The tip of the iceberg

AMONG the many gruesome details to emerge in Andrew Shaw's trial for sex offences - of trading in indecent photographs of children on the Internet, of conspiring to rape a child - it was one of the more banal remarks which was perhaps most disturbing.

Shaw told the court that he had chatted to hundreds of people on the Internet about having sex with children, and that what they wanted most was to get hold of pictures of children having sex.

The magnitude of the Internet child sex trade comes as no surprise to enforcement officers and experts working in the field, but Shaw's evidence does shed light on the operation of paedophile rings.

The former executive officer with the Cleveland Army Cadet Force told the court that he had swapped pornographic pictures of children with men he had met on the Internet. It was to one of these men, Alan Lawson, that he offered a child for sex, although the rape never actually took place.

"I got a lot of trades back. It effectively was a case of you would send them and he would send his pictures, and you would discuss what I would like to do... or what he would like to do," he told the court.

Shaw was jailed for ten years for conspiracy to rape and possessing and distributing Internet child pornography in a trial which ended in February but can only now be reported. But he was just one of a vast network of paedophiles using the Internet, according to John Carr, Internet safety advisor to the children's charity NCH.

"The mystery was how these guys used to meet up with each other in the first place, but with the Internet it is a great deal easier," he says. "If you have got a small amount of technical knowledge and you are determined to find this sort of material, then you can.

"It can be a mixture of just swapping images, it can be live abuse, or it can be swapping children."

While British Internet Service Providers (ISPs) do not allow access to child pornography sites, it is relatively easy to find them by going through an overseas-based ISP. On some of these sites, the users' email addresses are displayed, making it relatively easy to spot who else is from the UK. Paedophiles can thus begin to correspond with one another, exchanging fantasies and, eventually, pictures.

The result is the formation of Internet paedophile rings, which can range from a small number of members to many hundreds. Alan Lawson, who was also convicted of conspiracy to rape along with Shaw and jailed for eight years, was a member of one of the most notorious, the Danish Paedophile Association. Other high-profile rings still in existence include the American Boy Love Association, while among those now defunct are the Norwegian Paedophile Group, one of the largest until it closed down, and the Paedophile Information Exchange.

While some of these rings are open to people with a low level of technical know-how, others are operated by people with a high level of technical sophistication.

One such was the Shadowz Brotherhood. Members of this ring used programmes to disguise their activities and a high-level of encryption to hide their identities, as well as measures to detect and block police officers. The subscription fee was 10,000 pornographic images of children, to prove the would-be member was a genuine paedophile.

But even paedophiles who use sites which make them anonymous or encrypt their activities leave a footprint, a trace on the computer network which shows where they have been. The biggest barrier to finding them, according to Mr Carr, is not technical knowledge, but resources.

"It is whether the police have the time and resources to do the huge amount of investigative work to crack these cases," he says. "It is not so much that it is technically difficult, although it can be, but it is whether the law enforcement agencies believe it is of sufficient importance, and if you go through enough hoops to cover your tracks they may just give up."

The most notorious Internet paedophile ring cracked by police was the Wonderland Club. Among its members was Gary Salt, who alerted other members to the dates and times when he would abuse children, so they could log in and watch it via a webcam.

Salt, along with eight other British men, was convicted in 2001 after the largest international police operation ever undertaken, Operation Cathedral, which discovered 750,000 images of children and 1,800 videos of abuse taking place. Of the 1,200 children who featured in the Wonderland pornography, only 16 were positively identified.

Although Salt was jailed for 12 years, seven of the British men were sentenced to between 12 and 30 months each. The law was subsequently changed to increase the maximum sentence for possessing and distributing child pornography from three years to ten.

But Wonderland was exposed not through trawling websites or technical wizardry, but through more conventional police work. Detectives investigating a child molester in California discovered he had relayed the abuse onto the Internet, and among the six men who had typed messages of encouragement was a member of Wonderland, who lived in Sussex.

But enforcement agencies realise they are only tackling the tip of the iceberg, although even this tip is of frightening proportions. The number of Internet child pornography cases in England and Wales has more than quadrupled in the last two years, from 549 in 2001 to 2,234 in 2003. In 1998, the year the framework for these type of crimes was established, there were 35 recorded offences.

'There is no doubt at all that it is very, very big," says Mr Carr. "If you look at the volume of child abuse images that have been seized by police forces around the world, it is running into tens of millions now. Before the Internet came along, police would find somebody with one or two images. This year, a man was arrested for being in possession of one and a half million."

Operation Ore, the worldwide crackdown on child pornography, produced a list of 7,200 UK users of one Internet site alone, called Landslide. But while the Internet has made the dissemination of child pornography easier than ever before, the Internet itself is not to blame, says Mr Carr.

"The Internet has undoubtedly transformed the whole business of child pornography and facilitated the formation of paedophile rings, which were simply not possible in that way before the Internet came along," he says.

"But if you stop people distributing the material, there will be no point in them continuing to make the images, and if you stop doing that, then fewer children will be getting raped and abused in order to make the images."