Internet Technology and Sexual Exploitation of Children

All human beings have some sort of concept of pain and suffering. Even the most fortunate of us know what it is like to get a bruise or cut on our own skin. The most significant difference between pain suffered by us and that suffered by others is that our pain is concrete and real whereas the pain of others is abstract and a little less real. An exception seems to apply in the case of children, perhaps because we were all children once ourselves. Sexual exploitation of children, one of the worst crimes committed under the heavens, occurs everywhere in the world, not only in so-called "third world" countries.

In Scotland, in 1996, Thomas Hamilton, an owner of a sports club and a pedophile, walked into a local primary school and opened fire on a classroom full of six-year-olds after he was denied contact with the young boys who attended his sports clubs. The boys had complained to their parents about Hamilton's sexually disturbing behavior toward them, touching them and taking photographs of them in the shower.

That same year in Belgium, Marc Dutroux was taken into custody after abducting two young girls, aged 14 and 12, and sexually abusing them in his self-designed dungeon. The girls had starved to death in the dungeon by the time local authorities found them. It was also realized that these girls were not the first ones to fall victim in this dungeon.

Perhaps the most well known story involving child sex abuse is that of Rosario Bayulot, a girl born in the Philippines who roamed the streets fighting for her survival, holding onto nothing but her inner dignity. That changed when the husband of the woman who housed her and several other children raped her. From then on, Rosario had not even her dignity, seeing her own body as nothing more than a commodity to exchange for money. After an encounter with an American tourist who inserted a vibrator into her vagina while she was unconscious in a bedroom he had brought her to, she spent the next few weeks knowing that something inside her was making her sick but was too afraid to tell the police or doctors. She died a few hours after someone finally rushed her to the hospital.

Far, far away from the infamous brothels of Bombay, Bangkok, and Phnom Penh, in the late 1990s, a couple in England shocked Europe and the rest of the world with their "House of Horror" serial murders of young girls. Their names were Fred and Rosemary West, and before murdering the children, they sexually abused them, filmed themselves during the process, and offered those videos to local video rental stores. This is an example of IT-related sexual exploitation of children. Any photographs and videos can be easily made accessible on the Internet with today's technology, creating a whole new field of study to explore before child sex abuse can be stopped. This field of study is also a battlefield.

The advent of Internet technology has opened new gateways between people all over the world. Unfortunately, these new gateways also offer new means for people who harbor sexual fantasies of children to get what they, ranging from mere pornographic images to the children themselves. It is no exaggeration to say that the Internet has revolutionized the child pornography industry and child sex tourism, which in turn calls for a much needed revolution in the legislative approaches to save children from sexual exploitation and the level of international multi-agency cooperation required.

Sexual exploitation of children has been around for a very long time, but the use of the Internet to perpetrate this human rights violation only started in the mid-1990s. One of the most dangerous aspects of having the Internet as a tool to promote child pornography is how relatively easy and cheap it is compared to, for example, buying a plane ticket to Bangkok or even to walk across town to a dirty street corner. With the Internet, pedophiles, who often times seem to be very "normal" people, do not need to embarrass themselves by visiting certain magazine racks or the adult section of a video store anymore. What they want to see is only a click away.

With such easy access, demand naturally rises, which means the supply must go up, which means sexual exploitation of more and more children. Also, if pedophiles see that there are websites out there dedicated to pornographic images of children, they will not feel alone. They will in contrast feel that these previously questionable sexual urges that they have are actually normal because they are shared by vast numbers of other people. Further, this creates almost a kind of camaraderie between people who, after all, share similar interests.

A few years ago, there was an online network in the United Kingdom called the "Shadowz Brotherhood," which operated like a business, raising their child pornography website to country club status. Members would join and receive with their basic membership access to the most casual material. As their rank increased, as they paid more membership fees, they would be allowed access to more extreme material. The administers of this website also kept the online community carefully layered, making sure that only members of the same group knew each other, limiting communication amongst their members. This kind of website almost turns child pornography into an exclusive enterprise in which too many people want to participate.

Because the Internet is turning child pornography into something of an enterprise, it also calls for new forms of legislation to replace the weak and obsolete national laws that are useless against the transnational nature of the Internet. What is crippling is that too many law enforcers have a far inferior working knowledge of the Internet than do pedophiles, child pornography website administrators, contributors to such websites, and the ringleaders of international child pornography rings. Such law enforcers should be provided with training regarding Internet technology, but that is another hurdle to overcome and an extra necessary step to be taken before children can be prevented from sexual exploitation.

