The Dark Net (14 page)

This dissociative imagination is most visible in several online paedophile communities. Users of these ‘legal-only’ forums congregate to speak openly about their desires, without posting or sharing any illegal material. There are a number of these hosted around the world – both open and closed – often with several thousand members and visitors. Far from being uncomfortable or secretive about their desires, in legal-only forums paedophilia is celebrated, with users proclaiming it to be a misunderstood, yet perfectly natural condition. One site I found offers ‘mutual support among child-lovers who are sexually attracted to boys’. Members of this group openly and proudly discuss their attraction, using an array of board-specific terminology: AF (adult friend), AOA (age of attraction), BM (boy moment – an experience that an adult has had with a boy in his everyday life). ‘Posters’, reads the forum rules, ‘have the ability to relate to boys in a magical way.’

According to Elena Martellozzo, these sorts of rituals allow boy- and girl-lovers to construct a board-specific alternative reality. Some of these forums establish complex and fantastical hierarchies, run according to exacting rules for building trust and progressing within the group. One forum studied by Martellozzo called the Hidden
Kingdom
^fn2
had a pyramidal structure based on medieval titles: the Lord was the overall site domain owner, while Knights of the Realm and the Royal Inner Circle had the power to moderate the forum and ban people who’d posted illegal material. To climb the hierarchy, Townsfolk had to post on the site at least fifty times a day. In many ways, these legal-only forums are just like any other: hierarchies, in-jokes and memes, complaints and frustrations. In another legal-only forum, I recorded grumbling about trolling from one regular poster; a complaint about the ‘selfish’ users who don’t give feedback on uploaded videos on a child pornography site; and several discussions about how law enforcement agents and child protection agencies are persecuting them for their natural and healthy love towards children.

The most well known of these groups, which has been in operation since long before the Web, is called the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). Founded in the US in 1978, their goal is to ‘end the extreme oppression of men and boys in mutually consensual relationships’, although in truth it’s hard to see how that really amounts to anything except the right of their members to fulfil their wish of having sex with children. NAMBLA members consider themselves to be misunderstood and persecuted in the same way homosexuals once were, and in the 1980s and 1990s they held public demonstrations in support of their cause. Most remarkably NAMBLA considers itself part of ‘a historic struggle’ and claims to support ‘the
empowerment
[my italics] of youth in all areas’ against what they call ‘rampant ageism’.

The relationship between these ‘virtual abuses’ and child abuse in the real world is not clear. Notwithstanding the gravity of possessing child pornography, academic studies that have examined the causal link between viewing material and physically abusing children are inconclusive. For some men, watching child pornography might spark an interest that will lead them to try to contact children. For others, a sexual interest in children remains a fantasy that they would have no intention of ever enacting. Many internet sex offenders like Michael say they would never offend ‘in real life’ and even give ethical or moral reasons for not doing so. For others, viewing material may even provide an outlet that prevents them from moving on to real-world abuse.

While there are more people being convicted for possession of child pornography now than twenty years ago, there has not been an increase in the amount of recorded physical sexual abuse. In fact, in the US, data aggregated from state child protection agencies pointed to a drop of 62 per cent since 1992, while in the UK the numbers have remained stable since the mid-1990s (although with an increase in emotional abuse). According to the American academic danah boyd, every new technology results in new anxieties about young people’s safety, but it’s often not borne out by the evidence. Despite fears about online predators, the vast majority of victims are abused by someone they know – fathers, stepfathers or another family relation or family friend.

But the internet has changed the way certain types of sex offenders operate. The police have recorded an increase in the proportion of
grooming cases that involve an element of online interaction, and are worried by the way groomers trawl through social networking sites actively seeking out vulnerable young people. According to Peter Davies, the former Director of CEOP, the ‘internet amplified, multiplied and in some cases almost industrialised [grooming] to a quite remarkable degree’. At the same time, patterns of abuse conducted over social media are changing. A CEOP and University of Birmingham study showed that physical contact was a declining motivation in online sexual abuse of children: there is a drop in online grooming to meet children offline, and an increase in the amount of purely online abuse. In one sting operation led bythe Metropolitan Police, a fake social networking profile was visited by 1,300 people, with 450 adult male profiles initiating contact. Eighty of them became virtual friends with prolonged communication via private chat, and twenty-three of them became involved in abusive sexual behaviour.

