (1992). "The Trade in Child Pornography," Issues in Child Abuse Accusations, 4(4).

  "We have called the claims about child pornography "myths." The existence of child pornography is certainly not. The myths are the exaggerated estimates of the number of children, the volume and value of the trade, the profits that are alleged to have been made, and the horrifying damage said to have been done to the children."

• O'Carroll, Tom (2000). "Sexual Privacy for Paedophiles and Children: A Complementary Background Paper."

"A survey of images in commercial child porn magazines that were available in the 1970s and early 80s by Schuijer and Rossen shows that only 14% depicted children engaged in sexual conduct with adults. Most of the material, 61%, showed children either nude at play or posing erotically. (8)"

• Bauserman, Robert (2003). "Child pornography online: myth, fact, and social control", Journal of Sex Research, 40(2).

  "Most of the CP images themselves appear to involve adolescents or children posing nude, which is not illegal in most Western countries. However, some hard-core images of adolescent and prepubescent children having sex with each other and with adults are available. While some appear to be recycled from 1970s magazines and films, other images seem to be "sex tourist" images created by men visiting Asian or Latin American countries in search of less risky sexual access to minors. Jenkins offers no estimate of the number of minors who currently appear in CP, but fortunately they seem to number far fewer than the tens or hundreds of thousands of children (defined to include adolescents) often claimed."

• Lanning, Kenneth (1992). Investigator's Guide to Allegations of "Ritual" Child Abuse, Chapter 2.1: "Stranger Danger". Quantico, VA: Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. See also, html version with less errors, and backup PDF.

  "Child victims who, for example, simply behave like human beings and respond to the attention and affection of offenders by voluntarily and repeatedly returning to the offender's home are troubling. It confuses us to see the victims in child pornography giggling or laughing."

• O'Donnel, Ian, and Milner, Claire (2007). Child Pornography: Crime, Computers and Society, p. 123. (Paraphrased by Brian Ribbon)

  "A recent study in Ireland, undertaken by Garda, revealed the most serious content in a sample of over 100 cases involving indecent images of children. In 44% of cases, the most serious images depicted nudity or erotic posing, in 7% they depicted sexual activity between children, in 7% they depicted non-penetrative sexual activity between adults and children, in 37% they depicted penetrative sexual activity between adults and children, and in 5% they depicted sadism or bestiality."

• Ribbon, Brian (2008). "How can anyone believe these claims?". Boychat.org

  "I could only find a small number of websites (less than 20) which contained material which would be illegal if viewed in my home jurisdiction, despite the fact that my home jurisdiction prohibits simple nudity. It is clear that there are not 150,000 child pornography websites. The websites which did depict material which would be illegal if viewed in my home jurisdiction were much tamer than government-funded organisations claim. Over 99% of the images which would be illegal in the USA/UK/Australia showed no sexual contact."

• Levine, Judith (2002). Harmful to Minors.

  "Aficionados and vice cops concede that practically all the sexually explicit images of children circulating cybernetically are the same stack of yellowing pages found at the back of those X-rated shops, only digitized. These pictures tend to be twenty to fifty years old, made overseas, badly re-reproduced, and for the most part pretty chaste. That may be why federal agents almost never show journalists the contraband. But when I got a peek at a stash downloaded by Don Huycke, the national program manager for child pornography at the U.S. Customs Service, in 1995, I was underwhelmed. Losing count after fifty photos, I'd put aside three that could be called pornographic: a couple of shots of adolescents masturbating and one half-dressed twelve-year-old spreading her legs in a position more like a gymnast's split than split beaver. The rest tended to be like the fifteen-year-old with a 1950s bob and an Ipana grin, sitting up straight, naked but demure, or the two towheaded six-year olds in underpants, astride their bikes."

• Mirkin, Harris (2009). "The Social, Political, and Legal Construction of the Concept of Child Pornography," Journal of Homosexuality, 56(2), pp. 233-267.

  "Most of the actual acts depicted by the young models in child pornography are legal. Although some of the older pictures have sullen, battered looking children who look like they have been drugged or coerced, that is rarely true of more current photos. Impressionistically, the largest number of pictures on pornographic sites involves clothed photographs of pretty or good-looking children. Often they are in bathing suits. These are tainted simply because of their presence on pornographic sites, but, although they often have an erotic tinge, the pictures would not be considered pornographic in other settings. The next largest number consists of nudes of diverse quality and degrees of eroticism. Some pictures of boys show erections. Videos are a media that demand movement and they often show sex play and horseplay among the youths (especially boys), but no real sex (except masturbation or attempted masturbation). Masturbation, usually alone but sometimes in groups, and oral sex are also occasionally shown in still images. Generally both boys and girls look cheerful and healthy, although obviously this could be an act. Still the smiles and playfulness are often in hundreds of photographs of the same models, and giggles are ubiquitous in the films. The attempt is to portray an innocent and joyful sexuality, whether or not that is what is experienced by the models and actors. The pictures are far less tawdry and hard core than adult porn and are more playful. Domination is not an important theme and very few images (probably less than 1%) involve adults."

