Police forces are turning to specialist charities and partner agencies to cope with the growing number of teenagers caught up in online child abuse. As new pornography laws come into force, frontline officers warn that young people are going down a pathway through extreme content that could lead to real-life abusive images of children. From Friday, it will be illegal to publish or possess pornography showing strangulation, incest – including some step-relations – or adults acting out fantasies of sex with under-16s.
The ban is built on years of campaigning that links pornography to real-life harm. DCI Gerard Smith, who leads the West Mercia team, told the Guardian: “There has to be a focus on the distributors in order to prevent the sharing of this material at source.” Smith’s specialist officers see the impact of violent pornography daily as they knock on doors in the early hours to arrest individuals who are viewing or sharing child abuse material. Across England and Wales every month, police arrest about 1,000 people – most of them men – for online child sexual abuse offences.
Turner said that on the dark web, offenders used sites that “resemble in style a regular porn site”. She added: “Dark web abuse sites are heavily linked to surface websites in style and content. The search terms may be similar, even the same.
But the videos will be of real children being sexually abused.” The officers say that men report having travelled through escalating extreme pornography habits to get to “a dark place”. Often the men we arrest tell us they are glad to have been caught.” The West Mercia officers, like others across the country, see so many young people – some in their early teens – in their work that they are looking at a pilot scheme that would send civilians to visit children who are viewing illegal material. Some of this is sexting between teenagers; some involves teenagers being exposed to violent images of child abuse through chat sites and forums.
Ultimately, we have to look at the big porn platforms. These are multimillion-pound companies.” New adverts from the Ministry of Justice have been circulating on social media warning extreme pornography users to “delete it” before 6 November or face prison sentences of up to five years. Clare McGlynn, a professor of law at Durham University and an expert on the legal regulation of pornography, wants to see the government make clear that the law was about cleaning up pornography sites.
She said: “I am concerned about misinformation online that this law is about policing what individuals have on their phones. This is about platforms removing very egregious content. What will they be doing about it tomorrow?” A report by the Conservative peer Gabby Bertin sparked the new law.
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