Tink Palmer is uniquely qualified to explain how the net has changed grooming. She is the Founding Director of the Marie Collins Foundation, a charity which helps victims of sexual abuse. When Tink first started working in the field, pre-internet, the accepted model of grooming was called the ‘Finkelhor Model’. It describes grooming for sexual abuse as a four-phase cycle. First, there is the motivation stage, when the abuser develops the desire to act. The second phase requires overcoming internal inhibitions – the emotional and moral qualms he or she might have. Once justified, he or she must also overcome external inhibitions: family members, neighbours, peers, locked doors. The fourth and final stage involves overcoming the resistance of the victim.

‘When I started,’ explains Tink, ‘grooming was a relatively slow
and careful process. A groomer would try to gain access to a young person, often by befriending the family or becoming part of their wider social circle. They would slowly try to build up a rapport with the child, and subtly try to turn the relationship towards sex, before drawing them into compromising situations.’ Tink does not think the internet has changed the model – it’s still a cycle of abuse – but the dissociative effect of communicating behind a screen has dramatically sped the whole process up, and reduced the external inhibitions – the physical barriers that make access to children difficult. Groomers still have to build up a rapport, explains Tink, just as they do offline. But they do it with new technology. ‘They spend hours monitoring their victim’s social networking profiles to learn about them, and then use that information – favourite movies, places they’ve been, a recent status update – to try to create a rapport.’ They will, she says, learn text and internet language and behaviour, and all the abbreviations that come with it, and she reels off dozens of expressions that I more commonly associate with teenagers: ‘do you have pos atm?’ (parent over shoulder at the moment?); ‘tdtm’ (talk dirty to me), and so on. Has it made grooming easier? I ask. ‘Definitely!’ says Tink. ‘It’s quick. It’s anonymous, it disinhibits. Groomers haven’t got to leave the house to sexually harm children.’

Many online groomers are extremely cautious, and give few or no details about themselves until they feel certain they are chatting to a real child. But the dissociative effect has made some groomers feel more disinhibited in what they say, which allows them to more quickly open up what Tink calls ‘the sexual phase’. It’s that critical moment when a groomer brings up the subject of sex with the potential victim, and usually when they have already isolated them
in private chats via MSN or direct messaging. In her careful study of twenty-three Metropolitan Police investigations into online grooming, Martellozzo found many are surprisingly public and open in their intentions. One had even posted naked photos of himself, while another was using a public social media profile which read, ‘I am a nice, decent, very loving caring guy with a pervy side – daddy/daughter, incest etc.’ Tink has also seen the groomers’ targets change their patterns of behaviour. If the traditional online grooming involved a very slow building of rapport, a growing number of cases now involve the
victim
opening up the sexual phase. It’s not to excuse the behaviour of the adult in any way – but Tink thinks it reflects young people becoming socialised to what behaviour they think is expected of them online. She tells me of one recent case involving a fourteen-year-old girl who, on first contact with a groomer in his twenties, told him that she was ready to have sex with him. Tink has seen young girls dangling older men along for fun or to relieve boredom online (it is, she says, called ‘bag a paedo’). But it’s not always quite as safe as young people might think.

A typical day for an analyst at the IWF is never easy. Twelve of them – a mix of men and women that includes a former fireman and a recent graduate – work at a nondescript business park just outside Cambridge. When I arrive, early one cold February morning, only a small printed A4 page with the words ‘Internet Watch Foundation’ on the door offers a hint as to what happens inside. The offices are
modern: spacious, bright, open-plan. A radio hums in the background and the staff cheerfully buzz about. Four walk into a secure room that’s about the size of squash court. Inside, a large peace lily hugs the far wall next to a Banksy painting. The only thing that sets these rooms apart from thousands of other twenty-first-century offices is the absence of family photos on the desks.

