More than 850 men a month are arrested for online child abuse offences in England and Wales. They come from every walk of life: teachers, police officers, doctors, TV presenters. And the numbers are rising every year. How did this happen?
Andy was enjoying a weekend away with his wife when it happened. “My neighbour phoned me and said, ‘The police are in your house. They’re looking for you.’” He didn’t need to wonder why. “You know. You know the reason. I was petrified when I got that call. It wasn’t just the thought of other people knowing what I had done; I also had to face myself, and that is a sick feeling – it is guilt, shame.”
Andy had been watching and sharing images of children being sexually abused for several months before the police appeared at his door. He tried at first to keep it from his wife: “I was afraid she would ask me to leave. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she had.”
When they got home, he told her his story: that a spiralling porn addiction had led him to ever darker places, chatrooms where people talked about sex and porn, and shared images and videos. “That was where someone sent me a picture of a child, in exchange for some porn I sent them.”
Unlike Andy, Mark didn’t immediately realise why the police had come for him. “My then wife came in looking worried and said, ‘There are police at the door.’ We were living in a wealthy area, so I thought they were there about some recent burglaries. But then they told me they needed to speak to me alone. They said I was being arrested for having indecent images of children.”
Mark claims he was shellshocked. “I knew I had looked at lots of porn but I genuinely did not think there was anybody underage in there. They said they had found 200 illegal images.” From the outside, Mark was a successful businessman, travelling regularly for work. His arrest was a public humiliation. “There were four of them, with body cameras on, in two cars. They told my boys, ‘Don’t worry, Daddy is just helping us out’ and put me in the back of one of the cars. In the picture the police took that day, I look suicidal.”
In England and Wales, 850 men a month are arrested for online child abuse offences. They come from every walk of life: teachers, police officers, bus drivers, doctors. Those on the frontline are warning of another alarming trend: a significant shift towards younger offenders among those picked up for watching illegal material.
The arrests are just one metric pointing towards a spiralling global crisis. Last year was the worst on record for instances of online child sexual abuse imagery, with the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation acting to remove content from 300,000 web pages, each containing at least one, if not hundreds or thousands, of illegal images and videos.
Now, police, charities, lawyers and child protection experts are asking what is driving this tidal wave of offending, and finding one common thread: the explosion over the past 10 to 20 years of free-to-view and easily accessible online pornography. Material so violent it would have been considered highly extreme a generation ago is now readily available on iPads, desktops and the phones in teenagers’ pockets. A growing body of research is beginning to warn of how problematic porn habits can be a pathway into viewing images of children being abused.
I have been writing about the online child abuse crisis for five years. Time and again I have heard warnings from those on the frontline that there is an unambiguous link between the two. Do the sites that profit from porn have questions to answer about this link? Can the connection be broken? And the big question: is the explosion of child abuse imagery online feeding a demand for this material, or creating one? [Emphaiss supplied] …
Andy argues that he has no intrinsic interest in children, but was led through a porn addiction to seek out ever more extreme images. “I am fully accountable,” Andy tells me on the phone. “None of this is an excuse. I look back at what I did with huge regret and shame. But I didn’t start out wanting to see kids. I was addicted to porn and I went down a road of being totally desensitised as I got further and further from what was normal.
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When you masturbate to porn, you get an intense dopamine hit. Then those first videos start to become boring. Your brain starts to say, that’s not good enough. Soon you are watching rape fantasies – there are loads of categories like this on mainstream sites. Then it’s teenagers. The algorithms keep showing you more extreme stuff.”
He argues that the mainstream porn sites encourage an interest in young girls. “They push the boundaries as much as they can, with content around young women dressed in school uniforms, for example; incest themes; old men paired with young women.”
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