What child molesters do to children is disgusting, but as a pedophile who chooses not to harm children or view child pornography, I have mixed feelings about these articles. These horrific actions are described as if they're inevitable. They're not.
To reduce offenses, we must focus on prevention, not just prosecution after the fact.
For pedophiles, mandated reporting laws mean that even if you've never harmed anyone, you can't see a therapist without fear of being outed. We can't even trust our friends or families to help us out. Taboos prevent research on prevention or safe outlets. We don't even know what percentage of pedophiles offend and what percentage do not.
And meanwhile, society tells people everywhere that sex is the ultimate goal.
For a young teenager just discovering this attraction, it's a grim view of your future: doomed to offend, no safe outlet, no good role models. In this article, "pedophile" and "child molester" are synonyms! I know the kind of harm that does. There's nothing to help these kids figure out how to deal with their lives. If you are that kid, reading hateful comments, please know that you CAN be successful and happy and never hurt a child.
When I was 13, I got lucky I never started viewing these images or getting into the spiral downwards that the article describes. Drawing attention to the lack of funding for police is important, but please, let's also stop abuse before it happens.
26
Thank you for this excellent, well-written article. Articles such as this one are what set the New York Times apart from most other media outlets. I have felt for a long time that what we are doing in this country to protect children is not working. So much manpower and money is spent on monitoring one-time offenders on the sexual offender registry; yet, the May 2019 U. S. Department of Justice Report on Recidivism Rates of Sex Offenders found that over a 9-year period, for those released from prison whose most serious charge was rape or sexual assault, only 7.7% re-offended. I have no sympathy for this 7.7%, but it also means that 93.2% did NOT re-offend over this same 9-year time period. That is a large percentage. But billions of dollars are spent monitoring this 92.3%. In Florida, where I am, the registry is for life along with many draconian state statutes and county/municipal ordinances. These 92.3% are not the ones out there producing and spreading these horrible picture and videos. The money would be better spent on going after the producers and tech companies causing the problems.
Research has shown that the registry does not work because most sex offenders are one-time offenders. I am a member of the Florida Action Committee, a nonprofit in Florida which is working to protect all children, while reforming our sex offender registry laws into laws that are fair and get results. Does the registry even work?
1
First of all- THANK YOU for drawing needed attention to this and the need for more funding and resources to stem the rising tide of child pornography. I want to say that this reflects poorly on the moral and psychological health of Americans. But I would guess this problem is international in scope and less reveals something new, than something old that the Internet magnifies through exploitation and ubiquity.
Still, to be honest, it further diminishes my faith in my fellow man. And trust is not something that always comes easily to me. Yet, those fighting and exposing these crimes restores some of my faith.
2
Since it seems that about 97 percent of these crimes are committed by men, this is, to put it bluntly, a male problem. Which is to say, addressing this horrific and tragic situation needs to go beyond technology and law enforcement solutions to include asking and answering what's gone wrong with the male psyche in the modern age.
7
This is an exceptionally well reported and written story that brings light to an incredibly disturbing issue. The reporters should be commended for what was clearly a long and laborious effort to get this right.
As I read it, a question formed in my mind that I'm afraid I can't answer. What good has the internet brought for mankind? I'm 49, so I vividly remember early adult life before it, and I'm stuck trying to come up with any advantage beyond the convenience of getting things faster and easier: books, rides, meals, hookups, etc. Pit that up against increases in child pornography/trafficking, the explosive spread of interconnected hate groups and the havoc social media has wrought on our ability to connect in person, and I'd be hard pressed to tell you it's been a worthwhile trade off.
Are we able to have an honest conversation about whether the pros are outweighing the cons? Or is the genie already too far out of the bottle?
6
This is appalling. Both tech companies and Congress must be held to account and any tech app that can't control the continuing abuse needs to be shut down immediately. A society that can not protect its children should not endure: it is a minimum requirement.
2
I was disappointed that there isn't anything new and effective to wean pedophiles from their obsessions, even thoses who are desperate for help.
Law Enforcement can not keep up with the porn explosion. Before massive amounts of new money goes into online pursuits, the US needs to define its objectives. Arrests of users might not be as important as services for victims, or prevention of exploitation
Child sex abuse is a crime perpetrated by relatives and trusted adults, not strangers. What’s more society has given tacit approval at the "highest" levels for sexual predation on teenage children, especially those who don't "count" because they are minority, poor, or in some way vulnerable. Think Jeffrey Epstein.
To help those who might be hurt - resources should go, not into chasing down internet deviants, but on educating parents and children, providing services, including shelters, and mental health, and preventing of child abuse. Those areas are starved for funding, as government budgets were slashed in the Recessions and never restored.
The US should be active in international efforts to stop child sex trafficking, and tourism.
A component could deal with the tech invasion of homelife: how parents and children can become savvy online users.
But the best first use of funding is in strengthening families and children. Go after purveyors of child porn, but not while failing to address issues that will make young people less vulnerable to exploitation.
I think that in the article a point is missing. It says about possible treatment of the results of the problem, like taking care of insufficient fundings, chasing the new cyber technologies, but it doesn’t say anything about the cause of the problem. Which, in my opinion, is a total indifference to the feelings of other people, taking to the extreme in this case. I think that these very mentally disturbed maniacs most definitely grew up in very emotionally unhealthy climates, so they didn’t grew up emotionally, and they learned to express their immature primitive emotions via criminal actions as torturing other human beings. So we could talk here about people treating other people as things and this goes from generation to generation, and has to stop. We all should be careful with each other, we should care about other people’s feelings, especially little ones. Life is hard for everybody.
4
In a lot of cases, foolish parents are only fueling the online pervert ecosystem. Recall a few months ago (maybe further back?) when a child predator subculture was discovered on YouTube where users would watch otherwise innocuous videos of young girls doing boring every day things, but they would all leave timecode comments to each other showing the exact moments when the camera can almost see up her shorts. Perverts are very creative in taking legal and non-perverted material and making it into something wretched and criminal. In the case of these YouTube videos, nobody is actually being trafficked and the kids are not in danger, so it's not exactly the same as the situation in this article, but it's all fuel for the same fire. Parents definitely need to be more aware of what their kids are doing - and POSTING - online. Kids will always be a step ahead, but parents can surely do more.
What's extra puzzling to me is when parents post pictures of their kids all over social media. The other day I saw a reddit post where some guy wanted to share a picture of his daughter's drawing (it was pretty good for a 10 year-old - certainly worth sharing). So he posts a picture of his 10 year old daughter holding the picture. Why? Now there is a picture of your 10 year old daughter just out there on the internet. Do you really think everyone who finds their way to that picture will be in it for the artwork? Careless, careless, careless!
ChesBay | Maryland
What's wrong is that our legislators don't care enough to do anything about it. They don't really work, don't do their jobs. They're on vacation, NOW...AGAIN! Most of what they do is raise money for themselves, and spend OUR money on nonsense. Furthermore, they don't know anything about technology and are so far behind that they will never catch up. This is a primary reason why we need to get rid of the elderly (well, maybe a few at the top for continuity,) and elect young Progressive people, who have energy, want to serve and work, who have no interest in making themselves rich on the backs of the people, and know how things work, TODAY. Clean out the swamp! It's not just tRump--he's bad enough--corruption is endemic in Congress. Most of them are in it for themselves. Voters, do your homework, if you want things to change.
2
My faith in humanity is at an all-time low, which for me is saying a lot. I'm fully convinced that we as humans are naturally inclined to evil. How else can we explain the extremely dysfunctional state of the world we live in today. Under no circumstances should any of this be allowed to happen! This is quite possibly the most shocking article I have ever read in the NY Times.
4
How do we get all people to see all people as people? Until the notion that there are people who are not really people and who exist solely for other's pleasure, exploitation, and benefit is excised, this will continue.
1
Is the collage of sanitized abused images necessary? I was hurt as a child. It's hard to describe how depressing it is to scroll through each image and wonder if I'm part of the crime scene.
4
Imagine if we took just 1% of our defense budget and put it towards this effort?
It is only the role of The New York Times to report, but I wish I knew what meaningful action could taken - should we contact our state and federal officials? Write to the tech companies mentioned? Something more than expressing outrage on social media.
3
This article is so horrific. I'm left feeling beyond heartbroken and devastated to feeling outrage at our government and the tech companies. Also, there is no CALL TO ACTION from the authors. This is literally the worst kind of evil and, after reading this article, all I can do as an average citizen is feel helpless. Where is the national movement?! What can we do to demand action?! The most vulnerable among us need us to fight these monsters.
3
I don't want to sound too cynical, but the title to this article needs to be reconsidered. It's not a matter of "what went wrong", but why did we assume the best from the outset?
2
NB: The accompanying article on "The Emerging Psychology of Pedophiles" seems to normalize this "attraction" and makes no mention of how much power the abuser feels over the victims. IMO, the driving force of abuse is the ability for those with more "power" to victimize the weak. There is nothing normal about being attracted to infants or small children. NYT needs to do a better job with their examination of what pedophilia truly is -- a deep mental illness rooted, at least partly, in the need for control.
2
I wished this devastating article gave some ideas on what everyday people like me could do to help these children being preyed on and abused. I am a childhood trauma survivor and my heart breaks to know that anyone went through the abuse I did. But what can I do?
4
The accompanying article on pedophile psychology suggests that "there is growing consensus that the origin is largely biological. This view is based in part on studies pointing to subtle physical traits that have a higher incidence among pedophiles."
Will AI soon refer people with these "subtle physical traits" to law enforcement for sex crimes investigations? Law enforcement is overwhelmed by the sheer volume of illegal content and machine learning is being offered as the only way to catch offenders at scale. That approach fits with the entire business model of Surveillance Capitalism, which wants to use your data to sell predictions about your future behavior. In order to fulfill their social "responsibility," tech firms will soon partner with government to hold you accountable for the shape of your face, and, of course, they'll probably nab some legit pedophiles too.
We could, alternatively, redesign the technological architecture in a way that doesn't open up everybody up for exploitation by pedophiles and data aggregators but that would preclude the possibility of total surveillance, which is the point of this design. This current design does not allow for discriminatory exploitation. In other words, Zuck, Bezos and Google are all in bed with pedophiles.
4
“ Tech Companies “ - SHUT them down. They are acting like the Catholic Church: lying, denying and collaborating. IF they don’t cooperate FULLY with Law Enforcement, SHUT THEM DOWN. I say this as a Mother and Grandmother. No excuses.
8
I'm gonna go ahead and say you might want take "Catholic" church out of that little slam you're trying to play there.
I've met hundreds of fellow survivors that were Pentecostal, Baptist, Lutheran, Episcopalian, LDS, non denominational, evangelical and countless other branches of Christianity, and then many other religions besides Christianity.
There are millions more victims from the protestant side of the house that will never get any type of recognition, and many where literally driven from their homes and families for not accepting abuse - and the people that abused them are often then held in higher regard for "standing firm in the face of a test from God" or some other lie to help explain away the truth.
To say that the Catholic church is the only church that has an abuse problem is childishly ignorant, so please don't belittle or ignore the victims of other churches by denying the reality that other churches do have abuse problems.
13
In some ways the internet is our society's mirror.
Too much of what we see in it is devastatingly ugly -- and too little of it is being confronted with any degree of success.
Technology has brought the ugliness to the surface and magnified it - it has not created it. But only humans can change the course we are on.
2
My 15-year-old daughter read this headline yesterday morning while glaring at the red dots representing the number of cases reported last year. The expression of disbelief and confusion on her face were astonishing. Leaving me speechless.
Truly heartbreaking!
15
Thank you, NYT for shining a light on this! That there should be a demand for such material is mind-boggling.
Better automatic detection is the only viable way forward here:
1) Train AI to recognize child pornography. That's not "future technology". It's relatively easy and Google has everything needed to implement this. The companies just lack the motivation. Fund it.
2) Legislate social media more strictly. I'd say any website letting users post non-textual material has to register (simple online form just to get at least one person's real name), implement AI filters, and keep anything caught by the filters for a year.
3) Get internet providers involved. If lots of material is downloaded/uploaded by somebody on the dark net, they can flag that, even if they can't see what the material is. I know there are legitimate uses for the dark web, but it's a drop in a sea of child porn, drug markets, botnets, etc.
I've always been against the death penalty, but if anything could make me reconsider, it would be torturing children for personal pleasure.
1
This is horrifying. The examples are beyond gruesome and nauseous. How could anyone get pleasure at inflicting such pain to children? Is there anyway we can help? Can we donate money to the underfunded agencies? Shame shame shame on the tech companies who are 100% complicit.
6
Child pornography is a crime.
But I don't trust you people to decide which "speech" is "hate speech" that requires intervention by "authorities."
1
My question to the Pro-life movement: How many children do you think could be saved from sexual torture if you spent as much time, energy and donations on its prevention as you spend on forcing women to remain pregnant? Tragically, I have little hope that even the astronomical increase in the rate of child abuse will convince you to reallocate your funds from preventing early-stage abortions to preventing child sexual torture. It would require that you reassess what mission you think God would want you to choose: spending multimillions of dollars and thousands of hours to save fetuses or to save children from being sexually tortured. Your answer is?
15
I would not be at all surprised if some members of Congress are slow walking enforcement and cutting budgets because they themselves and/or their rich and powerful friends are perpetrators and consumers of this horrid industry.
Would anyone really be surprised?
8
The networks that run these operations can be hacked no matter their level of encryption, and image recognition software can be deployed to sort through the haystack. That being said, this is the wrong day and time of year to be reporting this kind of news story.
Knew this was a huge problem but am shocked at how common place it seems to be!! Appreciate the people working on the front lines doing all the can with such limited resources. I'm compelled to look at my own backyard and see what I can do to help in anyway. This has to be the worst crime one could possibly image and it cannot continue to grow any further, the kids need our full attention.
2
I at least had not heard about the individuals cited in the article who have been locked up for life, or any others. Why not more publicity? Are the media not more actively reporting on this because it's so horrific? Convicting and jailing these sub-humans should be widely and vigorously publicized, calling them out for what they are, so that those who may be tempted to create this stuff come to realize they are at serious risk of ending up in jail for the rest of their lives. Force them back under their rocks. It's only part of what should be the response, and it won't cure them or their customers of their underlying pathologies, but it will surely help reduce the number of victims which ought to be the primary goal.
3
It is very peculiar and unfortunate that anyone would choose to run such disturbing stories during the start of the High Holy Holidays. It is also odd that an event, such as the Folsom Street Fair, should take place on Rosh Hoshana. I don't think anyone in their right mind would run such a story or hold such an event on Christmas Day, for example. And, if nations can crack one another's military codes, and hack into their systems, then certainly experts exist who can hack into the networks being described. If $60 million is all the money going into the program, then experts can be hired in third countries to do the work on a relatively small budget.
2
Does any one remember Toni Morrison's novel, God Help the Child? When it came out no one of my friends wanted to read it. But I thought Toni was telling the truth about the society I saw happening around me in LA. So, now it seems to me that she was right on target about our culture, and it will only get darker and grimmer before it gets better. And it will eventually get better! I believe this and part of my religious faith in the role America is destined to play, but not the same as MAGA.
Privacy and anonymity is a privilege. It could only be justified
A) when resisting or subverting corrupt or tyrannical authority
B) to allow for freedom of expression that doesn't negatively impact others
The interpretation of the above can't be entrusted to an individual, nor software. It probably should be decided by a community, neighbors.
Hopefully, in USA, a corrupt authority is a corrupt official, not the entire government apparatus.
Pulitzer Prize time for the NYT.
7
What does this stuff do to the law enforcement and computer techs forced to deal with these images? The monsters who feed on children are destroying lives of others as well.
8
When I first started as a young lawyer to handle child abuse cases, I was expecting that the cases would involve extreme corporal punishment or parents who acted in anger. What I found was that about 80 per cent of the cases were sexual abuse cases. Mostly the abuse was done by a mom's boyfriend or male relative, while the mom just didn't see (or want to see) what was happening. I would never describe these cases to anyone - they are worse than you can imagine, and more prevalent than you want to believe. They are everywhere, in every part of society. If you are a human being reading this article, you surely know both abusers and abused, even if you don't know it. I have no magical solutions to propose - but one thing I am against is homeschooling that isolates children and it also seems to me that most of the online school alternatives provide no safety net to allow children an opportunity to learn that the abuse is not normal or acceptable.
