Child pornography online: myth, fact, and social control

Journal of Sex Research, May, 2003 by Robert Bauserman

Most of the CP images themselves appear to involve adolescents or children posing nude, which is not illegal in most Western countries. However, some hard-core images of adolescent and prepubescent children having sex with each other and with adults are available. While some appear to be recycled from 1970s magazines and films, other images seem to be "sex tourist" images created by men visiting Asian or Latin American countries in search of less risky sexual access to minors. Jenkins offers no estimate of the number of minors who currently appear in CP, but fortunately they seem to number far fewer than the tens or hundreds of thousands of children (defined to include adolescents) often claimed.

In Chapter 3, Jenkins details the organization of this subculture online, describing four institutions. First are the newsgroups now on Usenet, descendants of the old BBS services. Child pornography is found on only a few of the approximately 90,000 Usenet groups in existence (a point not emphasized by Jenkins, who identified barely a dozen "major" underage-oriented groups), and much of the posting on these groups consists of "spam" (come-ons for commercial sites, invariably featuring teens of legal age--18 and over--for pomography). Thus, barely 1 in 10,000 of the newsgroups serve as conduits for CP. Those that carry the most such material are most difficult to access, as many service providers block access to the groups that post the most illegal material.

A second major institution is storyboards, which post only text stories rather than pictures. Consequently, these sites operate legally. Third are interest groups on commercial servers, but Jenkins details how these groups are typically shut down quickly if service providers become aware of any trade in CP. Last are the web-based bulletin boards, the source of most of Jenkins' material. These boards do not post illegal images, but serve as information exchanges where posters trade tips on security; discuss their "hobby" (their term), including ethics and rationales for their behavior; and tell others about websites where CP can be found and post passwords for accessing the material (such websites are typically short-lived encrypted sites that disappear after a few days, often recycling materials already posted elsewhere). It is on these bulletin boards, if anywhere, that the online pedophilia subculture maintains its existence.

In Chapters 4 and 5, Jenkins provides his most interesting and valuable material from a psychological and sociological standpoint. Here he discusses the structure of the online CP community and the different values or standards that participants advance to justify their activities, referring to the work of Best and Luckenbill, who categorized social deviants as loners, peers, colleagues, teams, or formal organizations. Classification depends on whether deviants associate with each other, participate in deviance together, or require a division of labor, and whether organizations' activities extend over time and space. Although the model seems to work well for many types of deviants, from pickpockets to organized crime, Jenkins argues that online deviance may be an entirely new category that cannot be classified in these terms. CP collectors are loners in that their activities are solitary; offers to meet are met with derision (there is no way of telling if such offers come from law enforcement personnel). However, these loners also may actively participate in a virtual community where regular participants are well-known and even sought out for advice, tips and information are freely exchanged, participants create temporary websites to allow others to access collections of materials, and even abstract concerns such as the ethics of CP are debated. This level of interaction would place them as colleagues in the Best and Luckenbill model, but the critical dimension of interpersonal socialization is missing. The subculture maintains its unity solely through shared interest, not through face-to-face relationships or commercial exchange (pay sites are often scams or law enforcement fronts, and experienced community members place great emphasis on security, which precludes any possibility of using credit cards or real personal information online).