Online Crimes

This chapter focuses on those who access and/or trade child pornography images but who have no history or seeming motivation to engage in hands-on sexual abuse with children and those who access and trade child pornography and use the Internet to facilitate hands-on sexual contact with children through grooming. It examines the legal understanding of child pornography and issues relating to defining terms, and the problems with assessing the extent to which putatively pornographic material can be shown to have violated child pornography law. The question of pseudo-photographs and virtual child pornography, and their status under the law, is also discussed. A summary of offender typology is presented, with an emphasis on the pathology underlying sexual voyeurism and the offender as a collector of child pornography, as well as other classifications and characteristics relating to child pornography and paedophilic behaviour.