Child Pornography - Serious and Disturbing

This week, Grant Smith, a professor from the University of Utah was arrested for viewing child pornography while on a flight from Salt Lake to Boston.  A courageous passenger seated behind Mr. Smith took a photo of him allegedly watching child pornography on his laptop. The flight crew was notified and Boston police officers were waiting for Mr. Smith as he deplaned.  He was detained, his computer and phone searched, and then arrested. It's important to note that possession of even one image of child pornography is a felony.  

This brazen display of the professor's need to view pornography shows the power of the addiction.

Child pornography involves a very disturbing and dark subculture of Internet pornography. Child pornography is a fast-growing business and the content is becoming much more graphic and violent.  Because of the severity of the penalty for possession, child pornographers typically swap and share images on peer-to-peer networks to avoid publicizing their addiction by paying on commercial pornography sites.

The most disturbing issue is that of those arrested for possession of child pornography, 40 percent had both sexually victimized children and were in possession of child pornography.

Of those arrested between 2000 and 2001, 83 percent had images involving children between the ages of 6 and 12, while 39 percent had images of children between the ages of 3 and 5, and quite sadly,  19% had images of infants and toddlers under the age of 3 yrs old.  I can only imagine that the statistics are worse after ten years of continued devolution.

According to Mark Shurtleff, attorney general of Utah, of those arrested for possession of child pornography, most started out viewing adult pornography but gradually progressed to more hard core images as the addiction advanced. (Source: KPCW radio interview on 30 Nov. 2011 at 9 a.m.)

As parents, we need to be alert to the fact that sexual predators are online in search of prey.  Children are the target and must be protected.  Parental controls software is the best method a parent has in the fight against this sickening trend.  Net Nanny Mobile will launch in January to help protect kids and teens using smartphones and iPods.

(Source: National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, Child Pornography Possessors Arrested in Internet-Related Crimes: Findings from the National Juvenile Online Victimization Study, 2005).

I work for ContentWatch and all opinions expressed here are my own.