• Quayle, Ethen and Jones, Terry (2011). "Sexualized Images of Children on the Internet", Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment, 23(1), pp. 7-21.

  The authors reviewed a sample of 24,550 child pornography images from the UK's ChildBase database. After excluding "children who had reached sexual maturity" (14+), 47.9% of the sample were classified as pubescent, 51.4% as prepubescent, and only 0.7% as "very young" (children under two). "The final total of coded images was 24,550; the majority of these images depicted children in indecent or naked poses. [...] The images were initially sorted into the following categories: gender (female, male, and gender unknown), age (pubescent, prepubescent, and very young), and ethnic group (White and non-White). The decision to use these age groupings followed the publication by Cattaneo et al. (2008) of an empirical study that highlighted the difficulty in allocating an age to postpubertal individuals. It effectively meant that any person displaying sexual maturity was excluded and that the majority of the sample would have been aged 14 years or younger (Cooper, 2005). [...] There were very few very young children in the current sample, and this differs from data published by the IWF (2008)."

Child pornography subcultures

• Bauserman, Robert (2003). "Child pornography online: myth, fact, and social control", Journal of Sex Research, 40(2).

"Also of interest is Jenkins' finding that, like many other deviant groups (e.g., organized crime), the CP subculture does not represent a total break with conventional morality. This claim may be surprising, given the extent to which sexual interest in children or adolescents is socially and legally condemned. However, studies of deviant groups show that members may express mainstream or even conservative values on social and political issues, and share widely accepted goals such as material success. While subscribing to mainstream values, group members seek to rationalize or "neutralize" the illegal and socially condemned aspects of their behavior. Jenkins notes the use of techniques such as denial of victimization (the adolescent or child is said to be consenting), denial of harm, and condemnation of the condemners (e.g., as hypocrites). Users also self-label with nonderogatory terms such as "pedo" or "loli-lover." Reports of truly sadistic and violent crimes against children (such as the Dutroux case in Belgium, in which an offender kidnapped, raped, and killed young girls) are met with expressions of disgust and anger and claims that "true loli-lovers" are interested in mutual pleasure, not violence. Jenkins considers such statements genuine expressions of feeling, not a public front, because of the private nature of the bulletin board forums."

A "billion-dollar" industry?

See also: Statistics Laundering: false and fantastic figures

Child pornography is generally exchanged without any money changing hands. The endlessly repeated statistic that child pornography is a "billion-dollar industry" has absolutely no basis. Government agencies are often the primary distributors of such material on the dark web, and any commercialization of these erotic images should be viewed as suspicious by the end user.

• Jenkins, Philip (2001). Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography on the Internet, p. 102.

  "Money is rarely involved in the child porn underworld, which is the preserve of truly motivated collectors."

• Bialik, Carl (2006). "Measuring the Child-Porn Trade," The Wall Street Journal, April 18.

  "Unlike, say, the soft-drink or airline industries, the child-pornography industry doesn't report its annual sales to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Yet in a press release ahead of a recent House of Representatives hearing aimed at curbing the industry, Texas Republican Joe Barton said, "Child pornography is apparently a multibillion … my staff analysis says $20 billion-a-year business. Twenty billion dollars." Some press reports said the figure applied only to the industry's online segment. The New York Times reported, "the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet is a $20 billion industry that continues to expand in the United States and abroad," citing witnesses at the hearing.

  What was Rep. Barton's staff analysis? A spokesman for the House Energy and Commerce Committee told me the source of the number was the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a group that advocates for the protection of children. When I first talked with that group's president, Ernie Allen, he told me that Standard Chartered bank, which has worked with the NCMEC to cut off funding to child-porn traffickers, wanted a quantitative analysis of the problem, so it asked for a measurement from consulting firm McKinsey & Co. Mr. Allen faxed me an NCMEC paper that cites the McKinsey study in placing the child-porn industry at $6 billion in 1999, and $20 billion in 2004.

  But a McKinsey spokesman painted a different picture for me: "The number was not calculated or generated by McKinsey," he wrote in an email. Instead, for a pro bono analysis for Standard Chartered, he said, McKinsey used a number that appeared in a report last year by End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes, an international advocacy group.

