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| Help Me Please |
Using a tool developed at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 2009, police have logged close to 22 million public I.P. addresses offering child-pornography pictures or videos via peer-to-peer file sharing, which allows users to download content from one computer to another; almost 10 million of the I.P. addresses were located in the United States
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Until the 1970s, magazines with titles like Lolita were
rife with sexual images of minors and routinely sold alongside adult
pornography at red-light bookstores. In 1978, Congress made child pornography illegal, and four years later, the Supreme Court upheld a state law banning its sale. The court’s decision changed the market along with the law. “The commercial distributors started to go out of business,” said Kenneth Lanning, a retired F.B.I. agent who consulted on child pornography cases for decades. For a time, distribution and production plummeted. But then came the Internet. By the mid- to late 1990s, Lanning said, “there was a way for people seeking it to find each other and send images.”
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A decade later, the Justice Department interviewed veteran experts like Lanning for a 2010 report, and concluded that “the market — in terms of numbers of offenders, images and victims” — was growing to a degree
described as “overwhelming” and “exponential.” In the early-Web year of
1994, only 61 defendants were sentenced in federal court for
child-pornography offenses; in 2011, 1,880 were, a 30-fold increase. The
federal definition of child pornography extends to young people up to
age 18, but the 2010 report noted that it had become more common for
images to involve young children, as well as violence and sadism.
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Precise numbers of child-pornography viewers are hard to come by. Unicef estimates that there are at least hundreds of thousands of Web sites with child pornography worldwide. Child-pornography consumers are even more likely to swap with one another via hidden networks. . Many
of the users shared only a single illegal image, perhaps downloaded
inadvertently, but others offered collections of hundreds or thousands
of pictures.
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To gain access to a group of downloaders, a recent arrival may have to
prove himself by delivering new material. Often this involves digitally
altering an existing image, but in some cases, it can also mean seducing
children to create new pictures to trade. The most desired series zoom
around the Internet. “A lot of these guys have a collector’s mentality,”
Lanning said. The pictures Nicole’s
father took became must-haves and went viral.
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For Nicole, knowing that her photos were circulating was an unrelenting
burden. It was hard to concentrate at school and hard to forge new
friendships. She stayed close to just a few friends from her church. Her
family is deeply Christian — “I’ve found comfort in my faith,” she says
— and she was home-schooled for a few years as a younger child. Her
friends from church were the only ones she told about her father.
“Everyone else I held at arm’s length,” she told me when we met this
summer at her lawyer’s office. Nicole speaks deliberately and carefully,
and on that day she was wearing an outfit that matched her coral nail
polish and perfectly applied makeup. “But other kids found out after my
father was charged. I remember walking down the hallways and thinking I
could hear people saying, ‘There’s the girl who was raped by her dad.’ ”
