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Surprise Canadian role in child porn

By: Gabrielle Giroday

Posted: 11/19/2009 4:09 PM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

Child porn tends to drive an extreme reaction in all of us: total disgust. The issue is supposedly coated in extremism because the thought is truly abhorrent to most.

However, the promise of battling child porn has an interesting effect on policymakers. I often think of the child porn issue as one of the least politically divisive things out there: an issue that unites lawmakers, interest groups, police, and voters of all stripes.

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No one wants to be seen as soft on child porn.

As a crime, child porn charges and investigations are particularly interesting to cover because it often touches people who are not heavily affected by violent crime: the middle class. Many of the people who end up being charged with importing child porn are people who may have no court experience and spotless records. (This is my anecdotal experience, not academic one, but anyway...)

This report was released yesterday by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection and Cybertip.ca. The report looked at 15,000+ websites and 4,000 child porn images on those websites, and the findings were fascinating.

I found the three distinct schools of marketing child porn to commercial buyers an interesting glimpse into the minds of pedophiles that purchase this material.

(Since I don’t go seeking this stuff, I’m not familiar with what it actually is. The report explains there’s three schools:

innocence-themed websites decorated with pastel colours and young children,
child porn websites portraying themselves as adult sites with heavily sexualized images and adult make-up/lingerie, and
depravity websites decorated with darker colours and market themselves as extreme websites. Sick.)

More appallingly, the ranking Canada has in terms of servers hosting this content is something I never would have anticipated.
This is not something to be proud of.

Of 800 commercial websites the report looked at (i.e. people have to pay for access), Canada had 8 per cent of servers hosting the material.

Some of the report’s recommendations seem obvious, like "collaboration and data sharing between organizations dealing with online sexual exploitation of children."

However, I’d recommend the report as a good read if you’re interested in nuances of the issue.

I especially appreciated the gender-based approach -- which points out 83 per cent of victims are women and girls -- and the need for gender-based education materials due to the large percentage of females involved.

Exploitation of children is not based on gender alone, but it helps explain how consumer patterns work.

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