  But the trail didn't end there: That report, in turn, attributed the number to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as did a report last year from the Council of Europe, a Strasbourg, France-based human-rights watchdog. Both of those reports noted that estimates range widely, from $3 billion to $20 billion.

  FBI spokesman Paul Bresson told me in an email, "The FBI has not stated the $20 billion figure... . I have asked many people who would know for sure if we have attached the $20 billion number to this problem. I have scoured our Web site, too. Nothing!""

  • Bialik, Carl (2006). "Measuring Chernobyl's Fallout," The Wall Street Journal, April 27.

    "Meanwhile, I heard more about the number that was the subject of last week's column -- the claim, which I couldn't verify, that the child-pornography industry generates $20 billion in annual revenue. In a 2004 report, the Council of Europe, a Strasbourg, France-based human-rights watchdog, attributed the number to Unicef. But Allison Hickling, a spokeswoman for the United Nations child agency, told me in an email, "The number is not attributable to Unicef -- we do not collect data on this issue."

    I told Alexander Seger, who worked on the Council of Europe reports, that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Unicef, both cited in Council reports, said they weren't the source for the $20 billion figure. He said the Council won't use the number in the future, and added in an email, "I think we have what I would call a case of information laundering: You state a figure on something, somebody else quotes it, and then you and others [quote] it back, and thus it becomes clean and true. ... Perhaps this discussion will help instill more rigor in the future.""

• O'Carroll, Tom (2000). "Sexual Privacy for Paedophiles and Children: A Complementary Background Paper."

  "The production of such pictures is vanishingly rare, however, and there is no shortage of criminal law to deal with any perpetrators who are caught. Even in such cases, though, we would be hard put to blame the private viewer of such material for creating a market in it. There is no means, no even on the Internet, to buy and sell such material. Illegal images may be posted, but this will invariably be done anonymously or with a phoney "from" address – for obvious reasons. This means that it is impossible to make money on these activities. From time to time someone may naively hope do so, lured by claims in the media that it is a profitable business. These commercial attempts have always been stopped very quickly: If the potential customers can find the producer then so can the police. The notion that there is a vast child porn industry, organised by some ruthless mafia, is simply a myth."

• Rothery, Brian (2008). "Every image of a child being abused", inquisition21.com.

  "By now, many journalists and activists concerned with how the police deal with the child pornography laws are aware that the American police and some related agencies are the main, and likely the sole, dealers in and publishers of images of child pornography, using them for entrapment purposes."

• Rosen, Jeffrey (2005). "The Internet Has Made Government Action Against Child Pornography Untenable," in Opposing Viewpoints: Mass Media. Ed. William Dudley. San Diego: Greenhaven Press.

  Child pornography is often alleged to be a 20 billion dollar industry. If this is true, that would put it at twice the size of the adult porn industry: "But today, as Frank Rich reported in The New York Times Magazine last May [2002] the porn industry—much of it hard-core—generates at least $10 billion per year in revenues for more than 70,000 websites, porn networks, pay-per-view and rental movies [700 million porn rentals per year], cable and satellite television, and magazine publishers."

• O'Donnel, Ian and Milner, Claire (2007). Child Pornography; Crime, Computers and Society, p. 54.

  "Because there is no way of estimating the amount of child pornography that was in circulation prior to the advent of the internet, it is possible that the quantity has not increased but has simply become more available and more copied."

• Udo Vetter (lawyer) in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (2009). Simple Lösungen für ein komplexes Problem. Translation found on GC.

  "You cannot physically abuse children on the internet. But you can look at pictures or movies of child abuse and trade them. "Of course paedophiles use the internet to trade child porn," says lawyer Udo Vetter, who has acted as a defense lawyer in hundreds of child porn cases. "But there is no such thing as a commercial market." ... There is no effective system of money transfer for the distribution of illegal pictures and movies. According to Vetter, "you simply can't receive millions of dollars online anonymously." Money flow is monitored by the authorities of many states, including the USA. According to Vetter, none of his clients ever paid for pictures or movies. 80 to 90 percent of the files found by the police are identical. "Some of these pictures are 30 to 40 years old." In contrast to the claims made to justify net censorship the amount of child porn available on the internet is rising extremely slowly. None of these pictures and movies have been produced professionally (the only exceptions being movies with teenage victims which may have been legal when they were produced."

• Lawrence A. Stanley (1988). "The Child-Pornography Myth" in Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal.

