The Growth of Porn

Yesterday, police in Australia picked up a child pornographer who had a collection of 800,000 offensive images on his computer. Yes, that’s right 800,000 images - just short of one million. Can you imagine the time and effort which would go into collecting 1,000 different images and then repeating the process 800 to 1,000 times! What kind of obsessive behaviour would drive a man to such lengths and what sort of market is there in cyberspace that provides such a huge reservoir of illegal material.
Child pornography is monitored in USA by the United States Customs and they have estimated that at any one time there are over 100,000 web sites offering child pornography. These sites are constantly changing their names to elude prosecution and a large proportion of them are based in Russia or East European countries.
Equally astonishing is their estimate that child pornography generates 3 billion dollars annually.* Most countries now have law enforcement officers monitoring the trade and attempting to stop it. Every day in newspapers around the world there will be stories of arrests of pornographers but still the trade flourishes.
We have often said that behind every image there is an actual child being abused. This reality adds to our determination to find some more effective way to stop the growth in this terrible trade.

* Pornography as a whole is estimated to generate between $57 billion per annum though some have claimed the figure could be as high as 97 billion. The three largest markets are China, South Korea and Japan. The USA is 4th.