Porn and Child Sexual Abuse Material

Online porn as an offender conveyor belt

20 years ago, men had to go to huge lengths to get their hands on child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Only too aware of the illegality and perversity of their actions, they often experienced a deep sense of shame, stigma and isolation.

However today, because CSAM can be accessed with relative ease and anonymity via Google, we’re starting to see a new type of offender: one who doesn’t identify as a paedophile, who’s in denial about his offending behaviour and who seeks out sexualised images of children after becoming desensitised to mainstream online porn.

So reports Mike Sheath, who has worked with offenders at the Lucy Faithfull foundation for over a decade. He observes that police hoping to apprehend dangerous child molesters increasingly recognise that they’re often chasing after ‘saddos’ instead- ‘ordinary’ men who cross the line online.

Not just ‘paedophiles’

We often assume that the only paedophiles are sexually aroused by children. But as professor Philip Jenkins explains, the kind of men with “a sexual interest in children is not confined to a tiny segment of hardcore ‘pedophiles’.¹ Rather than there being two separate and distinct groups (“paedophiles” and “ordinary men”) there is instead a continuum, as Gail Dines explains: “some men are clearly situated at either end but others are scattered at various points. Furthermore, men’s position along the continuum is subject to shifts… depending on the particular constellation of their life experiences at one time.” We’re starting to understand how the consumption of online porn is increasingly playing a role in shifting men along the continuum.

Changing tastes

Our sexual tastes and interests are not fixed and static, but are malleable and evolve over time. When we watch a lot of pornography, we find that after a while, the things that once aroused us start to loose their appeal. As that happens, we start seeking after more extreme or novel content- something known as “the Coolidge Effect.”²

What’s more, it’s been shown that when men are in a state of sexual arousal, they are more likely to behave impulsively, exhibiting increased sexual deviance and fewer inhibitions: ‘when aroused, the same individual will find a much wider range of activities sexually appealing than when not aroused.’³ Known as “the Bikini Effect” this effectively gives men ‘tunnel vision’ where the drive to sexual gratification overrides the restraint of conscious, rational thought. This explains why men’s initial disinterest in (or even disgust with) child pornography gradually diminishes after repeated exposure, especially in the context of masturbation.⁴

Because the internet has made pornography more accessible, anonymous and affordable than ever before, there are far fewer constraints on our consumption. Today, online porn is literally hosed into our homes and our personal electronic devices and we watch far, far more of it than at any other point in human history.

This has meant that, collectively, we’ve become desensitised to porn depicting more conventional ‘vanilla’ sex acts. As with any other addiction, those who watch a lot of porn built up “tolerance.” This helps to explain why, although most users start out watching porn that’s aligned to their tastes and preferences, over time they can become habituated to watching material they once found unethical or inappropriate. This is known as “blunting.” It’s a strong effect that’s not limited to men, and it tends to happen without the consumer realising, at least at first.⁵

However, online porn sites realise. The industry makes a huge amount of money from understanding and catering to these effects. It’s no accident that the boom in the amount of online porn we consume has coincided with the escalation in its extremity and diversity. Material that would have been refused classification 20 years ago is now commonplace and in the name of sexual freedom of expression, we expect potn to represent every conceveble paraphilia.

One of the genres that has emerged as extremely popular in online pornography is known as teen porn- or pseudo-child pornography, which merges sexual images of girls and women, thereby confounding the distinctions between them. It, ‘portrays young looking adult women as if they were young girls, using props (e.g. teddy bears and lollipops) and captions or text to describe the depicted women as children… [it] can also be accomplished by dressing them in childish clothes and hairstyles, positioning them in childlike poses with childlike expressions and surrounding them with children’s toys.’⁶

Along with other kinds of extreme material, PCP is effectively ‘hanging the thresholds of what is normal’ and that, according to Mike Sheath is dangerous: “Of course most people can watch extreme porn and walk away but I don’t see those people. What we are seeing on a daily basis is the conflation of easy access to hardcore and deviant pornography and an interest in child molestation. The link is unambiguous.”⁷

A new kind of offender

The explosion of online pornograhy has led to a generation of new offenders, men “who may not have a sexual preference for children, but who ahve seen the gamut of adult pornography and who are searching for more bizarre material.”⁸

Watching simulations of children being sexually used by adults in the context of mainstream online pornography means it is easier for men to take the next step of watching real child sexual abuse material.⁹ Gail Dines writes how, ‘[t]he transition of a male’s arousal to child pornography can be achieved through a step-by step process of exposure to gradually younger sexualised teenagers and then prepubescent girls- a process…’

The internet makes it incredibly easy for men to scratch any sexual itch. Online porn accommodates our escalating preferences, with every kind of extreme or niche material just a few clicks away. Men who’ve seen the gamut of adult pornography end up finding child pornography in the search for more novel or extreme material: “…many arrested internet offenders were heavy, long-term users of legal, adult pornography. In a state of sexual excitement, recklessness, perhaps drunkenness, they had followed links that took them to illegal content. Often a small step but one from which there was no return.”¹⁰

Gail Dines observes: “While PCP sites may satisfy the user for a time the sensitization eventually leads to boredom and the need for harder-core and more extreme pornography. The obvious next place to go is real child pornography, since here a real child is used and the truly illegal and hence secretive nature of the porn is only going to add an even greater erotic thriller for the, by now, somewhat desensitised user.”¹¹