I did that work for many, many years, until it burned me out. There are images I carry in my brain forever. If we were all kinder neighbors, it might help prevent abuse or at least allow it to be discovered earlier.
33
I am an addiction psychiatrist early in her career. I did not imagine going into my psychiatry residency, and am astounded now, at the number of people who I have treated who had been sexually abused in their youth, and now meet criteria for PTSD and mood / anxiety / substance use disorders. I have met patients suffering into their 60s - 80s. After reading this article yesterday with my husband during our date night, I anew felt disgusted and immensely sad and asked him why we decided to have children. He reminded me of his reluctance prior to having our first. It is just Shameful that the tech companies that earn so much cannot contribute a small fraction of their earnings to prohibit this activity. Shameful.
3
Thank you for doing such hard work that I'm sure helped so many. I can't imagine what you've seen. I have three young girls and these stories horrify me. I feel sickened and powerless. I know that despite living in a progressive, upper-class suburb of Washington, D.C., bad things happen everywhere. We can't assume that our kids won't be affected. We must be vigilant in the questions we ask our kids and the things we tell them are NOT ok. And, trust your gut. You know your kids. Ask the hard questions and don't be afraid to make (childcare) changes when something doesn't feel right.
"Separately, the Department of Homeland Security this year diverted nearly $6 million from its cybercrimes units to immigration enforcement — depleting 40 percent of the units’ discretionary budget."
That alone should be an article of impeachment.
12
Teaching people, in the long term, the responsibility, empathy and etc of an adult being, perhaps, is the best way to eliminate this. AI, with all its limitations, might never keep the internet completely clean, and in some borderline cases, AI might touch upon freedom of speech. Preventing pedophiles from acting evil is hard, but preventing a young child from growing into a pedophile is much easier.
Sadly, this was entirely predictable. The printing press. Photography. Motion picture film. Video cassettes. DVDs. Computer floppy discs. Online file sharing. People with nefarious intent have always found a way to disseminate images of child sexual abuse.
2
And we call ourselves civilized, first world country !
Thanks NYT for investigating and writing the article while our politicians are busily figuring out what do.
4
As a start, any statute of limitations should not begin until data is decrypted. Most of this material if properly stored is vulnerable to attack (decryption) within the next decade-- at which point the cold sweat begins worrying about an 0600 knock on the door.
Encryption is at best a temporary shield, enough for today but tomorrow is another story. It is astonishing how naive these people are thinking they have a magical eternal encryption shield, when in reality data hoovering makes them into 400,000 walking perps waiting to have their lives further ruined by their own behavior.
2
I have never seen a better argument for the death penalty.
6
As a former federal prosecutor who prosecuted child exploitation cases, I suggest the Times take a look at the below-guidelines sentences imposed by federal judges for convictions for possession of child pornography. Judges, like most people, would rather not know how horrible the abuse is and think that simply possessing images is less harmful than distributing them on the internet. Although I do not have experience at the state level, I would guess that state judges impose similarly light sentences for a crime that continues to victimize victims.
8
I cannot conceive of a single reason why someone guilty of raping a child should be allowed to live. Such a heinous and vile act should be punished with death. There is truly nothing more evil on Earth. No one found guilty of such a crime can be rehabilitated. Execution is the only solution.
9
From a certain perspective, it would be worth shutting down the whole of the internet to save even one child from torture.
6
Make it the year of the the eradication of internet porn- replete with media watch dogs, whistle blowers from the public,world wide concerts to fuel a huge anti media porn campaign, as many scraps from government funds as legislators can be shamed into. Lastly, force the political and media movers and shakers to read this article followed by a mandatory quiz adjudicated by the writers of this invaluable news article. I would give anything to see Donald Trump, William Barr, and Mich McConnell have to submit to this trial by fire.
4
In a way, I feel comparatively lucky that when I was raped as a boy and forced to become a sexworker fir 18 months the Internet did not exist. It is difficult enough working out the feelings of guilt and shame and confusion without there being a record of it for sick minds to peruse. I wonder if a combination of group approval and an increasing sense of lack of control in one's personal life leads certain individuals to execute such acts of cruelty to feel a sense of power.
If state and federal governments are unwilling to do what it takes to protect our children so they can grow up to be healthy functional adults who contribute to out society, they should be voted out of office.
Steve S.
6
A number of steps could be taken, if the will to do so existed. Viruses could be inserted into new encryption apps and Tor updates that could wipe the hard drive or destroy the computers of users, or the Tor browser could be eliminated and with it easy access to the dark web. The use of VPNs outside nations like China that limit their citizens' web access could be banned. FB and ISPs could be made responsible for monitoring and removing content hosted on their servers, and they could be penalised for cases where they are the conduit for illegal images. This was the approach taken with the site mega-upload when it ran afoul of MPAA, ASCAP, and US entertainment content providers. Where there is a will, there is a way. Anything done by tech can be undone by tech.
5
The lack of enforcement exists to the extent that certain interests benefit from the lack of enforcement. If the practice of child sexual exploitation is pervasive, those who perpetrate child sexual exploitation are also pervasive. No mystery here.
4
We live in troubling times. One of the largest churches in the world has turned itself into an organized criminal enterprise, by abusing children. Anonymous downloaders of disgusting images get decades in prison, but the priests and the cardinals, not so much.
And then there is a much more disturbing problem. Most of the "child porn" that circulates today on the internet is not disgusting filth like the examples cited in this article. On the contrary, the predominant form is your children, "sexting" each other. Congress has decided to call that "child porn" too, and the penalties are breathtaking. Up to 35 years in prison. This new law already is being used. Maybe your kid is next.
So as usual in the United States, we take something that needs correction and turn it into a means of oppression. The people we used to protect, the kids, now can join the adult pedophiles in prison, convicted of the same crime. In fact, our local prosecutor was so concerned about this problem that he held information sessions in the local high school, warning kids of the risks to their well being posed by these laws. He does not want to prosecute children for this, but he is after all a prosecutor.
Some people want to use this awful material to once again ban all porn on the internet. Presently legal pornography is three quarters of internet traffic today. I'm all for prosecuting child abusers. At the same time, I don't want to enable religious fanatics.
6
This is heartbroken. I am the father of two lonely kids. I can not imagine the pain and suffering that the parents of children who got sexually abused. and I can not imagine the pain and suffering of the children themselves. How they gonna face the world afterward? how they gonna tell the story to their children? how they can have the confidence to raise the children their own?
This is a serious issue happening now in this country. As the most powerful and rich county in the world, We CAN and we SHOULD ACT to protect our children.
2
Porn is one of the most unregulated consumer product. If any food sold like this manner you will lose your family ina year or so.
1
"Separately, the Department of Homeland Security this year diverted nearly $6 million from its cybercrimes units to immigration enforcement — depleting 40 percent of the units’ discretionary budget until the final month of the fiscal year."
That was an interesting decision -- who made it?
7
Mass illegal immigration is a driver of crime. Law and order requires a society willing to enforce its laws.
1
From mass shootings in schools to child sexual abuse, America isn't protecting our most precious thing, our children. It's apparently more important to make the money such as the NRA hands out and coins going into the pockets of the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and other tech sites. Sad state of affairs in American society.
7
People not doing their jobs need to be fired!
"Some state lawmakers, judges and members of Congress have refused to discuss the problem in detail, or have avoided attending meetings and hearings when it was on the agenda, according to interviews with law enforcement officials and victims."
3
The stories told in the article are truly horrific, but I don't think I agree that outrage at encryption or tech companies is the best way to solve the problems. I do think that many cases of child abuse came from kinds in dysfunctional families, neighborhoods, abandoned kids who are then exploited. Maybe more oversight and funding needs to be directed there. I guess the tech companies need to do more, but I just can't reconcile being 100% efficient in finding every child abuse image with privacy. Maybe it is a price worth paying, I don't know...
This has to be one of the most painful things I've read in awhile. I didn't want to read it, and then I got to the section about how avoidance is one of the reasons (of many) the tragedy is being ignored and underfunded. Thank you NY Times for investigating. And I can see from the low number of comments here, that many, like I felt initially, might be scrolling past the content.
2
How can a video of a man raping a 6-year old go “viral”? If anything illustrates how numb and amoral humans have become, with the anonymity the Internet affords, it is that.
New Zealand has a law that “forbids dissemination or possession of material depicting extreme violence and terrorism.” It was used to prosecute people who shared the graphic POV video of the mosque shootings in Christchurch. But New Zealanders don't have the protections our 1st Amendment confers.
3
Doesn't the accompanying article say that pedophilia is biological? Then how it is a crime?
Some things have to be crimes. Murder has to be a crime. Perhaps one might raise an insanity defense, but the crime is still a crime.
1
@areader, huh? Criminal guilt has to do with conscious acts by people who were ca-ablemof knowing that they were doing wrong. Psychopathy is genetic, but psychopaths can be intelligent and aware, and very much capable of knowing right from wrong, and that their actions have consequences. So if a psychopath kills someone, and it cannot be proved that it was during a psychotic episode in which the perpetrator was of diminished capacity, that killer might be found guilty of murder. Alternatively, or she might be be found guilty of a lesser crime, or maybe even found innocent by virtue of mental illness. But a crime was still committed. Some of the child porn users and traders who have been prosecuted have tried to claim they were addicted — therefore not responsible for their choices. Baloney.
2
@Eileen Hays,
Aren't we told that if it's not a person's choice but a natural thing then we have to accept his way of life?
One can't help but be filled with heartbreak for these innocent souls and raging anger and disgust at the individuals who engage in violence against children. Like domestic violence, this sickness has no demographic bounds.
NYT, my gratitude for reporting on these horrifying crimes.
Tell us -- how can we help? What can we do?
3
Among the many disturbing points of this article is the fact that our Congress would rather help turn millionaires into billionaires instead of fighting the sexual abuse of children. The $60 million a year to be allocated to law enforcement is less than some CEOs get for being fired after failing to improve a corporations finances. It's a trivial amount. Yet, Congress, and the people that voted fro them, would rather lower taxes for individuals who have more money than anyone will ever need or spend.
66
Utterly non-sequitur appeal to jealousy and outrage.
4
"Tech companies are legally required to report images of child abuse only when they discover them; they are not required to look for them."
Congress should force tech companies to search for child abuse on their platforms.
2
This is a rather ridiculous thing to say. But frankly I'm surprised it only has 30 Recommend's as of now. Not to worry. I'm sure many more are on their way. This perfectly exemplifies progressive thought, and that's sure to make you a star here.
Please, let's not blame "Congress" for this abominable state of affairs. The responsibility lies squarely with the Republican Party of hypocrites, who, while espousing their law and order agenda and decent Christian values, do everything they can to undercut legitimate government work like stopping child pornography and ANY other criminal activity. Through simplistic messaging and the drum beat of lower taxes and smaller government, Republicans undermine our most important institutions. Republican hypocrisy knows no bounds as they support a corrupt, ignorant, and thoroughly repugnant president who could give "two hoots" about the welfare of anybody but himself.
2
If the Democratic run Congress of the Obama administration had taken measures to combat this situation, I might agree with you. However, as they did no more than the GOP, the blame must be applied equally.
1
It is time for governments around the world to fight this scourge, rapidly and massively, bring the criminals to justice without pity. This is a mortal crime. We need to protect the children.
2
Normally I read an article all the way through before I comment on it, but I can't read this one. I want to say that the people who perpetrate this are animals, but animals don't do behave this way. It is not a survival behavior. I wonder, has technology had a corrosive effect on our very souls? I fear that, rather than being a working part of creation, our species has become a cancer on the earth, and with the speed of technology, we are becoming vastly more malignant and virulent. Shame! Shame!
3
I wonder if there are statistics on how many of the offenders are male versus female?
3
Another reader posted this. It includes those statistics and others.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/594970e91b631b3571be12e2/t/5d516a24dd94dd0001bc6e5b/1565616783919/CSAM+Report-v4.pdf
3
97% vs 3% (men vs women)
5
No surprise: 97% male. Or, as the NYT describes in its most anodyne PC-speak: "most."
5
And yet our primary education system is being subsidized by the likes of Apple, Microsoft, etc. There's almost no way to keep tech out of children's hands if one wants to. Of course the pedophiles will still find ways to spread abuse even without the internet...but not nearly as effectively.
2
Disturbing article. But it's also disturbing that these things are lumped together by the authors: "The internet is well known as a haven for hate speech, terrorism-related content and criminal activity, all of which have raised alarms and spurred public debate and action." So-called "hate speech" is largely protected by the First Amendment, unless there is a direct, credible and imminent threat involved. Child porn is not protected by 1A.
4
"All Americans are outraged by this scourge, and so today I promise that if elected I will raise taxes so that we can adequately fund the fight against it."
Said no (winning) candidate for office ever
8
I read probably an eighth of the article then had to stop. It was simply too painful to continue. A sincere thank you to the people who work with this everyday to protect children. I hope that you are getting the emotional support that you need to do this deeply disturbing work.
To the companions that look the other way, shame on you. You are complicit if you do nothing. And because we have an unfunded congressional mandate, the rest of America is too.
4
The Internet is ... what? Well in fact the internet is not a "thing" or a place. The Internet is a medium - of information exchange. Like the cell system for phones, phones may be full of XXX images but the cell system that is used to communicate is not. The Internet is not a thing in itself, it is an open pathway with endless redundancy built in so that it is reliable and flexible.
When you realize this fact (as taught in any intro computer course) the hot air escapes from the argument that the Internet is full of anything. Writers might stop creating the illusion that it is, that then generates outrage about the Internet. People misusing a thing is as old as people. You can harm a person with the same ax you used to cut down a tree, you can abuse a drug given to you for your own health, or drive your car into a crowd. The Internet can be used to deliver all manner of data because that's it's design, and it's not responsible for people behaving badly nor are there ready solutions any more than there are for the misuse of other tools.
5
Thank you NYT for bringing this to the world's broader attention. The statistic that stood out to me was that Facebook "Messenger, which last year was responsible for nearly 12 million of the 18.4 million worldwide reports of child sexual abuse material."
Social media is an experimental business model and it's yet to be proven as being of any tangible benefit to society. Coca-Cola used to have cocaine in it too; now it doesn't. Facebook and the federal government knows it has a problem and yet permits the issue to persist to protect big money in Silicone Valley and Wall Street. How is Facebook not legally liable for allowing such sharing and working to make it even more difficult for law enforcement? This used to be called 'aiding and abating'. When a product is proven to be dangerous to consumers, the product is taken off the market. Why does this not apply to software like Tumblr and Facebook? No one needs either.
134
JeffB, well said. The tech companies that host and distribute (knowingly or not) these pictures and videos are complicit in these crimes.
If, heaven forbid, someone gave me images of the kinds of things described here, and I sold them to someone else (or gave them for "free" to someone else, in return for which exchange a corporation would give me advertising dollars), surely I would be legally involved as an abettor in this crime?
Is there anyone on this thread with legal knowledge who can explain how the social media companies whose technologies are the ONLY vehicles for distributing these images are not all closed down and their owners (I'm looking at you, Zuckerberg) thrown in jail? Please advise.
3
Coco-Cola had cocaine in it for about 3 years in the 1880s.
1
Those were the days. !
Between this and international terrorism, it's about time to require a license to use the internet, just like radio frequencies.
Individuals don't need a license to use radio frequencies. Do you have a cell phone? That uses radio frequencies. Do you have a garage opener, microwave and endless other items that use radio frequencies? Do you have a license for all of those? In fact, I bet you don't even know how much of the frequency spectrum you use in the course of a day! Do you use a WiFi connection?
It is difficult to find the animals who produce these. But when they are found, they should be locked up for life, no parole, for the first offense so that there is never a chance for a second offense. We don't need to "understand" these people or show them compassion. Just put them in a cage and let them rot.
