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You’ll be familiar with the type of article in question, they’ve become commonplace enough during the internet era. You’ll see them in broadsheets, local press, tabloids, then echoed and amplified via social media. The story is always similar, following the same pattern time after time.
A man (for it’s almost always a man) has been ‘caught’ by police in possession of indecent images of children, the number and category of severity will vary, and in most cases the sheriff will hand out a non-custodial sentence involving unpaid work and time on the sex offenders register. The accused inevitably had pled guilty, as the evidence had already been collected on the day their house was first visited by the police and so there was never any doubt as to the outcome.
People read these articles in different ways. At one end of the scale, some will skim it, tut about the depravity, and then move on with their lives. Others are more militant, sharing the article widely and ensuring the ‘beast’ is added to online lists of sex offenders, and vocally decry the lenient sentencing, accusing the police of not doing enough. Most people will be somewhere in between.
What people don’t tend to question, and what the press don’t even bother to discuss, is what lies behind the headlines. People don’t know, for example, that more than 4 in 5 of these cases go completely unreported by the media. For every single time the ‘monster’ is outed, there are at least 4 more who quietly complete their sentence and move on with the rest of their lives largely unnoticed by society.
Another staggering statistic is that although a lot of money is spent on this police function, they only have the resource to attend a tiny percentage of the addresses flagged up as having received indecent content to their IP addresses: less than a single percent. So, for every time you read one of these articles there aren’t 4 people quietly slipping through the net – there are 400. At least 400, because the police’s methods aren’t catching everyone who should be on their ‘hit list’. Indeed, the most proficient users of the dark web, those experts with online anonymity, won’t be tripping alarms in the first place and don’t run the risk of facing justice.
This information isn’t supressed, it’s not ‘covered up’ like the self-styled ‘Paedophile Hunter’ conspiracy-theorists would suggest. It’s readily available, and indeed the social-workers and SOPU (Sex Offenders Policing Unit) officers who work with the people convicted of these crimes are fully aware of how futile the current system is. However, so long as the courts continue to convict this tiny percentage, and the press continue to tell the story of some of them: to the outside world justice appears to be being served. This process is put on a pedestal as an example of the Criminal Justice System working as a ‘deterrent’, and the police employing advanced technology and modern methods to ensure this type of abhorrent offending has no place in our society.
It isn’t working.
The numbers of IP addresses on the ‘hit list’ continues to grow, and yet the sentencing and convictions maintain their averages, capped by resources. The news articles are actually going the other way. Having been big stories 10 years ago, they only really reach the limelight these days if the person involved is someone of note; a celebrity or somebody in a profession like teaching or caregiving where the obscenity of the crime is amplified by their station. Or if it’s a slow news day, it’s always easy enough for the county court journalist to throw an article together in a few minutes if they need a bit of padding for the day’s publication. It’s a copy/paste job, just change the names and the numbers and it’s an easy way to generate clicks on their webpage.
I was a slow news day. I’m nobody of note, and it was a coincidence that of the 3 court rooms open on the day, the resident journalist had opted to sit in mine instead of the others. But here I am, not one of the many, many offenders slipping through the net: I’m one of the ones serving as an example, as a deterrent, and as such, nobody knows better than me how ineffective the system is.
My actions were unforgivable, I accept this and wouldn’t even think to raise a single word in objection. My guilt and self-loathing will be eternal, my apology infinite, as I am reminded by my family and friends (or lack thereof) situation on a daily basis how my offending was the stone in the pond that caused the irreparable ripples through so many peoples’ lives.
If the hundreds of thousands of people in the UK committing these offences were to be aware of my story; (I tell myself) if I was able to talk to them about the complete devastation awaiting their lives if they are caught, about the knock-on effects to the people they love the most in the world: that would be a deterrent. Yet I know this will never be the case. My story will never work as a deterrent, because my full story is never told. Other than the people in this field; the police, social workers, rehabilitative experts, medical professionals such as psychiatrists and behavioural psychologists, the only story anyone in ‘real life’ is going to read is the tabloid version decrying the ‘sicko’.
