Stop The Hysteria: Most Child Porn Statistics Are Wrong

Thanks to Ell I’ve been reading an amazing article at Libertus called Statistics Laundering: False and Fantastic Figures. It carefully and comprehensively dismantles the myth of an “explosion” of child porn on the internet.

Essentially, it’s saying that the vast majority of child porn statistics quoted in the media and elsewhere are either inaccurate, wildly exaggerated or simply made up. The author has taken the standard figures quoted by politicians and drilled down to find the original source of the statistics. In far too many cases, the statistics are just plain wrong.

“it is estimated that 100,000 commercial websites offer child pornography”
This 100,000 number originated in 2000 and has often been attributed to “Canadian Police”. However, in April 2005 the officer-in-charge of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s National Child Exploitation Coordination Center said it is not their estimate and that they obtained it from a January 2002 magazine article which attributed the 100,000 number to the U.S. Bureau of Customs. Further, the alleged U.S. Custom’s estimate did not include the words “commercial” or “offer”. Considerably more recent estimates/statistics (2007-2008) place the number of commercial websites between 150 and 2,204, most of which remain ‘live’ for less than 50 days.

“child pornography is one of the fastest growing online businesses generating approximately $US3 billion ($3.43 billion) each year”
This ‘$US3 billion’ figure has no credibility and even if it had credibility in 2008, then it could be regarded as ‘good news’ because it would mean (based on previously promulgated ‘statistics’) that there had been no increase at all in the five years to 2008, therefore ‘child pornography’ could not be “one of the fastest growing online businesses”. The ‘$US3 billion’ figure has been promulgated far and wide since at least mid 2003, when Jerry Ropelato, a Utah-based anti-pornography crusader and content filtering software promoter, commenced publishing it on his web site InternetFilterReview.com, without citing a source for that or many of the other scary numbers he promulgates.

It’s quite a shocking thing to read, especially when you consider that child abuse and child porn are the premiere cause of sex panics in Western society.

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Now let me say that, in posting about this, I am not for a minute saying that child porn isn’t a problem or that it doesn’t exist.

What I do want to say is that these inaccurate statistics are being used by politicians to whip up fear in people’s minds, beyond the scope of any real danger. And that fear is then being used to push censorship and encroachment on civil liberties.

Thus, you get the Australian government planning to censor the entire internet and labelling anyone who disagrees as a child pornographer.

By the way, I’ll say it again, like I did in this post. I hate writing about this subject on my blog and I also hate the idea of using the dreaded “CP” phrase which is anathema to most people who make adult websites because of the negative traffic it might attract. But I’ve got to post this up. People need to know this stuff.

Every time I hear of some guy arrested for CP “and police found 500,000 images on his computer” I always wonder if it’s the truth. Were there really 500,000 CP images? Or were there only a couple and the rest were just legal porn pics? It won’t make him any less guilty of course, but why does the media feel the need to exaggerate the numbers?

Child abuse is a problem in our society and we all want to work together to prevent it. Unfortunately exaggerating figures is counterproductive in the long run. I’ll end with a quote from the article:

The writer is of the view that public policy should be evidence-based, not based on myth, fiction, fantasy, exaggeration, or misrepresentation of academic research findings, promulgated by advocacy organisations (whether overseas-based or Australian-based) no matter how well intentioned any such organisations may be.