Depravity Online

As some British kid-porn purveyors head for jail, hiding on the Net becomes easier for their successors.

The group considered itself the haut monde of child pornography, zapping reams of the stuff to each other via their own private chat room.  To join the highly secretive “Wonderland” club, each member had to cough up steep membership dues: 10,000 sexually explicit images of kids.  Once inside, at the bottom of seven layers of electronic security, they had access to 750,000.  There are pictures of a fair-haired toddler, still in diapers, being sexually abused; of young girls and boys, even babies as young as three months, being raped, genitally and anally; of children performing sex acts on each other and on adults; young boys in chains; recordings of children’s screams as they are beaten.  Some of the kids are in obvious terror.  Others, heartbreakingly, strain to trust their abusers.  One Wonderland member created new videos by preying on his children’s friends, even performing specific acts requested by those who were watching online.  Last week seven British members of the club, who are among 107 people arrested in 12 countries, were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 12 to 30 months.  With good behavior, they could serve only half the time.

“I am absolutely stupefied by this leniency,” said Michelle Elliott, director of the child protection group Kidscape in London.  “You would get a longer sentence for accumulating masses of parking tickets or for burglary.”  The judge didn’t have much choice because the defendants pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors.  British law has since been changed t permit maximum sentences of 10 years rather than three for distributing indecent images of children.

The real worry is the size of the iceberg beneath Wonderland.  Before the Internet, kid porn could be exchanged only in person or in unmarked envelopes.  Now anyone with a computer can trade pictures around the globe; anyone with a camera and a child to prey upon can make his own video – and UNICEF estimates that some 2 million children around the world are being sexually abused.  The secrecy of the Net subculture is its own turn-on.  David Hines, one of the men jailed last week, told the BBC: “I had friends all over the world. [The Net] was wonderful.  It sucks you in.”  The clubby feel validated their urges, too.  “We just didn’t see it as abuse,” says Hines.  “We saw it as, there were some children involved in relationships.”

The spread of cheap, strong encryption is a powerful new tool for pedophiles.  Of 12 Wonderland arrests in Germany, for example, none has gone to trial because police can’t decipher all the evidence they’ve collected.  A spokeswoman for the U/S. Customs Service says, “We have the latest systems… there is no refuge for pedophiles in cyberspace.”  But that sounds like studied bravado.  “Sure, if every computer on the planet spent three months on one of these codes you might crack it,” says John Carr, Internet consultant to the British children’s charity NCH.  “But right now, the seesaw is definitely tilting toward the bad guys.”

Another problem is that peer-to-peer file sharing systems, like Napster, can allow porn to be posted at prearranged times on an unsuspecting host, then quickly removed.  Breaking international rings takes agonizing coordination among multiple jurisdictions, many of which lack savvy cyber crime squads.  And in some countries, laws and attitudes still lump adult pornography – which may reflect consensual activity – together with child pornography, “which is the picture of a crime scene, of a child being sexually assaulted,” says Rachel O’Connell, director of research at the University of Central Lancashire’s Cyberspace Research Unit.

By keeping tabs on child porn sites, police can sometimes manage to identify new victims and arrest the abuser before more horrors are perpetrated.  Unfortunately, that’s not the norm.  Of more than 1,260 victims in the Wonderland archives, only 17 have been identified.  And the demand for fresh images, which the Internet’s reach only intensifies, means that uncounted other innocents will become victims too.

Time, February 26, 2001