"Diseased": Pedophilia, child pornography and IT



  • Hello fellow WTF fans,

     

     I'm the longtime lurker with the changing name of "St Mary's ..." and I just registered because of Remy Porter's "Diseased" from today. In that story, Darren was caught in a pedophilia police sting.

     This remembered me of an article I once read, saying that 45% of the people possessing child pornography had a university/college level education and 30% of them were working in a IT or engineering job. Here it is: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-244X/9/43

     What interests me is... where does that bias come from? Is it because IT people are commenicating inherently much more online than offline, and are prone to committing criminal acts rather online than offline? Can it be argued that one would rather use illegal pornography online than sexually violate a family member or an acquaintance, giving the role the internet has in one's daily life?

     The positive thing this study is telling: Most (92.3 %) of people convicted for possessing child pornography did not commit any criminal act again in the 6-year time frame, which is very high compared to other sexually motivated criminal acts.

     

    Kind regards,

     the turtle with R, Java, Perl and BASIC experience.

     

     



  • Wow a legit post.  Looked at first like a spam but I took the time to read it.

    I agree with the theories that you posit.  IT people are online more, therefore if they're going to commit a crime, it's more likely for it to be online than people who aren't online much.  

     



  •  Yes, that's what I first thought, too. But this also leads to another question: These 230-ish cases emerged during the Swiss "Operation Genesis" where the child pornography consumers were caught by their credit card data - shouldn't exactly these IT people be more aware of what can happen when some other people, be it police or con men, get hold of credit card information?

      During the child pornography debate in Germany, however, it was said that child pornography cannot be a flourishing industry, as consumers are now very aware that credit card data can be used to track them.



  • I would say that anyone in IT has a higer chance then average of not being a idiot, but that doesn't mean that aren't more then enough idiots in IT. Also, IT is pretty large, if you pull cables for a living you are working in IT, if you manage a group of programmers you are working in IT. Also just to reiterate, most people are idiots.

    I would assume it is easier to get access to child porn on the internet then offline by asking around or something, so perhaps some level of competence with the internet is needed to even be able to commit criminal acts.




  •  I always wondered why nobody wrote a virus that downloads kiddie porn to your PC, thereby making you a sex offender if you see it and if you get rid of it, you're destroying the evidence!



  • @ekolis said:

     I always wondered why nobody wrote a virus that downloads kiddie porn to your PC, thereby making you a sex offender if you see it and if you get rid of it, you're destroying the evidence!

    Actually that has been a successful defence in the past.

    As to the online vs. offline -- It's a LOT easier to catch the people who get their pedo-porn online.  Of course catching the originator's is more difficult as most of those who have been caught have been getting their online porn from sting sites.



  • What sucks about sex offender stats like these is they don't say the age of the "victim" (note: I use quotes because the underage person isn't always a victim), so you don't know if they got busted for nailing jail-bait or pre-teen. On top of that some juristictions will actually treat Hentai as a medium for child-porn to be in, this has the effect of reducing possible outlets for pedophiles who are unlikely to become child molesters, since the primary concern of handling child-porn situations is to protect the children.



    Edit: Finished reading the study. So to deal with the questions the poster asked:
    @badly coding turtle said:

    What interests me is... where does that bias come from?

    The quoted article was doing a study on the Swiss and clearly mentioned that there was a bias because the perps would need to know English and how to use the internet.
    @badly coding turtle said:
    Is it because IT people are commenicating inherently much more online than offline, and are prone to committing criminal acts rather online than offline?

    One would most likely commit a crime that used the domains of knowledge they were most comfortable with regardless of the act.
    @badly coding turtle said:
    Can it be argued that one would rather use illegal pornography online than sexually violate a family member or an acquaintance, giving the role the internet has in one's daily life?

    Generally IT has a fair amount of stero-typical nerds, who do not enjoy physical or social contact if it could be avoided, they would logically most likely gravitate towards acts which minimize this. Furthermore, they are more likely to have a strong immagination and consume fantasy materials (I'm including Sci-fi stuff as fantasy), as such they are more likely to develop a healthy fantasy/reality split and can distinguish between the two. The more they escape into the fantasies, the most fantasies they consume, eventually this overlaps into "deviancy" and you get people who use CP to help with a fantasy, and obviously having CP of a real person is more likely to be evidence of harm being done to a person, however what that study did show was that the people who consumed CP instead of made it were less likely to actually hurt anyone.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Lingerance said:

    On top of that some juristictions will actually treat Hentai as a medium for child-porn to be in
    Not just Hentai: Former teacher pleads guilty to downloading 'Simpsons' porn.



  •  @stratos said:

    I would say that anyone in IT has a higer chance then average of not being a idiot, but that doesn't mean that aren't more then enough idiots in IT. Also, IT is pretty large, if you pull cables for a living you are working in IT, if you manage a group of programmers you are working in IT. Also just to reiterate, most people are idiots.

    Yeah! That's why we have The Daily WTF! :) 

    Pulling cables - right, that's something I neglected. Am I also in IT because I use databases to gather information about tropical diseases at my job?

    I would assume it is easier to get access to child porn on the internet then offline by asking around or something, so perhaps some level of competence with the internet is needed to even be able to commit criminal acts.

    Today, child pornography is sought and offered in these very special kinds of forums - somebody not internet-savvy would not even know how to search for them, or the chances would be much lower that he (she - are there any female child pornography consumers?) gets to know such a "special interest" forum by chance.

     I like controversial topics...



  • @PJH said:

    @Lingerance said:
    On top of that some juristictions will actually treat Hentai as a medium for child-porn to be in
    Not just Hentai: Former teacher pleads guilty to downloading 'Simpsons' porn.

     OMFG - out of curiosity, I've seen such porn already. Hentai too. I should never visit the U.S. :)

     What I certainly do not like is that in all this public outrage, the victim is simply forgotten. While a (very controversial) point of view could argue that consuming child pornography (in contrast to sexually violating a child) is a victimless crime because the criminal act - the production of pornography - has already taken place, we could agree that some child pornography laws cover too much. Like in the cases of Hentai or the Simpsons TV series ;-)

     Since a week or two, in Germany we have a "To catch a predator" clone called "Tatort Internet - schützt endlich unsere Kinder". Since, at least one of the "predators" has gone missing, and in another case, a childcare home manager was uncovered as a "predator" - and for full five months, the TV team did not share this knowledge with either the owners of the childcare home or the police. That's how our children are protected. Such TV shows only encourage suspicion towards the internet and especially chatrooms instead of telling the parents how they can both improve their confidence in their children and helping the children to be more careful - something like this "If you are drunk, I will drive you home and I'll ask no questions" program that exists in the U.S.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @badly coding turtle said:

    @PJH said:

    @Lingerance said:
    On top of that some juristictions will actually treat Hentai as a medium for child-porn to be in
    Not just Hentai: Former teacher pleads guilty to downloading 'Simpsons' porn.

     OMFG - out of curiosity, I've seen such porn already. Hentai too. I should never visit the U.S. :)

    Or Australia (It seems to be not uncommon over there.) Or the UK.



  •  @PJH said:

    Or Australia (It seems to be not uncommon over there.) Or the UK.

     From Bavaria I know a case where an apartment has been searched because of Hentai images showing children having sex, but this resulted in no criminal sentence as far as I know.



  • I gotta agree with you. IT people are online quite a lot. But mostly engineers and IT professionals were caught with porn - a find that point disturbing


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