2
I was wondering if you guys had the opportunity to speak to anyone at the tech companies who actually had the job viewing, collecting and compiling these images for the reports that went to law enforcement? I worked at Aol for 20 years, before being laid off, gathering evidence (images, etc.) and compiling it into reports that went first to the FBI and then to NCMEC. I started doing this about six months after I joined the company in 1995 and worked on this issue, in some capacity, until the day I was laid off in early 2015. During my time at Aol we were very aware of this problem and were proactive in trying to address it. However, as you note in your story, we were overwhelmed by the volume of images that we encountered. Eventually developers at the company created an automated process utilizing hash-file technology that could scan images that were uploaded by Aol members for Child Sexual Assault Images (back them we just called it ‘child porn’). The automated process did help us get a handle on the volume of images for quite a while. The evidence that I was able to compile and forward to law enforcement through NCMEC led to the arrests and convictions of numerous individuals who used the Aol service to trade and distribute these types of images. I find it extremely unfortunate, but not at all unexpected, that this problem is now overwhelming not only law enforcement but the tech companies as well. Thank you for bringing MUCH NEEDED attention to this issue.
23
I don't understand why so little attention is giving to the fact that it is almost entirely men who produce and consume this content, who commit these acts.
29
I cannot speak to which gender consumes it more than the other, but there are plenty of women involved in the production. They procure, they film, they participate. They even use their own children.
1
I agree. Why is this simple, glaring fact so ignored?
1
97% of the producers and consumers of these images are men (see statistical information posted above in the comments.) But by all means, minimize men's overwhelming culpability in this and other acts of sexual violence. Because surely protecting men's sensitive feelings is more important that protecting the children victimized by these crimes.
2
I was sold and used by my parents in child pornography and prostitution in the 1960's and 1970's, starting at a very young age. My father wasn't the drooling guy in the park in a raincoat, but a high-powered Wall Street executive. I have memories of law enforcement officers joining in the "fun." The problem isn't the internet, it's a society that has been very sick for a very long time.
152
Very sick indeed. Thank you for sharing. I send love and prayers for your healing and well being.
6
Abe,
As much as it may pain you, you do need to,read and comprehend the article. This is a crime that thrives in silence, and we have been mute for,too long. Whatever belief you subscribe to,every world religion honours and nutures its children. And there can be no more urgent and important cause for people of faith to take up. So don’t continue to bury your head. This offends us all, but that is no longer an excuse for turning away.
I could not read the article or report in any detail due to its hideous content. What I did read is beyond belief though it is here documented. The documentary evidence showing Nazi concentration camps doesn't pale in comparison . No, I am inclined to see the Evil documented in this article going beyond that cesspool. Could not read the article -- only in part. We may well be a species
irreparably now condemned to that Lake of Fire. I will not lose hope. Even if the content of Internet were contained, our species would still practice its endemic perversions. Let the Fire destroy us? We've deserve extinction? Final observation: That the NYTimes would save this in-depth article to print on what is called in some circles 'The Day of the Lord'. Could the Editorial assemblage
hold off on such an article for a weekday. It disgusts me that this paper would choose to print such a report on a Sunday. "Have you no decency?" went the remark addressed to Joe McCarthy.
This is the ugly truth of the sexual revolution. The ugly truth of our sexual promiscuity, and permissiveness, and perversion. As with all of our society's sins, it is the children who suffer. Add abortion to the discussion and we can feel certain that we deserve what we get as a society.
3
Nonsense. This stuff has been going on since the beginning of civilization. We are animals. Face it. No religion is going to stop it. Only we can.
7
Are you kidding? Do you have even a rudimentary knowledge of the history of how children have been treated in the past? Up until modern times children, in most of the world, were property. They could be traded, sold or killed at the whim of the family. There were taken after a side lost a war, they were sold into prostitution. The nobility used their females to cement political alliances (no you think many Kings married for love?) You just never heard about it. If you are interested in learning how children throughout the ages have been treated, that information is available either online or at your local library.
12
It's popular, if you say it is popular, only because it is forbidden. I'm on the internet quite a bit and I haven't seen any evidence that it is over running the internet. That stuff is only there for people who look for it.
3
Please put a trigger warning on this article. The description of what is done by these criminals is extremely disturbing.
4
Actually, they did. It is in the headline of the story on the front page.
@Ex New Yorker, how could you click on an article on this subject, and not expect that it would be horrifying? Seems obvious to me.
2
Good for the New York Times! Very good work in the public interest.
2
Well all of these tech geniuses have unleased a world of destruction in there quest of greed and power. These individuals participate in their own dark worlds that spill out into society. Instead of technology leading investigation to assist the police they are bringing up the rear telling the public they will do better.
What year are they ever going to do better? maybe when one of their children show up on the platform, because the problem right now is just getting bigger and bigger. We have laws that tell sex offenders that they can't live by schools however we have no laws or measurement systems to fine technology companies for the growing number of images on the internet.
If these companies wanted to really do something they could, with all those smart people who work for tech companies I dont understand why it is not the highest priority since safeguarding our democracy was not important to them.
1
I've been wondering since #metoo broke when we would start to hear about the abuse of children. No one talks about it, even the witnesses deny it. I hope you will followup with more work on how it impacts us we go through our lives, especially when we are the ones told we are bad, or wrong or that it just didn't happen. I was 4 when my pediatrician raped me. My best friend and her brother were abused in their neighborhood for years. We were not believed. I cannot read this article, just the title makes everything about this come back.
20
OMG your pediatrician? It's beyond belief. I'm so sorry. I just can't believe there is no augmentation in federal funding to try to crack down on this .
3
In 1890 until 1940 (when penicillin was discovered) there was an epidemic of gonorrhea in children. Victims were primarily girls ages 5 to 9 – many the children of well-off families. Doctors knew that gonorrhea was a sexually transmitted disease, but no one wanted to believe that fathers, those captains of industry, were raping their daughters. So, a national hygiene campaign began to teach the dangers of dirty toilet seats. Rape and incest comes out of the closet every so often and then is shuttled back in. People can’t believe men are capable of such crimes.
I am also a survivor. My first rape was at age 10. Therapy and loving people in my life have saved me. Still, at age 68, I question why men want to have sex with children. People speculate they were abused and so grow up to abuse. So was I and I never once wanted to molest a child. This article cites two incidents of women molesting children which gives the appearance that they are equal players in these crimes. I don’t agree and the evidence doesn’t support it. To all of you who just can’t bear reading such a sad story, think of living that story. Face this epidemic. And it is an epidemic. Ask your senators and congress folks about the money that is supposed to be allocated for fighting these crimes. Demand an explanation from Facebook and Microsoft and Tumblr and others who are complicit. And the men who commit these crimes who are reading this? What happened to you? Why? Why?
82
" This article cites two incidents of women molesting children which gives the appearance that they are equal players in these crimes"
Yes. That was really poor journalism.
7
Unfortunately these heinous pedophile consumers touch all facets of our society. A prominent Jackson Hole denizen -- hailing from a wealthy E. Coast family and Snake River Associates member who stands to make millions from developing his inherited ranch land at the base of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort -- is one of these people. Fortunately he was busted, but as things generally go in the United States, his affluence resulted in a slap on the wrist: https://www.jhnewsandguide.com/news/cops_courts/prominent-citizen-tells-what-led-him-to-child-porn/article_331a593f-e4aa-5c7f-bf80-3b5cadb47b4d.html
4
This is a good example of a case that should never have been prosecuted.
He was not accused of any sexual contact with children -- merely looking at child pornography.
He was depressed after a friend's suicide, and was looking for something to distract him.
The police spent time and resources prosecuting this case that could have been better spent on real crimes, such as actual child abuse and rape.
I heard a psychiatrist, Willard Geylin, being questioned by a law professor about when he would report to child protective services that a patient was at risk to a child. Geylin said that sexual fantasies about the child wouldn't be enough. But if there was any physical action, that was dangerous and he would report it.
Child pornography is more like fantasy. This man made no effort to approach a child sexually, and there was no evidence that he ever did or had impulses to do so.
The only benefit is to the prosecutor and investigator who can put another notch on their belt.
One cop claimed that there were 200,000 men in New Jersey who looked at child porn. What does he want to do -- put 200,000 men in prison? For their fantasies?
During the 1960s, there was a sexual avant-garde which argued that sex between adults and even young children was acceptable. Children who grew up after those experiences convinced me that this is wrong and dangerous.
But unless you want to fill the prisons with millions of people, we have to distinguish between fantasy and action.
3
"He was not accused of any sexual contact with children -- merely looking at child pornography."
Child pornography is illegal, therefore it is illegal to look at child pornography. It is using the product of a criminal activity. This guy belongs in jail.
"Child pornography is more like fantasy."
Pedophilia is a pathology. It is a dangerous mental abnormality, not a sexual "preference." The creation of child pornography involves child abuse of the most horrific kind. The user of child pornography is as liable as the creator of it and deserves punishment.
This is a crime, and the people who make and use it are criminals. Period. What is the matter with you?
16
Many people have been through dark periods in their lives but most do not choose to look at child porn to get through them. From the article, this wasn't about a few times in someone's Internet history where they were curious but 540 images on this guy Rezor's computer. I'm not sure why you felt the need to defend him. It is people like him who propagate child pornography online. Take away the customers and there's less incentive to produce such sick stuff. Every pedophile deserves to have their pic in the news like this guy as there's still power in public shaming.
5
Excellent reporting NYT. Thank you. I had my first child at 45, 25 years ago. I was amazed by the difference in cultural attitudes toward children from my childhood and that of my older siblings' children. I hate to connect perversion such as that which is in this research to a general cultural phenomena, but I really think general attitudes have more tended to condone these activities than ever before. Children, the act of having children, resources for educating children, the idea that children will represent us all in future, are all ideas and issues that have been increasingly looked at in a negative way. Pregnant women are disrespected; child resources are subject to the equivalent of NIMBY attitudes and proscriptions; under-age sex-ploitation has become more normalized; underage women and men are sexualized more and more in the media. I tend to look at it as an over-population consequence. Children are not as valued when we, as a species, have no need of them, or at least so many of them, for our survival. But, whatever the reason, children and the idea of raising them in a nurturing way, as a culture, has/have become disturbingly de-valued, in my opinion.
The proliferation of porn online was predicted in the early days of the Internet. It was seen as an area to exploit, not to control or monitor. The sickest parts of the porn world — exploited children, animal abuse, images of non consenting adults used violently — were glossed over as just the stuff of a small, fringe cohort. That was never true.
I remember having a discussion on this subject with a tech investor, back in the tech bubble of the late 1990s or early 2000s. He said, outright, that “the future of the Internet is porn.” He was the father of young girls, and he expressed some concern that kids had easy access to things they should not see, and that seeing them might affect how they viewed an valued their own bodies. But he did not consider the fact that children may be used in those images and videos. People often ignore that which is too confronting. If we don’t look at it straight on, maybe it will go away.
I read a news report on a man who was arrested for having thousands of pedophiliac images and videos on his computers. He said that he had became addicted to online porn, and found that over time he needed to keep finding more and more stimulating images. He said that was how he moved to the images of children. Whether that is the true story of his predilection, or just him making excuses, he did touch on an element of universal truth: We become inured to disturbing things we see every day. The “disgust” bar keeps moving, until it disappears.
3
So many people are clamouring against ICE because they're enforcing Title 8, USC (immigration law). But it needs to be stated that ICE has a vital role in busting the producers of child pornography as it develops the intel and also puts together the task forces and furnishes vitally needed millions from its budget to fight child sexual exploitation and its internet aftermath. HSI has a mandate to pursue abuses of child sexual exploitation whenever the images are being sent around on the Internet. This piece didn't adequately mention I CE's instrumentality in fighting cybercrime, but I have innumerable child porn cases that I administer in my Federal law enforcement job that have ICE nexus.
1
The money is drying up—and we can't protect our children be it from domestic terrorists or pedophiles. And, yet, Epstein who would have been one of those who benefited from a tax reform by Mr. Trump went his merry way until he knew the jig was up. Makes one want to spit nails—but, I guess, I will just have to write to my reps and ask what they are doing for our country not what the country is doing for them.
1
And then some wonder why we "helicopter parent". We know how many sick people are out there.
4
Most of the risk for children come from people who know them friends and family - not strangers.
1
I hate to say it, but the government needs to intervene and shut down these websites. These creeps don't worry in the least about being punished! They need to be stopped!
2
Two thoughts:
1. Is there MORE abuse going on, or just a greater distribution of instances? The article is not at all clear on this.
2. Either way, it's all symptomatic of a deep rot in modern civilization.
In the US, we now have mass shootings using long guns that have been commonplace for a hundred years (with statistically insignificant crime associated with them).
Porn sites such as youtube and pornhub now feature incest porn (whitewashed as step-siblings or stepchildren), a new phenomenon.
News organizations, consumed with the 24-hour news cycle, traffic in salaciousness and inanities.
TV shows, such as Keeping up with the Kardashians and Jersey Shore, featuring personalities that commit acts such as urinating in public, are incredibly popular, garnering their stars billions in revenue.
Populists and criminals are being elected and re-elected, worldwide. Trump, Johnson, Putin, Abe, Netanyahu, and dozens more.
Somehow, it all seems to go together.
3
We have people who believe that they can do anything to anyone and no one can stop them. Technology has enabled disturbed people to hide behind their computer screens and no one knows what they are doing.
If we can monitor what people do on a regular basis, I dont understand why the dark web is not being monitored. The engineers at these tech companies, know ow to monitor if they really wanted to. This is a serious case of no will.
Epstein had a great many enablers as do most of these individuals, this activity doesnt happen in a vacuum
Thank you very much New York Times!
Child advocates remain the first line of defence in combatting this scourge of evil. Unfortunately, sexual predators figured that out a long time ago. In my experience, advocates for children face seriously destructive enmity which, facilitated by social media, has escalated even over the past few decades.
In 1996, I requested prosecution of childhood sexual crimes committed against my person after witnessing my assailant entice a nine year old child to touch his penis. My sister (GOD rest her soul) died in her early thirties after her attempts to prosecute our assailant were met with such malignant hostility it plunged her into intractable depression.
Shortly after requesting prosecution, my governing law society received a complaint from my assailant's business contact and pledged "to prosecute me to the fullest extent of the law." I was subsequently forced to endure an illegal fitness hearing during which the law society's 'prosecutor' urged a psychiatrist to find me psychotic and unfit to practise law "for being on a mission to help children." I was then illegally suspended for unfitness -also because I had "requested prosecution of sexual assault."
When goaded into disclosing the most important of the human species, Jesus Christ extracted a child from the crowd declaring the child to be the 'most important amongst us. (Holy Bible, St. Luke, Chapter 9, Verses 46-48')
Suffer the children yet.
1
P.S. Society can normalize child abuse all they like. You'll reap what you sow in the end, and it won't be a ticket through the 'pearly gates.'
i don't think its being normalized and very doubtful pearly gates are any kind of motivator or deterrent.
Well done reporting and research--Kudos--hopefully this kind of visibility will provoke improvements on all levels. Thanks for directly tackling a difficult and tragic problem.
1
I agree that it would be useful to dig into reasons that Congress did not fund the bill referenced here (and others aimed at sexual violence). Which congressmen blocked that that funding? Their constituents might find that helpful information at the polls. As another follow-up to this report, it would be useful to delved into how much money the various social media cited here -- especially Facebook, Tumblr, and Snapchat which seem to be the worst offenders -- have made directly and indirectly from the exploitation of children. I would argue that people like Zuckerberg should be treated as accessories to these crimes.
5
What went wrong? One out of four females is sexually assaulted/abused before the age of 18. For males the number is one out of six.
Just what do you think happens to these children? What stops these perpetrators? Why wouldn't images multiply? Articles like this infuriate me. I was photographed as child by a neighbourhood pedophile. Nothing happened to him for decades. How many others did he abuse? I shudder to think.
Let's relate what we know about child abuse and trauma to the actual population, and look closely at our families and communities and not turn away when it is too 'uncomfortable'. Let's look at the known links of abuse and trauma to later drug and other self abuses and homelessness, and continued re-victimization. Let's look at how social media acts unfettered in so many ways. Let's put more police and trained investigation resources on stopping the cycles of violence and orchestrators of sexual abuse rings of all kinds. Let's open our eyes. Go find your local versions of Jeffery Epstein. Look at trauma and dysfunction in your school. In your community. In your family. And then: don't look away. DO SOMETHING.
15
Internet regulation and control has always tested the limits technically and the correlated decades-long development trajectory between online pornography and technical infrastructure priorities and policies is undeniable -- especially the overriding principles of decentralization and anonymity.
These core principles have for decades caused a broad, cascading set of globalized impacts -- in plain view and with a window of opportunity for effective intervention.
