Thanks to the Internet and the ever-decreasing costs of quality digital cameras, the NCMEC report said child porn has officially become a multi-billion dollar global commercial enterprise.
“The ease and anonymity of using home computers has revolutionized accessibility as well as the production and distribution of child pornography, especially across international borders,” said Ernie Allen, president and CEO of the NCMEC. “The fact that child pornography can be purchased using a credit card or traded at no cost on the Internet is causing an exploding global problem and an immeasurable impact on the sexual exploitation of children.”
Though numbers are hard to determine, Allen claimed the number of child pornography images on the Internet is estimated to have increased by 1,500 percent since 1997. Though many images police find online are not original, roughly 100,000 child porn websites are thought to exist today, according to Allen.
Most disturbing, he said, has been the increase in calls to the NCMEC’s phone hotline, which received 106,176 reports of child pornography in 2004. The line only received 21,603 reports in 2001, Allen said.
“Those numbers wouldn’t surprise me but I can’t corroborate them,” ASACP Executive Director Joan Irvine told XBiz. “[ASACP] gets about 6000 reports a month of such child porn websites, but only about 150-200 of them are new. That would mean we report around 2000 new cases a year, but we aren’t as large of an organization as [the NCMEC].”
During a study of arrests for child porn possession from 2000 to 2001, the NCMEC found the vast majority include material involving children between the ages of 6-12. While 83 percent fall into this age bracket, 39 percent involved children aged 3-5, and 19 percent featured children under the age of 3.
“Traditionally, we have viewed pedophiles as the users and distributors of child pornography,” said Allen. “However, we [were] shocked to learn that the consumer market for child pornography is growing and becoming much broader. Younger and younger children are being victimized, and the content is becoming more graphic and more violent.”
Allen said many images discovered over the last four years featured children in bondage, being raped and even being tortured. Although most images were of girls, Allen said the number of boys is increasing, though percentages were not reported.