Moreover, it is impossibly difficult to locate children who are sexually exploited via the Internet, much trickier than breaking up a brothel and saving the children who have been forced to work there. Many children seen on Internet websites are sometimes never found by local authorities or international organizations. Children who are forced into production of child pornography often get sexually abused. As if this were not traumatizing enough, they all have to live with the knowledge that their shameful activities have been recorded and will be shown to anyone with access to the Internet. Many of them never escape the clutches of child sex slavery. Perhaps their only escape is death. Some strong souls recover and somehow manage to get on with their lives if they were lucky enough to escape this form of modern-day slavery. Others, however, even if they are released, never move on with their lives, many either returning to prostitution before they turn 18 or resorting to drugs or suicide. Even those who get on with their lives are reminded of their trauma if they hear about circulation of certain videos online.

Many children get hurt when the Internet is used as a tool for child pornography, but children do not always have to be involved with the production of child pornography. With today's technology, fake child pornography could easily be produced by pasting faces of children onto bodies of adults, or even creating virtual scenes of child pornography. Although this form of child pornography does not directly harm children, it still sends messages to those who see such images. Perhaps children will think that it is normal to pose naked in front of camera after seeing numerous images of children who seem to be happily taking their clothes off and engaging themselves in sexual activities. Perhaps pedophiles can use those images to persuade children that sexual activities with adults is normal.

Such activities can range from posing for erotic photographs to abuse and torture. The former is actually not illegal according to some countries' laws, including Denmark. Such material is categorized as erotic material, which is technically not illegal but deemed a human rights violation by international organizations that are fighting for child rights. The latter, anything that can be broadly categorized as abuse or torture, is considered illegal material. Sadly, over the last few years, such illegal material has been on the rise whereas erotic material has been decreasing, according to a Danish study.

Of all the forms of information exchange on the Internet, newsgroups, file-sharing, online gaming, and chat rooms are the lesser used media to perpetrate child pornography. Websites and e-mails are on the top of the list. The most dangerous of websites might be online social communities. More and more children, all persons under 18 years of age, are engaging in online social communities where they post personal information and are able to communicate with people they have never met before. Often times, these communications through the website progress to e-mails, then to chat rooms, then to phone conversations, sometimes to meetings in the real world.

It is a myth that child sex abusers are always violent rapists. More often than not, they are charming individuals who seem to be leading normal lives and are apt at building a bond of trust with children. This is perhaps the sickest part of all: These people build relationships of trust with children only for the ultimate purpose of sexual exploitation. This sense of betrayal experienced by children probably scars them emotionally and mentally as much as the sexual abuse harms them physically.

Pedophiles do not always act on their sexual urges, but there is a correlation between people who harbor the thought and those who perform the deed. Studies have shown that sexual exploitation of children is not an impulsive act. It is usually meticulously planned, encouraged by the steady stream of child pornographic images they have no problems obtaining on the Internet. Pedophiles and everyone else who harbor any sort of sexual interest in children, men or women, with or without a history of sexual offense, are obviously the root of the global problem that is the sexual exploitation of children. Some of them only harbor fantasies whereas some of them act on their urges. Of the latter category, some commit moral crimes far worse than others. Child sex abusers who are familiar with the nuts and bolts of Internet technology are perhaps the most slippery perpetrators to catch.

Despite the bleak picture of child sex exploitation, there is actually much being done to prevent further harm to our children. There are literally hundreds of organizations in the world dedicated to child rights, with specific branches committed to thwarting IT-related sexual exploitation of children: ECPAT International (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes), Focal Point on Sexual Exploitation of Children in Switzerland, International society for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect based in the United States, the Preda Foundation based in the Philippines, and Save the Children to name a few.

Save the Children is active in over 100 countries, with many of the organizations participating in INHOPE (Internet Hotline Providers in Europe), the first of its kind in Europe. Designed to receive reports from civilians and staffed with full-time employees, the hotline service from Save the Children is every citizen's opportunity to join in on the fight for child rights. This hotline service is not limited by national borders either. If traces are made to other countries with local Save the Children organizations, then the case is handed over to them. In the case that the country in question has no Save the Children organization, then the national police takes matters into their own hands and arrange for international cooperation, which is needed more than ever in this new age of technology.

Within a year of opening their hotline service in earlier this decade, Save the Children organizations all over the Nordic countries received thousands of reports from civilians. In 2004, Save the Children Denmark had two successful operations, arresting hundreds of Danish men who were participating in illegal exchange of child pornography. The main shoot, however, was in the United States, where thousands of individuals were arrested. On the note of the United States, in 2004, the Danish Pedophile Association, which aimed to justify sexual exploitation of children via their website, was closed down but reopened later in the year on an American server. The administrators have yet to be located.

Obviously, greater international cooperation will be essential in this fight to end sexual exploitation of children on the Internet. The Stockholm Congress in 1996 (The First World Congress Against the Sexual Exploitation of Children) and the Yokohama Congress in 2001 (the second such world congress) were major steps. Perhaps the third one will be within a year or two. Rather, the third one should take place soon. In the meantime, if everyday citizens are able to feel each other's pain, especially that of children, then calling the hotline is the best way to help.