Last week, a report by the United Nations released a jaw-dropping statistic, reported by the AP and elsewhere:
The number of Web sites containing child pornography is increasing and more images show serious abuses, a U.N. expert said Wednesday. More than 4 million Web sites worldwide show images of children being sexually exploited, said the U.N. investigator on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography, Najat M’jid Maalla. “There is an increase in the number of sites recorded,” she told the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, citing research by the U.K.-industry group Internet Watch Foundation.
Four million seems a staggering number. The Internet Watch Foundation maintains a blacklist of child porn sites, and issued research in January, 2009 that stated the number was “fewer than 3,000.” The IWF website notes that, “The list typically contains less than 1000 live child sexual abuse URLs at any one time.” A blacklist maintained by Danish ISPs in February 2008, reported 3,863 blocked sites. And an Australian government blacklist published by the website WikiList listed 2,395 pages.
So where would these researchers get a figure like 4,000,000? I see two possibilities, either credible:
1) The four million number refers to child pornography images, not websites. In an interview with Reuters, “Interpol Secretary General Ronald K. Noble said its database now contains more than half a million images of children being sexually exploited.” Not four million, but at least in the same ballpark. A statistic of 4 million child pornography images in existence worldwide seems very credible.
2) The four million number refers to all pornography sites, not just child pornography sites. Research from 2004 and 2005 reported the total number of Internet pornography sites at 1.2 to 1.5 million, so a 4 million number is credible here as well. (Side note: counting the number of Internet pornography sites is difficult because the Internet porn industry operates by creating large numbers of free “feeder” sites that display free content in order to “feed” users to a few thousands pay sites).
In any event, we need some explanation from the U.N. here on this number that seems wildly at odds with other research.
Filed under: Filtering, Internet Safety, Policy
This is stupid. What credibility has an organisation when they come out with a figure which is so vastly different from those of the IWF? Pure hysteria, set to create headlines,
I did a quick Google on how much money claimed to be being made from child images. I saw figures up to $50 billion a year. Absolute total nonsense. I saw another figure of $5 billion a year. More nonsense.
I read an article where a journalist tried to discover where these figures came from. Thin air; no-one would admit to having released them. They have just been made up.
CP is bad but it does not allow the loony fringe that pedal this nonsense. They have their own agendas to get more publicity and funds for themselves.
If you read the data from the IWF and Cybertip.ca the criminal businesses operating this are few in number. The actual number of illegal websites is only a thousand or so.
The zealots include a huge amount of adult pornography to bump up the numbers. Anything that has teen in it is labelled as child when teen is probably the most common term in adult pornography and denotes young adults from 18-25 and in some cases 30 years old.
The whole thing is a mess. It is terrible there is any child images, it is terrible the law allows the prosecutors to do what they do with scant evidence (ie adult models labelled as children) and it is terrible those with a mission are praised for the nonsense they spout.
I think that anybody that watches child
Porn should be raped in the butt by a Clydesdale horse! Come On now….. If your that sick why don’t you watch beastiality porn it just as disgusting As child porn. Children are innocent and if you watch it then I can tell youre Best friends with the devil! I really didn’t think “child porn” was real until I seen this site. Me and my friend were watching Bastard Out of Carolina and was
curious and now were sick to our stomachs.