In England and Wales, 850 men a month are arrested for online child abuse offences. They come from every walk of life: teachers, police officers, bus drivers, doctors. Those on the frontline are warning of another alarming trend: a significant shift towards younger offenders among those picked up for watching illegal material.
The arrests are just one metric pointing towards a spiralling global crisis. Last year was the worst on record for instances of online child sexual abuse imagery, with the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation acting to remove content from 300,000 web pages, each containing at least one, if not hundreds or thousands, of illegal images and videos.
Now, police, charities, lawyers and child protection experts are asking what is driving this tidal wave of offending, and finding one common thread: the explosion over the past 10 to 20 years of free-to-view and easily accessible online pornography. Material so violent it would have been considered highly extreme a generation ago is now readily available on iPads, desktops and the phones in teenagers’ pockets. A growing body of research is beginning to warn of how problematic porn habits can be a pathway into viewing images of children being abused.