It represents a broader technology governance failure - a silenced discourse due possibly to a fracturing of cognitive integration processes and perceptions engendered by the infrastructure and interface design.
From an ´internet-engineering´ perspective, child abuse content is one of many classes of toxic digital content that - with various forms of encryption - transits across, and resides in various storage forms at the network edge - like medical records.
The underlying pathologies have always existed, and the extent to which internet design disinhibits or amplifies behaviors is a crucially important research topic.
The impending rapid expansion of networks into emerging markets with underdeveloped regulatory capabilities requires urgent attention, specifically in the form of global technology infrastructure governance treaties and compacts.
A pragmatic rights-based framework will have to align financial incentives of infrastructure services providers with respect to regulatory and enforcement standards.
If the tech platforms were criminally charged as co-conspirators, they might get more serious about removing abusive images from their platforms and cooperating with the authorities. The abusers could not commit these crimes--or amplify their crimes, driving this disgusting "market"--without the internet platforms that make it possible and bring these monsters together in communication with each other, egging each other on. The internet has made the world a worse, far more dangerous place. The negatives outweigh the benefits.
2
Reading these astounding statistics makes me realize how amazingly fortunate my now grown children are to have NOT been abused. The "red dot" illustrations really drove it home for me.
Internet is a great tool for diagnosing and detecting the critical illnesses of our society. Child abuse and all other similar despicable sicknesses are likely to have been just as widespread in the past as they appear to be today (maybe a bit more now due to the ease of access). Before the internet and the aggregate online statistics, we could not acquire enough data from the physical offline world to get an estimate of the extent to which the sickness had spread. Now that we have the data, we can make an effort to effectively address the problem.
So, child sexual abuse is a big crisis, but it has been here for a long time, living amongst us, under the shadows and in the dark tunnels. It's just we can shine light now and see that dark world.
2
Parents: Get off your phones. Pay attention to your kids instead. Engage with them face to face. Know their friends and their friends’ families.
Please. You can have your electronics later in life, all to yourselves. But you may not be able to retrieve your children’s innocence.
8
This is so important. And same with the kids: don't let them have smartphones or their own laptops without supervision until high school.
1
"What" went wrong? Many, many people. Period.
2
I am stunned and had no idea. But I don't understand. How many of these sick monsters can there actually be? Are their numbers actually growing? Or are they individually committing greater numbers of these unspeakable acts?
7
I'd like to see this investigative reporting go a little further. If Congress passes a law and then doesn't fund it to make it effective, how did that happen? What were the steps along the way? Who made those decisions? Why did they make those decisions? What were the dynamics? How can we change those dynamics?
2
For several years now the world is producing the same amount of photos as during all the years before. This is the literal definition of the exponential growth.
So it's not at all surprising that the abuse images mirror that growth.
And the focus on images is simply misplaced. Instead the authorities should go after the image producers - set up international groups, work with foreign governments and fix the REAL problem.
3
This is the kind of article that makes me think we should do nothing about climate change – we are a despicable species that deserves our fate. Such is the curse of moral consciousness.
13
The tech companies have to own the problem of fast and wide dissemination of this filth. They need to use AI technology as a gatekeeper for all uploaded media. Users should be able to contact the companies in case of errors but let denial of all suspicious material be the default behaviour.
1
I didn't read the whole article. Too depressing and too hard to enter into the minds of people who abuse children. However, I do understand the attraction of young adults, and realize that I am just lucky not to feel the desire or urges as described.
The Tshirted tech boys of the internet have some explaining to do here, and not just about allowing uncontrolled spreading of child porn.I also think of the brave people whose job it is to try to understand that dark world and investigate. It must be the hardest thing to do.
2
It is overwhelmingly painful to read this article. It’s painful to know that so many children in our country are suffering in this way. It is also very painful to recognize that there are inadequate efforts and resources focused on this tragedy. My overall feeling right now, living in the United States, is that we are living in the Wild West, a time when there seem to be laws but no adequate way of enforcing the. I see this not only in the realm of child abuse described here, but in other areas as well—some more mundane, like the absence of police presence on a major bridge (520) into Seattle where entitled drivers, many in expensive cars speed beyond the pale and occupy car pool lanes illegally. There is virtually no oversight and a heart stopping feeling every day that I commute. My heart goes out to all victims. We need regulation in the realm of technology and there are some glimmers of hope that it is coming. One wonders, given a president that regularly flouts the law and/or comes close, if this has emboldened abusers, and possibly the drivers on 520 in Seattle as well. Perhaps violating the law and also not deeply caring about human life has become more of a norm. Are we a culture creating more and more sociopathy?
1
Thank you for the article. I am numb, but not defeated. The crimes against humanity described in this article impact all of us on many levels. The victims need our help, law enforcement needs trauma-informed care, and society needs to understand the maelstrom lurking under our feet, on our cell phones, computers, and God knows where else. The article does so much to illuminate this mega-crisis, and one thing is clear; we are living in the perfect environment for this torturous reality to bloom. When pieces such as these are published, truly no one can turn their head, and claim ignorance. This is a call to arms, as we MUST do all we can to change the environment that has enabled this un-human tragedy.
4
Isn't failure to cooperate with a police investigation a crime? Why couldn't law enforcement get a judge's order for Tumblr to release records? Shouldn't Tumblr be criminally liable?
8
Part of the problem in families is the dissonance of facing either a monster in the midst or a victim in the midst. It's too big for a parent to wrap their head around. I have a cousin by twice-marriage: step uncle's step-son (zero blood connection to me or anyone else in the family--thank god) who went to prison for trading these pics in the early Aughts when this was, apparently, a nascent problem. To this day his mother defends him and casts blame on one of the cretan's friends. It has utterly ripped our family apart where no one really speaks to anyone anymore after generations of being an extremely tight-knit clan. It's an absolute shame and catching perpetrators is only a piece of the much larger, all-encompassing fallout of the impact these people have on the children and the rest of their families and broader communities. This is a scourge worse than any of the others combined. Primarily because of the level of denial that accompanies it and the heinous outcomes that denial fosters.
3
If you go on Twitter, you will see a fairly good representation of what Tech has become. 99% of what's on there are useless and petty ramblings, including those by famous people and even journalists. Tech has been having so much fun and making so much money building the fastest rocket that they forgot about taking care of the crew inside, who are depleted and becoming weaker by the day. We need a dramatic intervention.
4
Terrifying and sickening. The worst part is that I know these creators and consumers of child pornography live right amongst me and my loved ones. I have grown kids now, but one day we will have grandchildren, and I’m so scared for what kind of world they are inheriting. I can only pray that my kids will have the skills to protect them.
4
This is horrifying.
The problem is made worse by paternalistic zealots who "over-diagnose" the problem. For example, many of the zealots are quick to label consensual sex work by adults as "human trafficking"; others have expanded the definition of "abducted children" to include kids whose parents are divorced with joint custody and one parent doesn't transfer the child to the other parent in a manner deemed by that parent; and many "missing children" are actually teenage runaways who voluntarily left their (often abusive) parents.
I think this over-diagnoses of the problem leads to more harm because it drowns out and diminishes the real cases of abductions, trafficking and abuse.
5
This article is flawed by a lack of objectivity. There are other, thoughtful viewpoints that it ignores.
To your point, Amnesty International, like many other organizations, took the position:
"We have chosen to advocate for the decriminalization of all aspects of consensual adult sex - sex work that does not involve coercion, exploitation or abuse. This is based on evidence and the real-life experience of sex workers themselves that criminalization makes them less safe."
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/08/sex-workers-rights-are-human-rights/
Other countries have unions for sex workers, which support this statement.
They distinguish between trafficking and voluntary sex work.
Thank you for your expose. It is heart wrenching to realize the extent of this sickness. I hope you will follow up with more articles on the subject!
Parents need to be vigilant and protect their children at all costs, and to do so, we need to have a better understanding. I myself have a thousand questions. Why are there pedophiles? Were pedophiles abused themselves as children? What is the percentage of women engaged in pedophilia? Is there a correlation with domestic abuse, with bullying? Is there a socio economical factor? What is the breakdown in percentages of abuse by strangers, by parents, by close relatives, by priests, by location.... Please educate us on the topic!
1
Humans as a fallen species? We evolved to be, at least some of us, a species that is capable not only surviving, but of the strong beating down the less strong. What some of us, many of us, do is cruel and selfish almost beyond comprehension, not only in sexual matters, but in racial matters, domestic, political matters, or simply trying to be more rich and powerful than the next guy. The fact that we have produced the pyramids, stunning Gothic Cathedrals, a Monet, a Darwin, boogles the mind. What is our purpose in being here in the first place. I believe it is to grow, yes, but grow and learn to become through evolutionary thinking and education, better creatures who are more fully consumed with love, empathy, knowledge, who can keep our baser instincts under control, creatures who understand we can all reach for the stars...some day.
We do have the means to make evil tremble through many avenues.
1
I have to believe in education, being necessary to save us from our own selves, where nothing else will help.
These thing are manifesting themselves because it is time. These practises have been going on for a long long time,stemming from the false worship rituals told to us, by our Father, in His word. Some of these rituals have been going on since the garden, and are practices still to this day. Yes ,it would not take an investigative reporter to make the connection between child sex abuse and a form of false worship being practiced world wide today. That is why we are instructed to, Come out of her my children!
In the world of sexual exploitation, I think about how low our moral standards have descended when speaking about the current president of the United States. Clinton was impeached based on a sexual harassment lawsuit brought against him and now, few people give a second thought to Trump's sexual exploits. How ironic that so many of his ardent supporters are embedded in the religious right.
6
A common theme in the comments department is "Why can't we round up all these people and drag them to jail?" It's because these people are not men with raincoats lurking in alleys - they are pilots, doctors, clergy, police officers, plumbers, lawyers, tech people, actors, checkout clerks and senators. They are your neighbors. They are your bosses and your employees.
12
And neurosurgeons, and nurses. Look up the case of James Kohut, MD, and his accomplices.
3
So? We can still round them up and punish them. The more salient point is finding them, gathering the evidence, getting them prosecuted, and subjecting them to the appropriate justice. I'm an MD and I would have no problem if another doctor was found with this stuff and sent to the slammer.
1
...and that “Ohio man” (Jason Gmoser), mentioned in the article, is the son of an elected county prosecutor.
Is it possible - likely, even - that this sudden explosion of a culture disturbing to the great majority of people is being fueled by parties intent on more social destabilization? The forces that are working to tilt the political balance and create division over social issues would have a nearly free hand in the dark underworld of child porn distribution.
This is in no way to imply that the problem is not real - it is, and has been for decades - but there must be a reason for the exponential expansion long after digital cameras and the internet made it technically simple. A directed effort to foster latent or suppressed pedophilia and harbor its spread, with the intention of creating exactly the nationwide reaction now seen, would not seem to be outside possibility.
1
I still don't understand how information that is transferred via cables that every single Internet user must use can't be run through central filters.
If all virtual information moves from individual homes onto a central highway of Internet transmission, why aren't social media companies able to erect the equivalent of cyber roadblocks that filter this abuse?
It's not like Internet traffic can hike through canyons on dirt roads like migrants evading border patrol checkpoints. Information has to travel on main trunk lines. Right? What don't I get about why it is so hard to filter information that can be processed at light speed by computers? I keep hearing about how the singularity is near and that the quality of computer facial recognition is very high. So why can't computers recognize that a video shows screaming children who are being raped? This should all be automated and anyone who attempts to disseminate such stuff should immediately run into virtual roadblocks.
Social media providers should have realized from the beginning that any technology that enables social behavior will also enable anti-social behavior--and they should have constructed law-and-order within their platforms.
42
Detection will probably become easier and more widespread in the future. However, there are and will be impediments to universal detection of media depicting child exploitation and sometimes unwanted side effects to its use.
One issue is who are considered children. It is legal for those 18-years-old and older to consent to participate in pornography. However, will AI be able to differentiate between 18-year-olds and 17-years-olds? Most human beings would probably have trouble in many instances in telling the difference between an older, but underage, teenager and an 18-year-old or 19-year-old.
Another issue is that the "wrong suspects" may be ensnared. For example, if a teenage girl takes a picture or video of herself and this media is detected, then she may suffer the consequences of her actions.
In addition, there is the matter of encryption. Just like when you perform online banking, access your email, and even visit the New York Times Web site, the data between your device and the server is encrypted so that if anyone were to intercept this information, they would not be able to make sense of it. As mentioned in this article, those engaging in child pornography can use this technology as easily as anyone else.
1
"why aren't social media companies able to erect the equivalent of cyber roadblocks that filter this abuse?"
Because:
1) It's infeasible due to the sheer scale.
2) It's pointless, since many images are not disseminated through normal social websites.
Heather: Most of that data is encrypted--scrambled into an unrecognizable form--precisely because of the points you make. Encryption also keeps our online purchases, banking transactions, etc., secure and private so it is a vital component of the internet.
2
This report is so disturbing I could not finish reading it. I know I can't bury my head in the sand or look away and pretend this monster of a societal nightmare will vanish one day soon. I wish more could be done to help with this problem but based on the initial part of this report we have a long way to go.
There is so much pain and sadness in me when I begin to imagine the horror of the abuse these innocent children have suffered. I'm a father of two grown boys and I can only imagine what the parents of these abuse children are or have gone through to help them heal from this horrible trauma.
May god grant them peace one day.
78
This is a war on our children and should be treated as such. Funding should be available from the massive US military budget.
155
I wish I could be less cynical about this, but when you look at how little money is spent on education and even less on subsidized day care and maternity leave, you see a country that values children far, far less than it values money and moneymakers.
A prominent Ohio weatherman on a statewide station was recently arrested for having thousands of images of child sexual abuse on his computer, going back for decades. This guy was in our homes, electronically, for 40 years. Why did it take so long for him to be found? If, at workplaces, an everyday IT worker can know what an everyday employee is accessing on a computer, why can't the superpowered tech companies ferret out these people sharing images of abuse?
2
Thank you for the article. As a victim of child sexual exploitation, it means the world to me that there are journalists exposing what is happening and calling people to account.
6
I'm afraid to read this. The comments are scary enough.
2
What a horrendous situation. The failure of the Federal government to devote serious funding, regulation and law enforcement is appalling. We spend twice as much to buy a single f35 fighter plane. Our priorities are as sick as the depraved behavior of pedophiles.
4
It is not "Our" priorities. It is the priorities of those whom have the authority and responsibility to deal with this that are messed up.
Why do we have a enough money to throw children into cages at the border, but, we don't have enough money to protect children from sex abuse.
Can we divert the billions spent on ICE, border patrol and private prisons and throw the sexual abusers into cages?
8
There have been thousands of reports of sexual abuse of children who are detained inside of the border camps.
1
I just started reading "Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market" by Eric Schlosser. It exploded about 35 years ago and is linked to the deregulation of the economy by none other than Ronald Ray-gun a truly exceptional Republican president. It is amazing to me how much stuff is linked to that man. There is a strong correlation to Black Market strength to corruption in government.
Chapter 3: An Empire of the Obscene details the history of pornography in U.S. culture, starting with the eventual business magnate Reuben Sturman. Schlosser closes by arguing that such a widespread black market can only undermine the law and is indicative of the discrepancy between accepted mainstream U.S. culture and its true nature. Americans abhor marijuana and sex but consume it in vast quantities. HYPOCRITE NATION!
2
In the article, one law enforcement official says “You got nine million people in the state of New Jersey. Based upon statistics, we can probably arrest 400,000 people.” Think about that - that's close to 10% of men (and no doubt some women). That's bigger than an internet problem. That's a society problem and it's probably a pretty old one. The strong preying on the weakest of the weak. Horrifying.
7
One of my biggest takeaways from this article is the fact that the US bureaucracy's funding priorities are warped and distorted beyond recognition.
"The Department of Homeland Security this year diverted nearly $6 million from its cybercrimes units to immigration enforcement — depleting 40 percent of the units’ discretionary budget until the final month of the fiscal year."
Apparently, rather than funding its own law enforcement's efforts in combating predators online, this administration's top priority is putting children in cages.
And this travesty is compounded by the US's neglected infrastructure, or the obscenely bloated military budget which continues to rise while crucial domestic funding continues to fall.
