National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, Child Pornography Possessors Arrested in Internet Related Crimes: Finding for the National Juvenile Online Victimization Study (2005)
Internet child exploitation poses complex challenges for law enforcement primarily because of three key attributes of the phenomenon. First, Internet based offending can quite easily and cheaply be trans-jurisdictional and multi-jurisdictional in scope. On the other hand, law enforcement agencies are in many respects jurisdictionally limited. The result is an inherent disequilibrium between the capacity of offenders to offend, and the capacity of law enforcement to respond. Second, Internet technology advances with great speed, and those advances are delivered to the market and taken up by Internet service consumers with similarly great speed. Accordingly, the technological dimensions of Internet child abuse are constantly and rapidly changing. The pace of technological change and widespread market adaptation to change typically far outstrips the capacity of legislators to pass necessary new laws, and often outstrips the capacity of law enforcement to retrain and re-equip. The result is that often law enforcement is fighting this year’s battles with last year’s tools and training. Third, Internet technology has facilitated the rapid proliferation of electronic communities whose members have no shared geography. In most social contexts this unifying power of the Internet is highly desirable. However the community building capacities that Internet technology provides have been exploited by those with a sexual interest in children. Relieved of the isolation and secrecy that goes with having such obviously anti-social interests, those with a sexual interest in children have used the Internet to create strong webs of mutual support and encouragement in the further proliferation of child sexual exploitation. In a word, Internet technology has meant empowerment for those interested in sexually exploiting children. Open source data around the volume of demonstrated interest in Internet child exploitation has also raised deeply troubling concerns about the extent of adult interest in child sexual exploitation. In other words, law enforcement is coping not only with the widespread empowerment of the Internet child exploitation community, but also with alarming indications about the size of that community.