She goes on to describe how she interviewed several incarcerated men who used child pornography, and found that “not one of them fitted the definition of the paedophile”: “All seven told me that they preferred sex with an adult woman, but had become bored with regular pornography. Five of them had looked at PCP [pseudo-child pornography sites first and then moved into actual child porn.¹²

Dr. Julie Newberry writes that through porn addiction, “[a] person, usually a man, who has no sexual interest in children, can find himself ‘crossing the line’.” She describes how her clients ended up looking at child abuse images, even though they had no intention of doing so: “They couldn’t understand why they continued to do something that disgusted them and which they knew was illegal. I suggest that each of them became desensitized to mild porn and sensitized to extreme porn….”¹³

The idea that men are drawn into CSAM through the route of mainstream online pornography is well recognised by psychotherapists counselling sex offenders but also by child protection charities and law enforcement.¹⁴ Police superintendent Simon Bailey, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead on child protection, says: “What we are seeing is a new group of young men aged between 18 and 26 who have been brought up on a staple diet of going to visit Pornhub and sites like that. They get to the point where there’s no pornographic material that is stimulating them so then they start to explore what child abuse imagery might look like. They start getting their kicks from that.’

“In my judgement, most image offenders have drifted in to this behaviour after becoming addicted to adult pornography.”¹⁵
Michael Stock, StopSO UK

Case Study¹⁶

“John”, who was convicted of possessing 5,000 indecent images of children. John said he became addicted to legal pornography when he was a teenager. “I suppose that’s not uncommon for teenage boys, but I carried on using it. That continued on throughout adult life and I got to a very, very ingrained habit of buying pornography and using it. Some might say you get addicted to it, and in a way I think I was”

His obsession meant that he was looking at all types of images which were becoming more and more extreme – and the internet enabled him to do this. John said he “didn’t appreciate what happened to the children for them to be in that position”:

“The children are portrayed often smiling and happy and a lot of the images are them posing and I did not consider the surrounding circumstances. It’s only when I got out of all of this and got help that I was able to empathise with what was going on there and these children were clearly not consenting.”

Self-disgust ¹⁷

Men who end up looking at child abuse material via the route of mainstream online porn often feel a deep sense of self-disgust at their own behaviour. Journalist Pamela Paul found that many “expressed shock at just how rapidly their viewing preferences had turned to increasingly violent and bizarre porn genres- genres that they had previously found distasteful but now actively sought out.”

Juliet Grayson, founder of StopSO UK, a service to council and rehabilitate sexual offenders explains that people who look at illegal images temporarily lose the ability to discriminate between right and wrong because of their addiction: “’Just as the alcoholic does when they reach for another drink and then for their car keys, or the gambler does when he bets his whole month’s salary.”18

“They couldn’t understand why they continued to do something that disgusted them and which they knew was illegal. I suggest that each of them became desensitized to mild porn and sensitized to extreme porn….”¹⁹
Dr. Julie Newberry

Often, this kind of offender doesn’t identify as a paedophile, nor does he regard himself as a criminal. When such a man is caught, both he and his entire family tend to experience a deep sense of shame and stigma. The risk of family breakup is common, as is attempted suicide.²⁰

“I feel really, really bad about it and I wish that I’d been a different sort of person and not done it.”²¹
John, offender

Conclusion

The link between online porn consumption and the interest in CSAM is difficult for us to come to terms with, since it complicates our straightforward ideas about inherent sexual preferences and the idea that those who watch CSAM are paedophiles who deserve locking up. But whilst we mst keep in mind that there are a range of risk factors and only a minority of heavy porn users end up being into child sexual abuse material, it’s foolish to ignore the trend and do nothing. The fact is that online pornography is ‘contrinuting to the crystalisation of those interests in people with no prior sexual interest in children.’²²

Helplines such as the government funded Stop it Now! report ever increasing numbers of calls from men concerning their online sexual behaviours towards children. Last year, it received a record 3,553 calls- including 1,000 from individuals concerned about other people’s behaviour.

Mike Sheath of the Lucy Faithfull Foundation writes: “I’m counselling 10 men at a time – and the police are arresting 500 men a month. If they quadrupled the number of police looking at online abuse the number of images found would quadruple. The only limits are the number of officers put on it…. Men can reach us by calling our helpline Stop It Now! and they mostly do that after they have been arrested. Our aim is to go upstream to reach out to the population before they get arrested.”²³

This is a problem that’s growing and will only continue to grow for as long as we do nothing. Law enforcement is struggling to keep up; we need to address this issue upstream, helping people who abuse to understand their behaviour, what triggers it and the huge impact it has on children. We must ask more questions and carry out more research into the impact of pseudo-child pornography, questioning its possible effects and interrogating the ways in which its images leak into real-world attitudes and behaviours.²⁴

‘We’ve got to start coming to terms with the fact that there are some appalling things taking place online that unfortunately the internet is probably the route of most of the evils. ‘We have to start looking at that and we have to start genuinely asking the question, how much more are we going to tolerate?’
Simon Bailey, National Police Chiefs’ Council lead on child protection