When people complain about big government, they should be complaining about hideously politicized government that cares more about fulfilling its partisan, vacuous talking points about "stronger borders" or "supporting the troops" than about the actual suffering that millions of Americans are experiencing daily.
3
Your biggest takeaway isn't how many men are out there committing these crimes?
When I first started reading this article, I was hoping that only a small minority of Americans participated, but that is not true. It is wide-spread, grotesque behavior that must be stamped out by the tech companies and our government. I would support criminal liability for aiding and abetting these nefarious people by making their sites usable. I would also support a special tax on the Internet or any of these services (Facebook, Instagram, etc) to fund efforts to shut down these monsters. The sooner the better.
11
If it means destroying the internet to save us from it, I’ll gladly go back to paying my bills by mail.
51
With or without the Internet, criminals are going to commit crimes. If child pornographers could not share their wares over the Internet, they would do so by mail, FedEx, UPS, etc.
This is the most disturbing report I have ever read.
If we cannot protect our children what is to become of our future as a nation... or as as civilization... or as a species?
3
This is the most disturbing report I have ever read. If we cannot protect our children then what is the fate of our nation... our civilization ... even our species??
I've seen a number of allusions in the comments to men who would perpetrate these acts. Let's not be chauvinistic, I was adopted and sexually abused by my adoptive mother. Pedophiles aren't gender specific.
6
Statistics are statistics. A slim minority of offenders are women.
As disturbing it was to read this article, it was a real wake up call to be vigilant when I take my child to public places. I let my child roam the park and run with her friends, but there are several entrances/exits in the big park and easy targets for pedophiles. This article was a reminder that I can't take my eyes off her even for a minute.
I should know better. I dated someone in college who was lured into a backroom with a bucket of tokens and he was raped. He was six years old. All it takes is a "friendly" person to offer candy or ask for help to find a puppy with my five year old.
I also went to the Megan's Law website just now and saw there are a few sex offenders who lives blocks away from the park. I want to believe the world is a good place, but it is not always. It's okay, parents--let's all be super vigilant the best we can.
5
While strangers sometimes harm children, the most likely offenders are someone the children know. Children are far more likely to be abused by a family member, friend of the family, coach, etc. than a stranger.
2
May I point out that most child abusers don't carry candies with them and hide behind the bushes. Many look like bankers, hedgefunders and lawyers. Many of them are priests, uncles, doctors, Royal princes even.
In general, child abuse, in all its shapes and forms, happens behind almost every front door.
1
Children are at most risk most within their own circle of family and friends. Stranger danger is an aberration with respect to this.
1
Thank you so very much NYT for shining a light on what is perhaps the most ugly aspect of the human condition, the wanton exploitation of defenceless children. This is exactly why I still subscribe to this publication. Keep up the good work!
1
Why are the statistics about the genders of the pedophiles and victims not mentioned? My guess is 95% of these crimes are committed by men. Yes, the horrors of the ages of the victims are mentioned, but how many male children are being abused? Female? My guess is also that female victims outnumber males ones. In addition, the lack of female lawmakers suggests why there is such a lack of priority around the security and care of our nation's children.
6
According to another New York Times article on this topic, entitled "Preying on Children: The Emerging Psychology of Pedophiles," ... rough estimates put the rate of pedophilic attraction at 1 to 4 percent in both men and women. Studies suggest that a small subset of male and female pedophiles have an interest in toddlers, or even infants."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/29/us/pedophiles-online-sex-abuse.html
So why didn't they simply get a search warrant? How naive to simply think these tech companies would turn over user info whose privacy they may feel they have a legal duty to protect absent legal process like a warrant. I mean, you usually don't tell a landlord you suspect a tenant to be a drug dealer because he might tip the guy off, even if he does ultimately evict him. The element of surprise is critical in situations like this so that suspect do not have an opportunity to destroy evidence. How naive.
2
The tech companies are no match?
They didn’t exist until the late 90s. We can live without them.
Shut them down until they fix the problem. That will get it addressed quickly. They raked in money. They have the resources.
The problems are gross optimism and lack of regulation. Technology can’t be built on the assumption it will only be used for good. And when technology companies put something out there that causes harm they must be held accountable. It’s not ok to throw your hands up and say “I’m just a platform!”
The NYT is a platform too. And it has an editorial board, journalistic ethics, fact checkers, copy editors, trained journalists and more to ensure the content on the platform is sound. It’s past time for technology companies invest in similar quality and safety controls, and be held accountable for harm when their systems fail.
4
Before the existence of the Internet, child pornography was spread via the mail and shipping companies. Should the United States Postal Service, FedEx, and UPS be shut down just because criminals sometimes use these legitimate services for illegitimate purposes?
1
When those were the only ways to spread child sexual abuse material the problem was a tiny, tiny fraction of what it is now. There were many fewer images being produced, it was much harder to share it. And, importantly, it was harder for a "community" of like-minded perpetrators to find each other and convince each other there is nothing wrong with it, and to convince each other to produce more images to share with each other. Read more here: https://tinyurl.com/y5obzpa8
1
not necessarily, but USPS ask me every time i mail an envelope or package if it contains perfume or explosives or other hazardous material. They do attempt to screen.
I am so sickened by the thought of child sexual abuse I can barely read the article. Congress needs to force the tech companies to eradicate this. And Law enforcement, Justice department etc need to start prosecuting these crimes to the fullest extent of the law, and/or make more punishing laws. Forget about the poor souls thrown in prison for having a joint on them. They aren't hurting anyone. People will scream but I really thing there are people out there who need some kind of chemical castration. It's well known that those who abuse abuse again, and the saddest part, is many who abuse become abusers, which makes the whole thing exponentially worse. The sickness of these people, the ones who produce and the ones who consume, is staggering to me.
3
These child torturers don't live in a vacuum. They are our brothers, our spouses, uncles, neighbors, friends, community leaders. As moral, decent members of the human race, we must be diligent in detecting unusual behavior -- both in our children and in those who come in contact with them -- and blowing the proverbial whistle on those who commit these despicable crimes against humanity.
4
So many young lives are being destroyed. I am not particularly computer savvy, have never visited the dark web, and wouldn't know how to get there. However, I cannot believe that the technical expertise does not exist to locate, trace and arrest the sources of these images. What is lacking? Political will? Misplaced concerns about freedom of expression?
9
Quote: "The Justice Department, given a major role by Congress, neglected even to write mandatory monitoring reports, nor did it appoint a senior executive-level official to lead a crackdown. " Because children don't matter. The sooner we look in the mirror and judge our society, the sooner we can address the problem.
This is very obviously a psychological and cultural problem. Although many will agree that we need stiffer laws and controls (me as well) this is not a "cure" or preventive activity- it is a control. In America we have normalized many sexual activities and even though they have existed for ever, normalization' as Durkheim pointed out, always results in extremes. Extremes by definition exist in a culture as polar opposites of norms. When norms move the extremes move as well. Its not necessarily that the extremes are new inventions of immorality- there is an increase in volume. We also have fewer adult men (adult here does not mean "grown") due to a lack of a method to bring boys from childhood and adolescence to manhood. Compulsory education is good and beneficial but it doesn't take a boy through the stages and events that result in what some call the masculine sequence. The internet is definitely of no help in this situation.
3
The majority of this is produced overseas. It is not simply an American problem. Only international efforts can combat this global problem.
1
I actually developed a headache and mild nausea reading this. Plus the thought that 400,000 fellow NJ citizens, which is more than I ever could have imagined, could be doing this shocks me.
3
When formats and media get rid of their paid editors, stop paying people to police and run their operations. Cheapness begets carelessness is usually the result.Also-this is a problem which may appear to be more visible to investigators only because the online format is so easily accessed. Once, photographs and slides or CDs or however the material was spread around were far more difficult to find.
Such stuff is always there-like owls it sleeps during the day and often is invisible-and it was just more carefully and closely held. Now we allow gambling on the internet along with fake online colleges and universities-we have allowed the system to control itself and so anything goes.
I'm have never had a problem with pornography but I know some people who have.
I think the diversity of theories in this area needs to be more fully informed by what we know about brain science: viz - the way that a mind is habitually used actually affects the way connections are made in the mind. The physiology of a mind is very much affected by how it is habitually used. So if you have an addiction which is not based on substance abuse, it will require you to practice changes in the habitual use of your mind over some significant period before you can find relative peace from your problem.
Pornography encourages the mind to objectify the subject of the fantasy. Habitually doing this has got to affect the mind in ways that hinder us from having the empathy we sorely need to deal with others in a way that best supports society. The fact that in some cases criminal behaviour does not result is hardly a proof that harm is not done in all cases.
You could characterize much of the current crisis in society as a huge deficit in empathy toward each other. So loss of empathy is not a small matter.
3
Where we put our time, effort, funds and whose rights we choose to protect with our First Amendment/legal system all are telling about out priorities as a society. Sorry kids.
2
Reading this has taken me to a very dark place, which I fully acknowledge is totally unreasonable. Whatever penalty was given to those who perpetrated these foul deeds strikes me as completely inadequate. As I grapple with the horror of what they did, I'd like to see a suspension of the Eighth Amendment (against cruel and unusual punishment) for these people. I'd also grant blanket immunity for any crimes committed against them either by victims, parents of victims, or any member of society who just doesn't want to share space on the planet with them.
As I said, my response is emotional and unreasonable. It is my response none the less.
1
As an aside, how great it is that our tax dollars go to feeding, providing healthcare, entertainment, and work for the individuals who commit these unspeakable crimes, yet the streets are flooded with individuals who never did anything wrong and are in dire need. Further, these individuals are housed in separate prisons because they'd never survive in gen pop.
2
This is easily one of the most horrifying news stories I've ever read: in effect this is the 21st-century iteration of crimes against humanity. It's also one for which the federal government has allotted a mere $60 million per year to combat -- a figure bordering on farce, given the scope of the problem.
It should also serve as a wake-up call to both the politicians and candidates for public office who think merely "breaking up" tech companies under antitrust pretexts will "prevent consumer harm." Whether it would is debatable. What's *not* is that it would have essentially zero effect on the likes of Facebook Messenger being employed for purposes of disseminating mass transmissions of some of the most grotesque imagery in existence -- nearly all of which involves harms children too young to *be* "consumers."
Instead of spending potentially billions of taxpayer dollars trying to target the likes of Amazon, how about instead using the funds to combat a vastly more horrific problem?
3
From the article on npr.org: "Section 230: A Key Legal Shield For Facebook, Google Is About To Change"
-- "Section 230 lives inside the Communications Decency Act of 1996, and it gives websites broad legal immunity: With some exceptions, online platforms can't be sued for something posted by a user — and that remains true even if they act a little like publishers, by moderating posts or setting specific standards." --
I have a question. The tech companies that host and distribute (knowingly or not) these pictures and videos are complicit in these crimes, yes? For example, if, heaven forbid, someone gave me images of the kinds of things described here, and I sold them to someone else (or gave them for "free" to someone else, in return for which exchange a corporation would give me advertising dollars), surely I would be legally involved as an abettor in this crime?
Is there anyone on this thread, then, with legal knowledge who can explain how the social media companies whose technologies are the ONLY vehicles for distributing these images are not all closed down and their owners (I'm looking at you, Zuckerberg) jailed for distributing child pornography? Please advise.
12
I am not a lawyer, but I suggest that when it comes to technology, that some people possess irrational ideas because they do not fully understand it. When explaining technology, I often find that using a physical analogy often helps in comprehending computers, the Internet, social media, and the like.
If one criminal mailed child pornography to another criminal, would you suggest shutting down the United States Postal Service? What about if this criminal used UPS or FedEx? Should these shipping companies be shut down?
Or, if the child pornographer chose to fax illicit images over telephone lines, should Verizon, AT&T, or other telephone company be shut down?
Should the postmaster general be jailed?
The same reasons why you would not punish innocent third parties just doing their jobs in the physical realm are the same reasons why you would not punish innocent third parties in the electronic realm.
2
One time I am definitely glad my privacy settings are blocking pictures.
Anyway what went wrong is the same thing that went wrong with every part of our society De-Regulation is what went wrong. Normal rational prudence would have dealt with most of the problems we have all had to deal with at great personal expense to us all before it was a problem inflicted in us all. The slow rational roll out of tech would have provided opportunities to see and deal with the perverts who use the net for child abuse.
What we have now as the direct result of de-0regulation is basically cave men with machine guns and nuclear weapons.
2
Testimony in his criminal case revealed that it would have taken the authorities “trillions of years” to crack the 41-character password he had used to encrypt the site. He eventually turned it over to investigators, and was sentenced to life in prison in 2016."
One has to wonder what the investigators did to convince him to turn it over; it certainly was not in exchange for a lighter sentence.
1
Marc Zuckerberg's net worth is reportedly 65 billion dollars.
Nobody who has made that kind of profit or power is going to voluntarily admit that their product is toxic and helps to destroy potentially millions of innocent lives.
It's up to government, law enforcement and society to push for an end to FACEBOOK. Marc Zuckerberg is not going to do it. He's proud of FACEBOOK and will continue to promote and protect it.
We don't know how many children have been victimized by creators and suppliers of online-child pornography.
The fact that Congress appropriates money to fight this - and its being diverted into paying for 'immigration enforcement' shows how broken our politics are.
The fact that Congress has a responsibility to write laws to combat this and apparently can't be bothered to go to hearings where this is discussed shows how broken Congress is.
What's it going to take?
Isn't this bad enough?
Isn't this, in fact, the worst?
1
Some criminals use the mail for illicit purposes. Some criminals use telephones for illicit purposes. Some criminals use cars for illicit purposes.
If we were to shut down everything that criminals use for illicit purposes, we would be in the Stone Age. Actually, we would have to go back before the Stone Age, because some of the criminals would use the stones to do wrong.
2
If this article was meant to convey outrage, it does a very poor job of it. Half of the front is wasted in stylized images of children that convey nothing. The rest of the article is scattered and not very deeply explored. There is no need to put the children’s images, but you could have mapped the US and told us where trafficking is happening and how many cases. You could have included images of the adults arrested in connection with this. You could have interviewed tech companies and asked what their frustrations were. In fact you could have told us which companies were the worst and how many such cases had been found in each so far. Everything is competition. Perhaps public shaming of companies would spur them into greater action to prevent abuse. If criminals can dazzle you with their engineering capabilities, I am sure tech companies can wield much more intelligent muscle than one individual. You should have had police intimately connected with such cases to share their ideas on how we as a community can help keep an eye out. You never explained exactly how these people gained access to children. Are they all employed near children? Are these children kidnapped and trafficked? Are they family? Such articles cause me deep frustration. Please start with content that immediately conveys urgency to readers.
14
We live in an age of outrage addiction, which brings us nowhere. The article is written with the utmost integrity, the images are sobering and purposeful.
1
Over 90% of this abuse is committed by men.
You would think this would be a major part of the discussion.
As opposed to not mentioned at all.
13
This "expose" is thin sauce, relying on false assumptions about how the world works.
Let's assume that not many folks are into the sorts of things described here--suspending nine-year-olds by ankles whilst performing unnatural acts is not the sort of thing guys boast about on fishing trips, and guys on fishing trips boast about a lot. So, why can't cops pose as purveyors? They could do all kinds of stings to combat this, yet we're blaming internet companies as opposed to asking why don't police do more?
Cops do not appear to want to get involved. Rather, they appear to expect tech companies to deliver cases signed, sealed and delivered. That's not how the internet is supposed to work, and that's not how cops are supposed to work. We spend tons and tons and tons of money on cops who are directed to do things that reflect societal values. Not spending more time developing online sexual abuse cases that can be developed with tools already available begs the question: What's more important?
Free Backpage.
1
Closing Backpage harmed the sex workers who were using it, and the younger sex workers who were being exploited and trafficked, according to both the sex workers who used it and the FBI agents who investigated it, as reported in a memo that the judge didn't allow Backpage to admit into evidence. (Kamela Harris was one of the prosecutors of Backpage, btw.)
Secret Memos Show the Government Has Been Lying About Backpage All Along
https://reason.com/2019/08/26/secret-memos-show-the-government-has-been-lying-about-backpage/
"Information provided to us by [FBI Agent Steve] Vienneau and other members of the Innocence Lost Task Force confirm that, unlike virtually every other website that is used for prostitution and sex trafficking, Backpage is remarkably responsive to law enforcement requests and often takes proactive steps to assist in investigations," wrote Catherine Crisham and Aravind Swaminathan, both assistant U.S. attorneys for the Western District of Washington, in the April 3 memo to Jenny Durkan, now mayor of Seattle and then head federal prosecutor for the district. Vienneau told prosecutors that "on many occasions," Backpage staff proactively sent him "advertisements that appear to contain pictures of juveniles" and that the company was "very cooperative at removing these advertisements at law enforcement's request."