My journey through this broken, unfit system and its treatment of online sex offending as part of the same laws and legislation that has been around long before the internet even existed has been eye-opening for me. It’s not just a ‘square peg, round hole’ scenario, it’s a pineapple and a keyhole.
Without addressing this online offending directly, as a specific crime with its own root causes and entirely separate to ‘traditional’ or ‘real-life’ sex offending, the system will continue to fail. It will fail to bring to justice the huge numbers of people who continue to offend with no consequences, it will fail the victims in the indecent images, and it will utterly fail to address the rising tide of this crime happening in the first place.
One thing that needs to be made abundantly clear, one thing that should be common knowledge, is that there is a significant difference between this specifically-online offending, and traditional sex offences. The vast majority of people accessing or downloading these images are not paedophiles, have never had any sexual interest in children, and left unchecked would never go on to commit more serious offences. This is a challenging concept for a lot of people to get their heads around, as it’s very easy to simply assume that the only reason anybody would ever access this content would be because they enjoyed seeing it. This is most often not the case.
There can be a varied number of reasons for people who commit these offenses, and to understand the complexity of this reality it requires looking at the stories that the tabloids don’t tell. The ‘who/what/why/when/how’ parts of the offending that are never touched on are instrumental to the root cause analysis, but they don’t generate the same outrage or traction and so are simply avoided as inconvenient.
A huge number of the people convicted of these offences have significant histories of mental illness. This in itself shouldn’t be a tricky concept to grasp, and it’s certainly not just a convenient defence for the lawyer to trot out to mitigate the sentence severity: happy, healthy people with sound mental wellbeing don’t want to view indecent images of children online.
Another significant chunk of the addresses on the police ‘hit list’ have been triggered by the unsafe online behaviours of children themselves. Young people of an age for legal, consensual sex can cross the line of legality by recording and sending sexual content to their partners. Indeed, it doesn’t even need to be sent – simply creating and possessing the recording is a crime. We also know that these types of activity are happening before children turn 16, it’s simply a modern reflection of experimental behaviours that have always been a feature of adolescence.
There are now several generations of people who have effectively been ‘raised on porn’, having had internet pornography normalised as part of life from an early age, and within this population is a recognised trend of seeking to push boundaries with the material that is viewed. Many heterosexual people will view homosexual pornography to push boundaries, engaging in an online behaviour that would never strike an interest to them in ‘real life’. In the same way, people view far more extreme pornography online than they would ever want to indulge in themselves, examples being rough sex, BDSM and more niche kinks. In many situations, the access of indecent images of children has come as a result of very unhealthy, boundary-pushing behaviours.
The technology the police use is very clever stuff: some of it is software shared by the FBI that analyses the digital fingerprint of the traffic going to and from the IP addresses. It’s looking at the 1s and 0s of the files themselves via the user’s Internet Service Provider, and automatically flagging up files, or sections of files, that are on record as being indecent images. AI is employed to identify content in the images themselves (these could be still pictures or moving video) that could potentially be illegal, and again this is fed back onto the police database and adds more addresses that can potentially be visited by officers and technical experts in a ‘dawn raid’. The days of a person having to hand their laptop in to PC World for illegal material to be highlighted are long behind us – the current process is automated and is effective, and yet the system that acts on this information remains stuck thoroughly in the past.
The legislation that is referenced in an online sex offender’s Basic Disclosure Certificate is from 1978. To give some perspective, this predates the actual invention of the internet by 11 years. To expect this legislation to be fit-for-purpose would be utterly ludicrous, and yet this is the situation we are in, and very little is being done about it.
As to what should be done differently, I do not have the answers. I have some ideas that have come about as part of my lived experience going through, and dragging my family through this torturous journey, but this problem is so far beyond one individual’s ability to solve it’s not even worth contemplating.
One thing I do know though, is that nothing will change without raising awareness, and so I want to do what I can to share my understanding with as many people as I can.
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