  "Not only was the business of child pornography largely fiction, so were most lurid reports of organized sexual exploitation. There is no credible evidence, for instance, to support claims of child auctions in Amsterdam, of toll-free numbers and mail-order houses for child prostitutes, of child "snuff" films, satanic molestation rituals or, as Michael Jupp, executive director of Defence for Children International, testified to Congress, "{American} chains of brothels and bordellos ... where children are kept under lock and key." There are no networks of individuals exchanging children. There in currently only one active pedophile organization - the North American Man/Boy Love Association - and NAMBLA operates wholly within the law as a lobbying and support organization. A recent report issued by the United States Senate cleared NAMBLA of any involvement in the production of child pornography. No children whose photographs appeared in child-pornography magazines and films were ever known or suspected to have been the victims of murder."

Sex Doll use for MAPs

Child dolls in the early 2020s

See also: Research: A "cure" for pedophilia?

This is an emerging area of study, and is limited by confounding variables, as the samples are by their very nature voluntary. Neverthless, no association was found between child-like sex dolls and offending proclivity, but instead, sexual preoccupation was lower among users.

• Harper, Craig A., and Rebecca Lievesley. “Exploring the Ownership of Child-like Sex Dolls.” PsyArXiv, 18 Feb. 2022.

  "In this study we have presented what we believe to be the first empirical study into the psychological and risk-related constructs associated with the ownership of child-like sex dolls. In contrast to moralistic publications citing the potential risks of such dolls in related to child sexual abuse (Chatterjee, 2020; Danaher, 2017, 2019; Strikwerda, 2017), we found evidence for their functional use. In light of this, we hope that those working in psychological and sex science can launch systematic studies that explore how to best support MAPs in their search for safe sexual outlets, with ultimate aims of improving levels of mental health in this population and, subsequent to this, the prevention of the sexual abuse of children."

• Desbuleux, J.C. and Fuss, J. (2023) "The Self-Reported Sexual Real-World Consequences of Sex Doll Use" The Journal of Sex Research, DOI: 10.1080/00224499.2023.2199727

Interestingly, pedo-hebephilic users reported a greater reduction of sexual compulsivity compared to teleiophilic participants following doll use. Additionally, pedo-hebephilic participants more often reported acting out of illegal sexual fantasies with their dolls and a loss of interest in (sexual) intimacy with real children through doll use in the qualitative data. These self-reported data challenge the view that doll use is dangerously affecting human sexuality and instead suggest that dolls may be used as a sexual outlet for potentially dangerous and illegal (sexual) fantasies.

In some cases, researchers have made flawed assumptions about sex dolls and other forms of fiction, arguably equating them with non-fictional activities. In one 2023 report from Australia, denying the "wrongfulness" of sex dolls' and drawings was classed alongside other researcher-defined child sexual exploitation "myths" such as "Boys under 18 are sexually experimental and are not harmed when they interact sexually with an adult online" and "People under 18 who offer nude or sexual activity on livestream are exploring their sexuality and should not be censored".

Impact on minor models

See Research: Double-Taboo CSA.

A small amount of research has been done into the direct effect of modeling on minors. This is featured in the above article.

Impact on "non-appreciative" adults

It is often claimed anecdotally that officers and moderators investigating high volumes of CP suffer from "burnout" or may have to enter counseling.

• Rothery, Brian (2008). "From inside the police force," inquisition21.com.

  "We have a report from a police insider about how many of his colleagues actually reacted to both adult and child pornography [...] He received his first, much of it shocking to him, initiation into the world of pornography from his older police colleagues who ‘sickened him with their canteen culture’. They pushed the first ever hard core magazines he had seen right in front of his face, as he put it, “Gloating over them.” [...] Only as the number of women in the force increased, especially in senior ranks, did the macho culture of open pornographic display decrease and become more covert. [...] These men were now being paid to study child pornography and soon he could hear them tell the media about fatigue and burn-out concerning images they had formerly gloated over."

Minor producers

The criminalisation of youth is also covered in a dedicated article.

Most "child pornography" in circulation is self-produced (in 2020, it even made up around half of the images processed by the IWF, rising to almost 3/4 in 2021 and 4/5ths in 2022). By 2022, even 70% of the prepubescent material was self generated. Prohibitions (if they are to be applied universally) are therefore unworkable, as it is extremely hard to define who is "exploiting" who using a conventional victimological model. While activists have been pointing towards the trend of self-produced images for some time, it has taken much longer for "Child-Protection" officials to admit that minors are capable of producing child pornography, and more recently that a significant majority of said material is voluntarily produced.