1
Norman,
Absolutely right.
NYT coverage of Backpage is one reason I'm deeply suspicious of this story--the paper allowed itself to get caught up in bunch of trumped up nonsense that has resulted in a federal ban on internet sex ads. It's about the only thing that R's and D's have agreed on since Trump got elected, and that should be enough to make anyone suspicious.
Your take is apt. Backpage cooperated with law enforcement and still got shut down, with its owners now facing criminal charges. Here, companies are not responding to law enforcement and are allowed to remain in business.
The biggest question is motive. What's the motive for these companies to enable sexual abuse of children? There isn't one. The companies, by appearances, are trying to protect online privacy. That's the motive, and it is a worthy one. No one wants their internet provider, or the government, sticking their noses into our online communications without good reason.
Any way you cut it, the blame is squarely on law enforcement and the government for not being more proactive. I do not believe that these sites are impenetrable. I do not believe that these cases can't be worked the old-fashioned way, via stings and offering breaks to lesser fishes who turn in bigger fishes.
Lastly, some of this stuff, I suspect, will continue going on no matter what. It's been going on forever. It's merely shifting to new platforms. The internet can be a great thing, yes, but there also are inevitable down sides.
1
I read a quote one time that if someone is behaving 'badly' or strangely the question to ask is not. "What is wrong with you?" but rather "What happened to you?" We live next to, work next to, and pass people on the street every day who are doing the best they can after surviving childhood rape. abuse, torture, and/or neglect. These things are not uncommon. We need to recognize how enormous the problem is and that seemingly 'normal' successful people often engage in abuse. It's not always the shady guy in the tank top. It can be priests, attorneys, judges, coaches, professors, and the kindly guy (or woman) next door.
What's wrong is that our legislators don't care enough to do anything about it. They don't really work, don't do their jobs. They're on vacation, NOW...AGAIN! Most of what they do is raise money for themselves, and spend OUR money on nonsense. Furthermore, they don't know anything about technology and are so far behind that they will never catch up. This is a primary reason why we need to get rid of the elderly (well, maybe a few at the top for continuity,) and elect young Progressive people, who have energy, want to serve and work, who have no interest in making themselves rich on the backs of the people, and know how things work, TODAY. Clean out the swamp! It's not just tRump--he's bad enough--corruption is endemic in Congress. Most of them are in it for themselves. Voters, do your homework, if you want things to change.
Sounds like the internet needs to be regulated and that the parts of it out of our control need to be shut down. What I never understood is there is no "report" button ro report criminal activity. We need a bigger cyber security force and I would be happy for my tax dollars to fund it. If Google, Facebook, etc can't control the monsters, it's time for the gov't to step in and do it for them.
1
The major social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, do have capabilities to report illegal content.
For example, this link describes how to report illicit activity on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/help/www/181495968648557?ref=u2u .
This link describes how to report illicit activity on Twitter - https://help.twitter.com/en/safety-and-security/report-abusive-behavior .
This link describes how to report illicit activity on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/reportabuse .
To determine how to report illicit activity on most social media platforms, use Google, Bing, or other search engine and enter, platform name report abuse. For example, to determine how to report abuse on Facebook, enter, "Facebook report abuse" into the search engine.
1
First thing to notice is that the explosion in image numbers is due to better reporting by the tech companies - the process is automated now.
The second is that the image itself is not much use - it is necessary to know where the physical location the images come from, tracing back it's path through the dark web or VPNs..
Thirdly, knowing the physical location is not much use without law enforcement officers to make the arrests.
Clearly the second and third steps are the bottleneck, and 60 million a year is woefully insufficient funding. My guess is that 60 million is a fraction of what is spent on copyright infringement enforcement by private industry.
2
It is difficult for me to believe that these cutting edge tech companies cannot formulate algorithms and technology to detect, and therefore put an end to, the proliferation of these images. That wouldn't make them money though. While the pervasiveness of this issue may not have grown, simply our awareness of it because of the age of the internet, we do live in an age where the possibility of stymying this issue is a reality. As we know from recent news reports, sometimes the most powerful and wealthy among us have perversions that fit into this category. It is unfortunate that wealth is the priority and not stopping this and protecting the vulnerable.
6
They could but it would take a real investment of money and time to do it and that is not a source of profit so they will not do it until they are forced to. Which was the whole point of the regulatory system the GOP destroyed.
7
I can tell you from experience that they cant. There are too many ways to change things up. And Android is one of the worst reasons. Due to its open source nature. Anyone can go in and find new ways to mess with the code or learn new ways to hide things.
Things like this will never stop until the human race changes as a whole. Too many things to prevent stopping things like this. Like our lax laws on the matter. If we were not soo weak as a people this wouldnt be an issue.
It’s not a simple problem. Millions of posts a day go up of men and women kissing touching their own children appropriately and creating code to be able to filter an appropriate vs porn situation is just difficult period. Of course obvious stuff like genitalia would be a start but its a very challenging requirement, maybe ai is needed for this.
2
The article would have done better to keep a bit of a distance. For example: it doesn't answer the question how many people convicted for child porn were active abusers and how many were just passive consumers. In the latter case they might not even have seen some of the pictures they were convicted for as they downloaded them in bulk.
The claim in the article that "Each and every image is a depiction of a crime in progress" is nonsense. Some pictures that now are considered child porn were just holiday pictures when taken in the 1960s. Considering almost any picture of a naked child as child porn is a recent "invention".
It is my impression that the fight against child sexual abuse has turned into a mindless witch hunt. It is a fact of life that some people get exited from looking at the pictures of naked children. The great majority of these people will never harm a child: that requires another psychiatric defect - a lack of empathy. Many might even be prepared to help the police find real abusers. In that light cops who get mad at any "pervert" might do more harm than good.
3
Passive consumers are just as bad. They provide the market. And seeking out predators is not a witch hunt.
8
Not so. There is a legal definition of what constitutes child pornography that includes a sexual element for the offense to stick. These laws are needed and must be enforced vigorously. In California possession of child pornography is a felony punishable by up to three years in prison and registration for life as a sex offender.
4
It is sad you think it is a witch hunt. I can tell you from experience that what an adult might think (right or wrong) is nothing, often has a devastating impact on a child. I work with people (children and adults) as a therapist who have been impacted by sexual abuse. The misconception is that there does not need to be overt abuse for it to impact negatively. There is harm. More harm than you realize.
4
And your reporting of such despicable crimes, what can this possibly lead to? Is this maybe another strategy devised by corporate-sponsored government think tanks to use as a pretext to impose citizen's limits on the internet? Or are the many dissenting political voices, (those who are seeing through the propaganda & the corruption) finally had enough of their government & their corrupt institutions & now are freely sharing their thoughts with others? Is this the real reason? I'm sure the NYT would love to see our infallible government appoint a commissar who will oversee the entire industry & just allow internet "access" to only those citizens who are "upstanding" & of high "moral character".
2
Possibly it could lead to greater awareness of the problem and more reporting? You're okay with these things happening? We should ignore it because you want free access to whatever you want? There are times regulation is reasonable. (And often the people engaged in these behaviors initially appear to be upstanding and moral.)
3
Child pornographers may mail each other illicit media. In addition, they may fax each other child pornography. This does not mean I want the government to "regulate" by opening my mail and monitoring my phone calls.
My first reaction is that use of the internet to do this is way too easy. It has been created by Silicon Valley and should be fixed by them. As a taxpayer and human, it is important to fund a response to this problem, but I do not think it fair to put my tax dollars into the hands of the same companies who have created the problem. They should be required by law to clean up their own mess or shut down. All pornography is abuse. Abuse of children is particularly egregious. Sexual slavery of a human any age is awful also. Making pornography using sexual slaves is illegal and morally repugnant, but watching any pornography supports this.
8
So many people are clamouring against ICE because they're enforcing Title 8, USC (immigration laws). But it needs to be stated that ICE has a vital role in busting the producers of child pornography and has a mandate to pursue abuses of child sexual exploitation whenever the images are being sent around on the Internet. This piece didn't mention their instrumentality in fighting cybercrime, but I have innumerable child porn cases that I administer in my Federal law enforcement job that have ICE nexus.
2
Nice to hear but the lack of oversight of separated children also has led to child abuse and child porn.
Moral relativism coming home to roost.
5
Lately, when people have asked if I am on a specific social media platform of one kind or another, I'll say, "No, I'm not a white supremacist." It calls to attention the obscenities present on the platform that no one seems to care about enough to leave it (to illustrate my point, can you imagine going to hang out at a brick and mortar structure, a club let's say, that had a significant contingent of neo-Nazis and white nationalists in the cocktail lounge or on the veranda? What decent person would ever be seen there?)
Today I'll start modifying my reply to, "No, I'm not a pedophile or a white supremacist."
What do you say if people ask you if you are on the New York Times platform?
2
Hire more police for God’s sake and regulate the internet already. Nothing is more evil than child rape. This gets to the problem of why God allows evil in this world. It is simply the biggest mystery. In many ways these crimes are worse than murder and one appreciates that even amongst hardened criminals no quarter is given to child rapists in prison. To me the most disturbing thing is the fact that supposedly 1% of the population are pedophiles. It is time for a massive government intervention into some kind of government regulation and policing of the web. More police are needed because the tech companies and local police are overwhelmed. If we need more prisons so be it. Tax the internet.
7
When I began workng with court mandated sex offenders in the 90's I was informed by my supervisor (male) that men commit these crimes because they can. Women offenders a scant % of offfenders, typicallly forced into sex trades using children to survive; third world countries producing photos/videos that were trafficked into states. 99% of offenders plea bargained to treatment, the 'victim empathy' letter writing exercise just a formality to graduate. Men do this because they can, power and control the arousal. Few understood the 'equality' wheel of relationships we espoused in our treatment. Back then child porn was traded in basements on 42nd Street and, some of the offenders in treatment belatedly admitted some shame, imagining the suffering of child victims. With Porn Hub so integrated into society, offering up and leading to more extreme abuses of children, why isn't this the subject of some investigative work? What is behind that big online machine? Could it be taxed to provide treatment for the victims turned offenders who, often can't afford it, let alone find program specializing in such treatment that takes health insurance/
11
Stopping child sexual abuse material crimes has to be the human rights issue of our time. But we have to be willing to look at it and talk about before there is action. ECPAT-USA's report makes clear there is something everyone can do. https://tinyurl.com/y5obzpa8
The FBI also needs to be called to account for the massive amounts of child porn they have disseminated over the years in their various "sting" operations. They might be the largest child porn distributor in history, even if their intentions were noble.
3
I looked up some of the convicted pedophiles noted in this article. They are all white men whose bizarre reported behavior and love of other people's pain—they are sadists, let us note, not just pedophiles—is rooted in an absence of empathy. We don't allow hackers (who are sometimes working for the social good) to have computers; why are mentally disturbed people with histories of bizarre behavior allowed to have computers? Child molestation has been happening forever; the internet turns it into a product. But I can assure you these people would be molesting kids anyway and most of them are victims of childhood abuse themselves. But the lede is buried here: "Reports to U.S. law enforcement agencies have proliferated (I would have written "Spiked up sharply"), while arrests have risen slightly (I would have written "only slightly"), but federal funds remained almost flat." The Internet may be giving us the gift of revealing these disturbed, violent abusers; but police and the government are not getting them off the street. As a person who lives in NC and faces cops who are known white supremacists at every anti-racist rally, I wonder how many law enforcement officers are engaged in this kind of behavior and protect other pedophiles? And I also wonder why the federal government does not take funding these investigations seriously enough to fund it? Ask you Senator. Ask your congressman.
6
Tried to read this with a purely analytical mind yet when the abuse is described in detail all I can think about these adults is "kill them all, kill them all."
16
The barber shop I patronized when I was a kid in the Fifties was owned by a guy named Lou. He cut my hair for my Bar-Mitzvah, and came to my house to give me haircuts after he retired.
Lou kept a supply of racy magazines on-hand for his customers. Police Gazette, Playboy and others I can’t remember. He also kept some books of dirty jokes and packs of playing cards with dirty pictures on them, the kind where the men were just wearing black socks; the photography on which was so bad you really couldn’t make out what, if anything, was going on.
Lou didn’t allow these materials to be viewed by just anyone. You had to be at least 14 years old. Lou had standards and knew right from wrong. He wasn’t going to allow the kid customers in his shop to get damaged or their parents to find out what he was doing.. He knew what boys wanted to see and was ready to supply it, up to a careful limit and no further.
I miss those days of Lou and his limits. The plague of internet porn that is now engulfing us has ruined countless lives and has enormously debased our culture.
As for me, I was the lone guy in ten thousand who actually did read the stupid “philosophy” articles in Playboy after looking at the pictures.
2
Follow the money. A large part of internet traffic is dedicated to porn and likely a large part of that is the kind described in the article. Thus a large part of the enormous internet profits come from this source. Are the internet giants really going to cut profits and shareholder value to solve the problem? It's our economic system at it's finest.
1
Every single penny being spent on a quixotic border wall should instead be spent on combatting this.
And by "combatting" I mean "finding the people doing this and putting them in prison with violent criminals who are all told what these people did."
1
The internet really is the Trojan Horse.
1
We need the bio pharmacy companies to figure a way to detect and rewire broken human brains.
2
I can understand, if not condone, all manner of human vices. Greed, laziness, egoism, you name it. But for the life of me I can't understand why anyone would be sexually attracted to infants and children, or aroused by violence against them. This is a dangerous sickness, and if draconian measures are required to combat it, so be it.
16
This is beyond horrifying. Any server, any company, any person who allows such abuse against children should be given lethal injections.
If Facebook or Google cannot or won't stop this, they should be impeached and disbanded. To continue to wait for action when nothing happens is horrifying. If encryption is so darn important to pedophiles, do not implement it.
It was Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, MADD, that initiated and changed laws for drunken drivers. What group, since the government is so useless, will force the government and companies to act?
These children, especially those under three before their ability to use language, are destroyed. But they are the future of America.
I'm sorry, but I assume more than the majority of such evil predators and those who allow their activities (Silicon Valley) are men. What does that say about our culture?
2
I have a proposal for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (and other philanthropic organizations, who are all doing a terrific job): here's your new cause in which to donate your millions/billions and your energies. Stopping child sexual abuse!! Let's make this a national cause. This deeply distressing article was so horrific I could barely read it to the end.
75
What we need is to rebuild the federal government that provides oversight instead of begging for help from billionaires. This is not how a democratic republic is supposed to function.
3
I have believed for a long time that the internet will end civilization as we know it. This article confirms my belief.
7
Does the whole of society bear some level of moral responsibility for the sexual abuse of children?
I often wonder where our society would be today if 50 years ago - 100 years ago - we had stopped allowing the sexual discrimination, harassment and abuse - and domestic abuse - of women? If our attitudes and our laws had changed then...where would we as a society be now?
I also wonder...why isn't sexual assault considered a hate crime? Moreover, given the number of women who are sexually assaulted over the course of their lifetimes, why haven't we even engaged in a discussion about this?
We don't even use the "r-word" in progressive publications like this.
Certainly, the way in which we have addressed the rights and protections of women - half of our population - has contributed to the overall moral fiber and attitudes of our society.
Have the consequences of not tending well - not tending fairly - to women...trickled down and contributed to the sexual abuse of children?
I recognize there are genetic, biological and other significant causes at play here, but I would venture to assert that we are ignoring a root cause - a distinct moral failing - when we ignore how, where, and for how long we have failed women...and how that has damaged our children.
15
There have been other articles criticizing places like China for "cracking down" on the internet. If tech companies here don't start amping up their game and cooperate in the fight against abuses like this they may be faced with the same thing, 1st Amendment or no, lest they be judged complicit instead.
Tech companies should be required by law to look for images of child abuse. That they are only required to report these crimes if they happen to come across them is undoubtedly one reason how the proliferation of these images has been enabled. While one can argue that hate speech should be protected by the First Amendment and tech companies should not be required to monitor it this is a completely different issue. That these crimes are able to proliferate suggests that tech companies are abettors unless they make serious attempts to curtail the abuse of their systems.
