PORN IMAGES EXPLODING
Interesting facts from the NYT article. 9/28, 2019
Photos and videos posted on line of children being sexually abused or tortured have increased from around 3,000 in 1998 to 45 million in 2018.
Legislation was passed in 2008 to deal with the subject but was underfunded and was not given proper authorization. Its authority is under the justice department but has not been assigned a full-time administrator. A budget of $60miillion was budgeted but half of it has never been allocated. Homeland security took $6 Billion from the funds for border issues.
Tech companies have not been helpful and reporting of violations are mired in understaffing, old technology and little cooperation. Reports, if there are any, are late, delayed or non-existent.
Less than 2% of the on-line infractions are even investigated.
The technology used by the offenders is state of the art and the technologies used by the defenders, law enforcement, the government, is old and out dated. It is not even close to comparable. The offenders use the many sites to learn how to avoid detection, to find new sources to share and how to stay encrypted.
Facebook Messenger was responsible for 12 of the 18 million images in 2018.
There are individual sites like Love Zone that deals in this material. They have 30K subscribers.
A site, Tumbler, is one of the biggest offenders, with 450 million subscribers, not all involved in pornographic imagery but a huge number of perpetrators are thought to be on this platform.
The dark web has instructions for how to make the videos, how to photograph and how to encrypt the images for self-protection and sharing the material by the perpetrators.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, established in 1984 was launched to locate missing children and has worked in this area of photos and videos. They prioritize their own activities by age of those offended but have little money and virtually no support to continue their efforts. There is an ugliness to this issue that causes people to not even want to deal with it.
Those who are offenders are thought to be people who did not mature past the age where they first found arousal. So, if a boy was first aroused by a ten-year-old girl he would continue throughout his life to be aroused by girls the same age. The ages most preyed on are from 6 years to 17 years. 1 – 4% of men and women participate. There is an expression “people don’t choose what arouses them, they discover it”
Root cause of child abuse is thought to develop in a prenatal stage. It is not genetic. But if abused in childhood the data no longer supports that they will be involved in hands on abuse as adults. Rather, the abused are more inclined to drug and alcohol abuse, stress and criminality.
But those who are physical abusers will participate in on line abuse at rates often as high as 60%-80% of the time.
For the overwhelming number of on-line abusers (the 45 million) there is about a 5% chance they will advance to physical abuse. These abusers are referred to as “virtuous pedophiles” They look at material, share it but do not progress to hands on abuse. They have gone underground due to the heightened level of scrutiny and the opportunity to encrypt their activities. The medical profession has been interested in studying them because they appear to have control of their needs without going to the next step.
Pedophiles will participate in on-line abuse. On line abusers probably will not.
This is a problem that is not going away.
