Viewing Child Pornography on the Internet
Understanding the offence, managing the offender, helping the victims

Edited by Ethel Quayle and Max Taylor
Russell House Publishing
ISBN 1-903855-69-1

This book has the highly unusual merit in publications concerning children that we had never come across anything covering this subject before. The reason is obvious. The internet is still a relatively new invention, and there has had to be time for paedophiles to start using it to share images, for agencies concerning children and the law to realise and react, and for this book to be put together about their distilled wisdom.

The book is based on the papers given at a COPINE conference held in Cork in May 2004. It still has something of the flavour of a conference on an emerging subject. Although there are papers on a variety of issues from a good selection of professional viewpoints, they do not come over as a coherent study of the subject and are very varying in content and style.

It is possible that readers will not have heard of COPINE, and they will have to get to the bottom of page 62 before they find out*. This may not be a problem for professionals involved in the child protection trade as they may well know about COPINE, and they will of course make up a significant percentage of the market for the book. If it is to reach a wider readership, though, it could have done with a fuller introductory overview and more spoon-feeding to provide a context for the other chapters. (RHP should also have cut out the grammatical errors in the Preface too.)

Child pornography on the internet is an important subject, and it is good to see that it is being addressed. Although it is sometimes defended as involving no immediate abuse on the part of the viewer, the children who were the subjects of the images were abused in being photographed, and in some cases actual abuse was recorded. A point made several times in the book is that once these images circulate on the internet, they become “public property”, and their subjects have to live for the rest of their lives with the knowledge that anyone anywhere could have access to them. It is not a memory that can be buried.

One of the fascinating facts in the Preface is that, while the internet is new, the pornographic photography of children is not, and when London police raided the studio of Henry Hayler in 1874, they took away 130,000 photographs, many being on glass plates. Images of this sort were widely circulated in Victorian times. The difference now is that the internet reduces the physical size of the collection and enables copying and transfer much more readily. The hoarding of images was clearly a feature of pornographers’ behaviour even in Henry Hayler’s day, and remains one of their points of vulnerability to tracing and conviction now.

The chapters of the book are drawn from Australia, the USA, the Republic of Ireland, the UK and the Baltic. Their authors are police, academic researchers, social workers, psychologists and lawyers. Inevitably in conference papers, there is a fair amount of overlap and repetition, but this does not detract from the book significantly, and if anything it suggests a common approach and agreement between the professions.

As a non-specialist reviewer looking for an introduction to the subject, I found some of the chapters of more interest than others. The first chapter, for example, looks at the application of law in England and Wales, and the discussion about the appropriate length of sentences for offenders had the flavour of counting the number of angels who could stand on a pinhead.

Again, the chapter on compliant child victims spoke mainly in generalities, while other chapters had much more substantiating detail. As a non-specialist, I found the case studies helpful in understanding what the reality of the situation is. Specialists in this field need to be aware that many readers may never have seen any child pornography and would be breaking the law if they were to look for it, even with the best of intentions.

Again, with the subject being so new, it is still raw around the edges and there are a lot of gaps in our knowledge. Research is in its early stages and still has much to find out. As a non-specialist, I found the chapters on psychosocial profiling and the use of relational frameworks in the psychological assessment of offenders less than useful and fairly tedious. The conclusions which they reached seemed to be the sort which proved common sense and did not seem to make any real breakthrough beyond what one would expect.

Overall, though, the book is well worth reading. Any professional involved in child protection should pick up its basic messages. It emphasis that child pornography is abusive, and there is a move to rename it “abuse images of children”. While the intention is good, the proposal is, in my view, a non-starter, as the term child pornography is now established.

There were points of encouragement. One is that the scale of internet activity is less than the image created by the media. Serious pornography collectors get together tens of thousands of images, and the raids in campaigns such as Operation Ore have led to thousands of arrests. However, it is very few people who have really extensive collections, and many offenders apparently do not share their pictures. If one considers internet pornography as a percentage of child abuse, it is a relatively small element. While it important to put the subject in perspective, this does not of course mean that it should not be taken seriously.

Another encouraging point is that professionals are getting their act together. It has taken time to develop the staff teams, build up budgets and data banks, cross international boundaries - and set up the COPINE conference. But action is being taken, and potential child pornographers would be wise not to use the internet, but to seek help from Stop It Now.

* P.S. The COPINE Project is Combating Paedophile Information Networks in Europe.