If you contend that tech companies should be required by law to look for images of child abuse, what about non-tech companies?
Should the United States Postal Service open every piece of mail just in case there are physical pictures or optical discs of child pornography? Should FedEx and UPS open every package to ensure that child pornography is not being shipped using their services? Should every telephone company monitor every phone call to determine that child pornographers are not making plans to distribute their illicit media or faxing their content over telephone lines?
Any technology or service can be abused by those intent on causing harm. However, to violate the privacy rights of the innocent because of the guilty is one thing that the Constitution rightfully guards against.
Why are the tech companies not solving this issue and paying for it? Why does The Center for Missing and Exploited Children have 10 year old software? Google gave $4M. Is that a joke? It must be; they are the problem and they are throwing pennies into the ocean. Again, my tax dollars going to solve problems created by the wealthiest, ignored by the wealthiest and 100% fixable if DC could grow a spine and Silicon Valley could grow a conscious.
Thanks to the Times for providing this study. It is both enlightening and terribly disheartening. It speaks to so many ways in which our society is broken and seemingly not fixable. Especially egregious is the role of companies like Facebook which facilitate the communication of pedophiles and their images of abused children. Those in Congress, slow or indifferent to respond, deserve special condemnation. However, our society has long been ambivalent about the welfare of children. They are small and rather helpless. They lack a voice in our national dialog. They attend schools, deteriorating with declining quality of teaching and achievement. The origin of this sexual perversion may be biological but as the authors point out, the transmission and sharing of these heinous acts, rampant as it is, could be far better contained if we had the will. We do not. Shame.
This is truly horrifying and I hope that the Times' reporting on this issue lights a fire under lawmakers in Washington to continue to fund and work on this issue. I would be curious to know more about the increase in reports: is the incidence of this abuse actually increasing, or just the reporting of it? Are the huge numbers simply proportional to our increasing population or is something making the prevalence of such abuse grow?
2
Ah, the conflict between protecting private data and "people doing bad things" is only going to get worse. In the end, I suspect that it will be a police state, paranoia and accusation will reign, and the "bad things" will continue barely abated.
1
The article following suggests that pedophiles are 1 - 4% of the population, in both men and women. So how does it follow that they have done this much damage? There is more than pedophilia going on, there is power, sadism, and a host of other horrifically disturbing factors contributing to this explosion.
I don't know the right words but can an analogy be made to the effects on the brain that seeing white supremicist or jihadist or adult porn be happening? Could the danger of posting turn the children into objects, not humans, in the eyes of the perpetrators? Are these powerless people preying on even less powerful, regardless of age (meaning age is not the point but a spurious connection). Etc. It's time not to try to understand pedophiles but to understand -- and stop -- what are the driving forces of this on-line nightmare.
For a certain period of time, I worked for defense attorneys in cyber-forensics. The law firm retained a steady volume of perpetrators that were arrested on possession of child porn images. As per their right, counsel is allowed to validate the authenticity of the images. For the most part extraction of metadata is very telling when investigating these cases. There is much that is hidden that can be told if you just know where to look.
On one case I recall doing a validation (the prosecutor is always present), I informed them that I most likely would be able to pinpoint where the photo was taken and assist in de-anonymizing the internet traffic as the perpetrator had logs on the computer which would have allowed as such.
On another case we were able to identify the path of emails between the perpetrator communicating with those he was swapping with. When approached the prosecution was simply not interested in attempting to identify those in the images/video.
I have found in my experience that there is a lack of will to attempt to identify those in these images/videos and pursue the ones who created the media. The tools for law enforcement are there, talks of breaking encryption and such are simply excuses for shortcuts which as we see with government are never used to protect those who need protection.
After a period of time I could not stomach it anymore and concentrated on my specialty of malware analysis and security. The tools are there, the fed needs to use them.
11
While the neglect and lack of sufficient funding is more than regrettable--it's sickening, it is unrealistic to expect anything to change.
Because the President of the United States was "close friends" with such a predator, until the day Jeffrey Epstein was arrested--then he didn't know him! But before that it was clear Epstein and Trump saw these young women like a dessert treat. Remember: There was a credible lawsuit against Trump for tying up and raping a 13 year old at one of Epstein's houses, and threatening the child with harm to her or her family. The day before she was going to reveal herself, she panicked and refused, then dropped the suit the next day.
One can only speculate that someone "got to her" and terrified her.
Buried in this report is the notation that funding was stripped by the President from THIS under-funded effort, for his fake border crisis wall-building. I suspect the last thing Trump wants is child sexual abuse investigations to get more thorough because it may well touch upon him. Epstein was merely the most prominent abuser.
It's not a new phenomenon. Miguel Piñero wrote a very disturbing play about it that opened at Joe Papp's Public Theater in February of 1974, called "Short Eyes". The irony of the play is that the predator confesses his crimes, is murdered by other inmates, and it ends with the authorities about to release him because he is "innocent"...but he wasn't. That was 45 years ago and it's just gotten worse.
1
A horror but also, hopefully, likely a poorly reported hysteria.
Consider...
Wilding teens: Never really much of a thing.
Rape by unknown assailants: Actually a tiny percentage of all rapes.
Child abduction: Relatively rare. Child abuse assailants are vastly more likely to be friends and family.
Mass shootings: Actually represent less than 2% of gun killings. We should pay more attention to suicide and handguns than debates about semi-automatics.
We are susceptible to our darkest fears. The greatest horrors grab our attention. This article picks what are surely non-representative and among the very worst of the horrors. This article plays into this and sensationalises; we should know better by now.
So those hysterias and others were widly overblown in the reporting. So what about child pornography?: I'm not sure, but I'd suggest that the reporters should go back and check, for example, how many of the 45 million images and videos are UNIQUE. Given their example of a single image going viral, my assumption is that the numbers given are misleading my multiple orders of magnitude.
This is further reinforced by simple calculations. The NJ task force commander estimates that 400,000 of 9 million people can be arrested in NJ for child pornography. This is 1 out of 20 people in the population. Could be, but color me incredulous until more careful reporting is done.
3
Before I turned 18, I had endured 4 incidents of sexual abuse - beginning at the age of 7 - by 4 different predators, 3 of whom were total strangers. This was back in the 60s and early 70s. I think most women have similar experiences. The percentage of men out there who sexually abuse girls is huge. It is our fathers, brothers, uncles, friends, boyfriends, husbands, sons and cousins who commit these crimes. I was never abused by a female.
Yes, perhaps the percentage of men who are excited by the most barbaric of sex crimes - those involving extreme sexual and violent activities against the youngest of children - are a smaller percentage. But the percentage of men who sexually abuse girls under the age of 18 is huge. Internet images of child sexual abuse is just one issue - child sex tourism is another. Men traveling to countries where they can buy child sex easily and not be as worried about getting caught and punished.
Even mainstream porn is flooded with 'school girl' fantasy as a common subset of available themes.
What is wrong with men? That is the problem we need to solve. Running after men looking at images on the internet isn't going to solve the problem. Children were being sexually abused all over the world long before the internet.
We need to find out why such a huge percentage of men are attracted to sex with children and solve that problem.
11
When I read the following, “...companies knew the house was full of roaches, and they were scared to turn the lights on,” he said. “And then when they did turn the lights on, it was worse than they thought.” and that what is disturbing. Predators are being enabled by technology platforms and law enforcement isn't receiving the support they need from legislators and executives in office. The internet is the wild wild west with not enough sheriffs to catch the crimes against children. The next MLK will be a leader who is representing our children. Our culture says it values our children but those are words. We see very little action with those words. What can our leaders do to help law enforcement? Because we cannot trust big tech companies that are dependent on investors. The government must take action.
Sexual abuse of children is reprehensible and the numbers here are jaw dropping.
I really doubt that sexual abuse of children is common across human societies and cultures. So I would like you to tell us what the sociologists have to say about this epidemic. Why? What cultural factors are involved? It does not seem to be only American or Western, but parts of Asia as I understand it. I don't think the internet is "the main cause." It seems to be an exacerbating and facilitating factor. Is this some sort of awful symptom of social neuroses or isolation or something? Don't social scientists study these sorts of things?
Another thing the New York Times could help us to understand would be more about how these determinations are made that end up in the statistics. How on earth can any group of police or examiners have evaluated 45 million pieces of data? Does that really mean that 45 million pictures of children being tortured and or raped were produced and exist? Good lord!! That is way more than the entire population of Canada! Help us to understand what these numbers mean. How do they break down?
There are a few not quite clear suggestions here in your article about SOME of the difficulties in dealing with the data, but it is too important a public issue for concerned citizens to leave at that.
2
" I really doubt that sexual abuse of children is common across human societies and cultures."
Why? Because you believe that there are good societies and bad societies? Good ethnic groups and bad ethnic groups? Good cultures and bad cultures? That's part of the problem. The left believes that only their society, their race, their couture, their religion does bad things. The right believes that only other societies, other races, other cultures, other religions do bad things. They're both wrong.
2
Sexual abuse happens in all cultures and all societies, as it has throughout history.
"Child torture" is a more appropriate term than child pornography in many of the examples presented in this article.
20
Two thoughts come to mind.
Clearly deporting immigrants or preventing their entry is a higher priority for this administration than protecting our citizens.
Second, one might have expected the New York Times to have reported what the largest police force in the country is doing in this area. Or will there be a follow up on the NYPD?
2
How about a no-images internet?
An absolutely horrifying article that has left me feeling empty and overwhelmed with the feeling we cannot compete with the dark underbelly of the internet. How can we help the children and the survivors of such atrocities? NYT, please shine a light on any organization that is trying to lobby for additional funds for the government agencies to fight this evil. NYT please shine a light on any credible organizations that are trying to battle this independently. Organizations who are fighting the travesty of on-line child pornography are where our many millions of grass roots dollars should be going! After that article you will have a motivated a readership who would like to assist in stopping the violence.
2
We've come to the point where we have to understand and accept that nothing we put on the internet can be private. Nothing! The dark web has been operating with impunity for far too long. Years ago I wrote a comment of the dark and evil things you can buy and sell using this platform. It was too graphic to be published. Now in the body of this article we can read a snippet of the vileness. It's about time we knew about all of it and accepted our responsibility to stop it.
If the criminal element can easily evade exposure by encryption, one of two things must follow. Either the Justice Departments around the world need to up their game and become better hackers, or encryption has to be outlawed.
We have a right to privacy within boundaries. There are no boundaries on the internet and since there are no boundaries to the depths of depravity humans are capable of, we must put some in place. If we don't, this world wide web we've created will ensnare us all. The poisonous spiders who spun their dark web with impunity for far too long are proof of where all of this is heading. The insatiable desire of pedophiles, a desire as old as the hills, has found its Shangri-la in this web. The almost exponential explosion of the material contained in that web hasn't reached its zenith.
From the lede:
"Online predators create and share the illegal material, which is increasingly cloaked by technology. Tech companies, the government and the authorities are no match."
At its very heart, encryption is just math. Math cannot be outlawed.
In addition, with all of the online banking, financial transactions, heath care, and commerce being conducted on the Internet, outlawing encryption, even if it could be done, would cause such significant harm, it would be comparable to nuking New York City in order to alleviate crime.
This is truly sickening. I guess I've been naive to think that our federal government was actively putting resources towards keeping kids safe. This is yet another demonstration that there is a mental health crisis in this country. The internet is just a delivery method. The number of adults perpetrating these crimes is shocking.
This was absolutely sickening to me to read as a survivor of child sexual abuse. I can say without any doubt that these victims will suffer for the rest of their lives. The perpetrators must be found and brought to justice. I really appreciate the hard horrendous work that the law enforcement workers are doing to try to address this blight on our society. All resources are not enough to prevent young lives from being ruined.
"Army Officer Assigned to Mar-a-Largo Sentenced for Lying in Child Pornography Case".
That was yesterday's headline in the New York Times. I think that the last 3 years have shown us that there is a very simple reason WHY child pornography and child sexual abuse is rampant: Because men who can usurp the laws want it to.
CASE # 1: Trump's best friend, Epstein; Acosta, Ken Starr, and that case of thousands that went to protect Epstein who had raped over 100 girls.
Odd how it is always Republican, conservative, Catholic priests, traditionalists who commit such crimes.
Odd, how they let each other off.
Trump has done one good thing: He has raised the level of awareness about sex offenders higher than it has ever been raised before.
Someone needs to check the head-count on the children in the cages.
I suspect that many are missing.
3
I'd support the death penalty for such offenses, at least in that it could possibly save, through deterrence, even one child from this kind of experience.
10
When I read articles like this, I wonder if maybe we SHOULD ignore the rapidly increasing population of our planet and the corresponding increase in pollution that accompanies it, in hopes that our race will become extinct. Without our presence the planet will, in time, renew itself and a new "intelligent" species will again be created. And perhaps this new species will not be as perverse as we were.
34
Our demise is inevitable, many of us know it, feel it, and are despondent over it.
As in, we should all fall on our swords? Sure. You first, we're all right behind you. Or maybe we can all keep trying to find a way out of this mess, eh?
3
I agree that humans should become extinct. These millions of pictures of child torture on the internet aren't coming from an isolated few people; they are coming from probably millions of people. Indeed, chances are, some of the commenters on this site, expressing their outrage, have also been culpable in some of this at some time. The problem with allowing over-population and pollution to wipe us humans out, while a desirable end itself, is that we'll be taking millions of other species with us--in fact, they'll probably die off first (they're dying off in vast numbers now). My biggest hope, then, is that a virus will come along that will affect only humans, kill us all off. Then how the rest of the animals and the planet generally will thrive! (The ultimate poetic justice will be that the virus comes out of our appalling factory farming system. Let's hope so!)
1
I am speechless. I had no idea there were so many sick man preying on young children. Those caught should have their pictures plastered all over for the world to see who they really are. Ruin them with very damaging legal suits, long stays behind bars and public shaming, that would be a good start.
45
Please, read the article. It's not just sick men.
Treating others as inhuman makes us all a little less human. The perpetrators of pedophilia are well aware that their behavior is considered disgusting by all but other pedophiliacs. Shaming them further will not change their behavior - they cannot control it. As the article states, we need to spend more effort determining the disease's causes and how to prevent it.
Humans have many ignoble characteristics and the desire to lash out in anger is one of them.
I am sorry to say ALL of us understand the power of the internet; and, smartphones! :( Notably, the FL. State Attorney announced in 2009 that INTERNET SEXUAL EXPLOTATION OF CHILDREN was the Number One Public Enemy, never mind the Central Florida Drug Traffic Corridor. SOOOOoooo, HOW eleven years later is this problem going unchecked with the alarming warnings!?
1
“It (child sexual abuse imagery) gets scant attention because few people want to confront the enormity and horror of the content...” reads one sentence in the article.
This should change and the Zuckerbergs of this world should have to watch with investigators the worst monstrosities on a regular basis. Then, whenever the possibility arises (TV interviews, shareholder meetings ...) they have to explain if their motivation to fight these horrors would increase if this would happen to their own children. I bet it would!
21
I thought the child porn swamp was the size of a basketball court.
Now I see it’s the size of Texas.
20
Kholood, Jack, Susan, Alan and the producers of this story, thank you so very much for writing this. It is a problem that needs to have a flood light put on it. The government has regulated the radio and TV waves from early on. We need to demand better from our elected representatives. And at this time in our country, thank God for journalists and the American free press.
59
This article completed evades all discussion of the critical question regarding the images discussed. Instead it subsumes the answer and subsumes the conclusion that censorship with criminal prosecution of those who publish is righteous. Indeed, it subsumes that criminal prosecution for mere possession of such images is righteous.
The critical question is similar to the critical question regarding publishing images of violence or pornographic images generally. The critical question is: Does viewing such images cause people to engage in the behavior depicted that the viewers would not otherwise have engaged in?
Unless you have compelling evidence that the answer to that critical question is "yes", then articles such as this are simply deceptive sensationalism designed to generate support for government efforts to impose censorship.
1
It's not the images -- it's the creation of the images, that is the most disturbing. Are you so blind you believe all the images come from CGI and are not real images of our children suffering? And yes looking at the images may not cause horrific behavior, but it does cause demand for more new images.