• Finkelhor, D., Turner, H.A., Colburn, D., Mitchell, K.J., & Mathews, B. (2023). Child sexual abuse images and youth produced images: The varieties of Image-based Sexual Exploitation and Abuse of Children. Child abuse & neglect, 143, 106269

"Only 12 % of the image episodes qualified as adult produced, child sexual abuse images. Such adult produced image experiences were also not higher in negative emotional impact than the youth produced images. Only 10 % of the episodes involved images of children under age 13."

• Drejer, C., Riegler, M. A., Halvorsen, P., Johnson, M. S., & Baugerud, G. A. (2023). Livestreaming Technology and Online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse: A Scoping Review. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 0(0). DOI:10.1177/15248380221147564

"In cases of self-generated sexual content featuring children, it is often challenging to evaluate the level of coercion, as some of the young individuals are using streaming services to self-exploit, earn money and receive gifts, or receive “likes” (Internet Watch Foundation, 2018; Jonsson et al., 2014; Terre des Hommes, 2013). In addition, it is not always clear whether a crime is taking place or if (sexual) boundaries are being explored between youth (Koops, 2009). This makes for complex legal challenges as the child can be both considered the offender and the victim (Westlake, 2018)."

• Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) report on self-generated content (2021)

  "Of the 252,194 webpages actioned during 2021, almost three quarters (182,281 or 72%) were assessed as containing self-generated imagery. This is a 28 percentage point increase on 2020 when 44% of actioned reports (or 68,000) were self-generated."

• 'A nightmare that's never going to end': child porn takes a toll on justice system

  "More internet service providers are reporting incidents, and more people, especially young people, have cellphones. It’s becoming more common for a minor to talk to people online and negotiate a price for a photo of himself or herself. “They’re almost exploiting themselves,” said Steve Harstad, chief North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation agent. “Once you hit send, that image is gone. There’s no coming back from that one.”"

• "SELFIE GENERATION (2021) - A REPORT FROM THE APPG ON SOCIAL MEDIA"

  "When looking at these distinct categories, NetClean found that the most common type of self-produced material they recorded was voluntarily self-produced material (57.5%), followed by images as a result of grooming (22%)"

• The Courier Mail (2008). "Making child pornography is now kids' stuff."

  "Teenagers are becoming major makers of child pornography in Victoria[Australia]. Statistics reveal adolescents last year outnumbered middle-aged men two to one as the main offenders in child porn production. Youths 10 to 14 were among the alleged offenders."

• Irish Independent (2008). "Children producing their own web porn."

  "CHILDREN as young as 10 years of age are taking sexually explicit pictures of themselves before uploading them onto the internet -- according to Ireland's leading Criminal Intelligence Officer at Interpol [...] Irish Detective Sergeant Michael Moran, who is one of the world's leading experts in the fight against child exploitation, has warned parents to be extra vigilant about their children uploading self-made pornography. "Everything from posing naked to actual sex acts on web cams. We are seeing a lot more self-produced child pornography to the extent that self-taking child abusive material is one of our biggest problems at the moment."

• Inquisition21.com (2008). "The new pizza scam."

  "The child sex abuse and child porn legislation have boosted the business of so-called ‘under-age’ minors scamming and blackmailing adult men. The latest to arise from the chat rooms is the pizza scam. [...] One of our other researchers went onto that chat room and asked if anyone had been approached by individuals offering to cam for pizza and one man from London replied. He said he had spoken to a male student who lived in his local area, aged 19. The student gave some sob story and said he would give a cam show for pizza. The man agreed. The boy named a local pizza place but gave another telephone number. The man phoned the number, who took his order and credit card details. Subsequently a PayPal account was set up using that credit card and money stolen from him. He reported this to PayPal who refused to do anything without a crime number. He then reported it to the police who simply took details. PayPal responded once he had a crime number, but the police apparently performed no investigation. A source close to the police has informed us that the police have a good laugh at this kind of thing. They regard the scammed as the perverts, or the guilty ones, and the scammers as having a right to sting them."

Excerpt Graphic Library

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• 
  Bill Thompson Opinion
• 
  IWF's 2021 annual report. Category A is the "most extreme" and generally the "rarest" material, yet consists mainly of teens fingering themselves and other banality
• 
  Blanchard/DSM debate opinions on drawn material - relevant to Lolicon-MAP Equivalence Debate
• 
  Mirkin on the CP Industry
• 
  From Tate: Child Pornography: An Investigation.
• 
  IWF case study backs up Lanning and Mirkin
• 
  Some quotes from establishment experts
• 
  Deconstructing NCMEC propaganda