On his very first day, a decade ago, Fred Langford went through the painful ordeal that all new staff at the IWF are subjected to: viewing the images and videos in ascending order of obscenity, from Level 1 to Level 5. It’s the final test for the job, really the only way of knowing whether new recruits will have the measure of it. At the end of the session, which is usually held on a Friday, they are told to take the weekend to make up their minds about joining. After seeing Level 1, Fred recalls thinking, ‘Oh, this isn’t so bad!’ By the time he’d gone through the whole spectrum, he’d changed his mind. ‘As I cycled home, I had this Level 5 image going round and round in my head. I couldn’t get rid of it.’ He told his partner he couldn’t take the job after all. But by Sunday evening, like most new recruits, he’d changed his mind. ‘I decided I wanted to help – to do anything I could to stop this.’

In 2013, analysts at the IWF documented around seven thousand URLs that contained scenes of torture and rape: often of children under ten. It’s hard to imagine how anyone can maintain their sanity in these circumstances. That’s why all staff, even the head of media, are put through a rigorous annual psychological examination. They are encouraged to take breaks whenever they need, leave early, and have monthly counselling. But it’s still difficult, even for experienced analysts. Everyone here does what they can to keep their private
and professional lives separate. That’s why there are no family photos on the desks. ‘Each one of us has our own personal coping mechanism,’ says Fred.

Staff at the IWF must sometimes feel like King Canute, trying to hold back a tide of reproducible, shareable files from appearing online. When the IWF was founded in 1996, its job was to target 100 illegal newsgroups. By 2006, that number had risen to just over 10,000. In 2013 it was 13,000. The IWF and the police are frequently faced with new challenges. In 2013, the IWF started receiving dozens of complaints about the same website, but every time they checked the URL, all they saw was mainstream adult material. After careful forensic work, the IWF’s technical researcher discovered that if you’d arrived there via certain other sites in a certain order, a trigger would kick in and send you to a hidden version of the same webpage. This was known as a ‘disguised cookie site’.

Despite the difficulty, they have achieved some considerable successes. In 2006, the IWF registered 3,077 domains hosting child pornography. In 2013 this was down to 1660. They have been particularly good at shutting down UK-based sites. In 1996, 18 per cent of all sites were hosted here; now that’s under 1 per cent. It’s good, but it could be better, Langford accepts. And unlike in the 1980s, cutting down on the local supply is not enough. Today an image could be created in one country, held on a server or website in another, and viewed by someone in another. Crossing international jurisdiction can be infuriating, especially when content is hosted in countries where law enforcement or internet service providers seem less concerned about the subject. Langford tells me of a ‘revenge
porn’ website that is hosted in Germany, where he estimates at least half the videos and images are of people – mostly British girls – under the age of eighteen. He’s been trying to get the German internet service provider to act for weeks, but to no avail.

The overwhelming majority of the material investigated by the IWF is on the surface web, accessible with a normal browser like Google Chrome, usually hosted in countries where domestic police are uninterested, incapable or under-resourced. Often, a link will take users to a ‘cyber-locker’, a hacked website where files are stored without the owner realising. Around a quarter of all referrals received by the IWF are from commercial sites, which ask for credit card payment for access and are advertised through spam mail.

The IWF doesn’t investigate URLs of Tor Hidden Services. Firstly, because they receive very few reports of material on there, and secondly, because if they did, there isn’t very much they could do about it. Tor Hidden Services can be hosted on any computer, anywhere in the world, and the complicated traffic encryption system used by Tor means it’s very difficult to work out exactly where it is or who they could contact to take it down. But Tor Hidden Services are vital to understand why the IWF’s job is so hard, because they serve as a hub that produces new material and recycles old, making it available to a wide audience to view, save and share again (often using peer-to-peer file-sharing technology). Content on these sites is uploaded anonymously using Tor and encrypted file sharing and downloaded by other users, decentralising and widening the distribution base of material. Every time a Hidden Service is taken down – it’s hard but not impossible – the community dusts itself off, reorganises and starts again.