4
fred:
You are incorrect. The article concerns and the policing and prosecution is for publishing the images or having the images in one's possession (stored in your personal computer).
Doing the actual abuse is a crime entirely separate. That crime can occur even if no images of it were made of it. Furthermore, there is no actual sexual abuse of children or anyone from making the pictures, publishing them, possessing them, or viewing them. The only sexual abuse occurs from the abusive act itself.
If you truly want to find and punish those who actually sexually abuse children, then it is counterproductive to battle the making of the images or their publication. That is so because publication of them offers an avenue for identifying the perpetrator of the abuse, and the images are evidence at trial that the abuse occurred.
1
This seems a rather thinly veiled defense of child pornography. Whether or not you feel you should have the right to view the images is irrelevant in the context of the child's rights who were violated to obtain them.
I was abused as a child and when I had the opportunity to have a conversation with pedophile who used to visit countries where children were more "accessible", I tried to contain my disgust. I'm sure I wasn't completely effective because he followed up with, "But I treat them with love."
There is no defense for this disgusting behavior, I went through it and love was not a part of the equation.
3
The internet is a capitalist-owned information sharing network with zero oversight. How could anyone not predict that would turn into something awful?
36
Randall:
Yes, let us prohibit capitalist owned information publishing and substitute glorious socialism (government owned/controlled) information publishing. Then we can have politically correct government censors control everything we are permitted to read and view. It will be a brave new world.
1
Any time I hear someone complain about over-regulation, I think of things like this:
The companies have known for years that their platforms were being co-opted by predators, but many of them essentially looked the other way, according to interviews and emails detailing the companies’ activities. And while many companies have made recent progress in identifying the material, they were slow to respond.
Greed is a sickness that makes people overlook every moral failing conceivable. And our system rewards it.
1
I don't think I've ever read an article that disgusted me so much. This is the worst that someone can imagine... but it's all real. I feel so sorry for the children growing up in this age of the internet - many don't have the skills to navigate it safely and the tech companies that facilitate these crimes don't, or won't, put the money and resources into fighting it. Social media is a farce, but it's also unveiled the ugliness beneath the masks. It's just all so depraved.
32
This topic is of vital concern and I thank the NYT for the series, but I can't even bring myself to finish this article. It's just too disturbing to comprehend. It seems that our collective appetite for online pornography has, for many over the last few decades, fueled a need for more and more extreme images to satisfy their sickening urges. New generations are being raised with a phone in their hand from infancy. What happens when children are able to access such images and see them as normal? I shudder to think.
17
There are a few elephants in the room, big ones that will take energy to address. The first issue relates to freedom within cyberspace, unregulated and unfiltered. This can change. There is little incentive for self regulation by internet providers and little care about kids, because they don't have any money of their own. What can a three year old do, sue an internet giant? Stiff fines must be instituted by government as a starting point for both the ISP and the perpetrator. The public must demand this, and hold those "religious" elected officials to task for doing the right thing during their legislative sessions. (It seems as if the only purpose of our country is to protect another mistake by Mr. Trump. )This is not gun control, where money talks. Or is it? The second consideration is the value of children in society. Do we value our children enough to provide good housing, great schools, and medical care? Do we care enough about children who witness gun violence, or war? Do we care about children who witness family member drown in floods? Do we care enough about children to grant them the same legal rights as adults at birth? Then consider mental health. Is pedophilia a mental disease, or only a crime? Is an unregulated cyberspace increasing the prevalence of this disease, and if so, why such gross inaction?
1
Wow. The Child Center has become part of the problem. As a private corporation they can operate without public accountability. Lack of transparency is often an indicator of guilt: in-effective program outcomes, mismanagement, or worse. I wouldn't be surprised if the Center has a covert pedophile or two working in their midst. Rotten apples fall especially close to the tree, if it's dying.
Thank you to the Times for this over-due report. Unfortunately people do these things because they can. I would even say casual viewers of online child porn are the victims too.
What this tells me is that there are a lot of sick adults in this world. How did they get this way? Since it seems you can't cure pedophilia, these people need to be locked up for the rest of their natural lives with no hope for release. Maybe that threat alone will deter some.
I have one relative who posted what I thought were suggestive poses of her 14 yo granddaughter on Facebook. I told here I thought they were inappropriate and should be removed. She laughed at me and called me "old-fashioned." To me, it's an open invitation for some creep to contact this young girl. Parents and grandparents, quit posting pictures of your (grand)children of any age on social media! It's their image and if you don't have (or can't get) permission from them to post, don't do it. If you want to share a photo with close friends or relatives, there are better ways to do it.
23
Don't most people only share those photos with "Friends"? Oh wait...I forgot some Facebook aficionados have 500 "friends."
1
I have so many friends and family member that post endless pictures of their very young, very attractive children, along with much too much information that would make it easy for predators to find them. My husband and I posted very few images of our children until they were in their late teens - usually high school sports events, less likely to attract child molesters. It is really not that difficult to text or email photos directly to family and friends - most of us were raised in a time when photos had to be printed and mailed in order to share them, and we certainly didn't suffer as a result.
4
Thank you NYT for bringing this to the forefront. As a victim of sexual assault as a child, it is more than abuse- it is violence as the article states - the realization that such behavior exists and now proliferates is welcome. While we as a society find it reprehensible we also like to ignore it. Just like MeToo# the world of child sexual assault exists.
Can you look at the images ? That sims question to the readers ? I don't have to for I live with those images in my heart and my body and in my nightmares.
8
Sad and sickening. Yet we are unable to face the reality that without guiderails governing free speech and free "expression," the Internet has devolved into a global monster that threatens not just the young and vulnerable, but also the very foundations of society.
The issue, specifically, is that Internet content providers such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, et al, view themselves as mere conduits of information. They are loathe to police in any meaningful way the disgusting offal served up by sick, demented, perverted individuals. There is no acceptable rational for images of child sexual torture or abuse -- none. It is content that shatters the meaning of free expression, turning it from the open exchange of ideas to a license for abhorrent, criminal behavior.
The response to this cancer must be global. Internet content providers must be held accountable for what appears on their platforms through a licensing protocol that could be revoked whenever content of a despicable nature is posted. Each nation must establish its own licensing procedure, but with tough minimum standards required.
Of course, many will object to this as pure suppression of thought and expression. To which I say, no. Free expression cannot be entirely free, given the vagaries of human nature, and a greater good must be protected and maintained. Furthermore, in the United States, Congress must enact legislation that defines Internet platforms as content providers -- not mere pipelines.
9
As I read this horrifying report, I was thinking of a young man I know who was the victim of child sexual abuse when he was a toddler. And I thought about how that abuse has affected him and his parents, who carry enormous guilt that the person they hired to care for their child turned out to be a pedophile. And I became enraged that companies like Facebook have long looked the other way. I think it is time to boycott all of the tech companies that do not put their billions of dollars of revenue to work fighting this horrifying and unspeakable crime. Let's call them out. Money is the only language they understand and if enough people boycott them, they will get the message.
131
I am equally enraged to find out the our so-called esteemed Justice Department has not even drafted a plan to tackle this issue. Be Best indeed!
4
"I think it is time to boycott all of the tech companies that do not put their billions of dollars of revenue to work fighting this horrifying and unspeakable crime."
If only it was that simple. Arguably one of the greatest paradoxes in modern times is the fact that we as a society inevitably castigate tech companies when they fail to keep our personal information sufficiently secure -- consider the myriad times hackers have stolen the data of hundreds of millions of people in a single instance, or even the likes of state-sponsored actors hacking into the DNC's email servers -- but the tech industry's efforts to devise truly secure methods of data storage and transmission have led us to this point: providing some of the world's most truly evil people the exact tools they need to get away with committing unspeakably horrific crimes.
We already knew this was true with respect to terrorism. And now we know it's also the case for the world's hordes of unfathomably perverse child predators, those who receive sexual gratification from harming society's most innocent members -- and on a vastly greater scale than nearly anybody realized.
I wish I knew how to resolve this paradox, but that's rather literally their core problem: they're extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to rectify. I am, however, reasonably certain that a mere boycott wouldn't have any concrete effect.
1
I am NOT sympathetic to Facebook, but, the problem of child sexual abuse is much bigger and thousands of years older than facebook.
First step is to start throwing child sexual abusers into prisons with absolutely no plea bargains allowed.
3
As a psychologist and child advocate, I'm thankful for this series. Badly needed. Thank you. I've been waiting for more information and awareness on these issues - parents and professionals need to know what to look for, how to help, etc. Thanks also to the professionals working to help treat and prevent abuse.
37
We will never be able to police this issue using current strategies. The volume of material and tools like virtual private networks mean that it is simply too hard to trace someone on the Internet to catch all offenders with practical resources.
The solution, I think, is to use artificial intelligence to identify the images. We are probably close to being able to do so.
There is a chilling downside to this, which is that authoritarian governments might use AI to police political expression. However, they will have the technology to do that in any circumstances. Here, the important thing will be to set up safeguards so the technology cannot be used to interfere with free speech and expression.
10
I am a life-long public educator and have seen a sharp uptick in recent years in student trauma and suicidality rates - reading this article makes me wonder if there might be a connection. Could this many of our students be experiencing hidden abuse, and if so, what can we do about it?
Use of digital images for self-pleasure has entered a new disturbing "norm" that requires increasing abuse and terror. I understand that online porn is now essentially ubiquitous. Couldn't there be a wide-spread public campaign against feeding the online porn industry?
I know many people who pride themselves on not buying into industries that perpetuate social strife - certainly, this is a case where abstaining from digital porn/abuse (and replacing it with curated print materials like 70's style magazines?) could be part of an initial public re-education effort against digital porn.
16
Porn is not the same as sexual abuse. This is discussed toward the end of the article. Porn “actors” are adults and allegedly participate of their own free will and are paid (and it is still rife with abuse including drugs). There is no way to produce “porn” with children without abusing them. Get real. Those images are of real children being forced into this activity by adults.
3
It is truly upsetting and scary to think human beings are so ugly. Why can our politicians diverge billions that are approved for the military to this very pressing problem. Also our tech companies ought to be held accountable. It is difficult to believe they can not find ways to enter the dark net. Perhaps diverging billions in their profits to spending more on hiring experts to investigate along with the police. Our taxes alone can not pay for this monumental crime but their profits can. So Facebook, Google, etc face up to your responsibility. I have four grandchildren and can not even imagine this kind of abuse going unchecked.
40
While I agree that the Internet is the genie we can't get back into the bottle, the sick truth is child sexual abuse numbers have been silently high for decades. I remember the revulsion I felt when this became apparent to me in the early 1990s when I started freelancing the night shift and heard my colleagues' radios tuned to the Dr. Drew (Pinsky) Show on the local rock station. Virtually every call from people at the end of their personal ropes revealed a history of sexual abuse, usually from a family member or friend. I was in disbelief, but the stories continued every night until I left. Dr. Drew went on to host a television show about celebrity drug rehab, and most of those addicts were likewise victims of sex abuse as children. The internet is a whole other level of evil, but the evil has been there all along.
82
Abuse of children has always been with us. We, as a society are more aware of it in modern times, but historically throughout the ages children were property to be used and abused with absolutely no rights. A cursory read of literature and history going back as far as possible provides evidence of this.
6
True, the disease existed before the internet. These sites are convenient carriers.
3
And your point is.....?
The article tries to make a very serious point that seems to have escaped your notice. The internet has caused this crime against children to EXPLODE catastrophically!
3
I don't want to read an article about the heinous sexual abuse of children , but I bet it is a small part of the sexual harm the internet is responsible for .
The unparalleled and instant access to information is sullied by the access to the most blatant sexual images that children of any age can see . Unfortunately , there is no way for parents to prevent this harm .
So, photos and videos of children being abused may pale when compared to the harm of children being exposed to sex prematurely .
1
The only way to make headway is to somehow separate the protection of privacy between what is legal and what is illegal activity. The solution doesn't lie in law enforcement but in technology, and the only way these companies are going to invest adequately in the solution is if there is a positive affect on their bottom line, whether it is the incentive for profit or the incentive to avoid fines.
Now I need to take a shower. Headlines and stories that emphasize the moral failures of my species seem to be multiplying at the same rate as on-line child pornography.
We need to keep faith in our cultural evolution just to keep it happening. It may not be an arch, but a chart over the centuries would clearly show that we are better than we were, even if there's been a terrible drop in the last few years. I support Steven Pinker's perspective on this.
If we survive another century, I'm confident we will overall be a kinder species then than now.
Another escape from this broken culture. Like all of our problems we can patch it, but like an old inner-tube or a crumbling foundation, at some point, it needs to be replaced.
1
Some, not all, blame goes to our notions of freedom from constraint as applied to our beliefs in freedom of speech. Then we throw in major internet "social media" players who use those arguments for free speech to justify nearly any act considered expression--mostly for their own profits (not so much out of any social conscience). The idea that those internet media companies can effectively police themselves is turning into more than a bad joke.
Sure, we can go overboard with restrictions in how we respond to a growing social problem. We can point to prohibition, but it is difficult to see how that historical example is relevant here. Abusive material was not being posted all over an internet that did not yet exist. As has happened before, we are our own worst enemy.
Can any singular version of "common sense" (whatever that might be) be applied in this situation? Probably not. This is another egregious example of how the internet is being exploited for the advantage of some very bad actors. It is an example of how our own Constitution is being used against our own populace--with the help of some high-priced attorney's graduated from our own law schools.
We will hear arguments that it is not the technology that is the problem, it is those people who abuse it. It is both.
9
I must really live a sheltered life because I’ve been to some of the darker spots on the internet and have never seen an image of child abuse. I’m not saying this article is a lie, after all, maybe the reason I haven’t seen these images is because I haven’t been looking for them.
3
it obviously takes a concerted effort do so - but the common response to just look away from this problem enables its "successes"
3
Why do you go to the "darker spots" on the internet?
2
The internet is broken.
We are all now personal brands. Children, often with their parents' support and encouragement, post deeply personal information on the web. They often do this because the culture that the internet has enabled says there's a chance to be rich and famous if you can rise above the screaming crowd and go viral.
Facebook and Twitter were designed to foster the exact kind of addictive engagement that promotes this fundamentally narcissistic behavior. And they do it VERY, VERY well. (Just ask our Facebook elected president.)
I am not the least bit surprised that the internet has become a haven for pedophiles. It's a sanctuary for pretty much all of the despicable, deceptive and hate filled communications that are undermining our social and political communities.
I believed in the early internet (from 1994 into the early aughts) with all of the passion of my soul. The ensuing decade broke that trust and now I see the internet as the enemy of all the social, political and (yes, even) commercial values I hold dear. It didn't have to turn out this way, but it has.
We need to break out of our stupor and realize that the internet has become a Trojan Horse that we have naively let into our politics, our human relationships and, most tragically, our families.
Unregulated and emboldened, the internet is doing exactly what Zuckerberg promised us it would do: it is moving fast and breaking things.
We need to push back. This global carnage stops with us.
161
I agree you forgot SNAPSHAT the ghost company...even worse than FB perhaps!
3
"Children, often with their parents' support and encouragement, post deeply personal information on the web. They often do this because the culture that the internet has enabled says there's a chance to be rich and famous if you can rise above the screaming crowd and go viral."
I take considerable issue with this statement, which hews uncomfortably close to blaming both the parents and their children for these almost unspeakably grotesque crimes. It's also a gross understatement of it: neither you nor I can estimate how many children become the victims of sex crimes because they've shared too much personal information about themselves, period, let alone for purposes of seeking "a chance to be rich and famous." To state the obvious, none of the infants, toddlers or preschoolers described in the story even remotely fit this description.
2
Don't paint "the internet" with a broad brush. Global communication still does more good than harm, e.g. largely fueling India's rise out of poverty. The specific problem is social media and websites that let users upload whatever they want. That's where far more regulation and mandatory AI filters are needed.
1
This is sickening. An innocent child.
The burnout rate on folks who are hired to find these video and report, then delete them, is high. Many don’t last a month. And have PTSD. Can you imagine at this point there are not enough algorithms to block these. Can we just go back to vhs tapes. The internet will be the death of us.
53
For someone to do a job like that long term, they would need to be as disturbed as the individuals producing and distributing the material... I don't think anyone normal would want that kind of job.
1