By Patricia Reaney
Thu Feb 8, 2007 8:42 AM IST
found
at Reuters
LONDON (Reuters Life!) - Men who download and distribute child pornography on
the Internet share similar characteristics with convicted paedophiles, according
to a study on Thursday.
Traits such as problems with intimacy and social isolation could be markers
to help identify the minority of Internet pornography viewers who could go on to
attack children.
"There are many similar psychological characteristics between the two
sets of people," said Professor David Middleton of De Montfort University
in England. "We could identify a cluster of individuals in both
groups."
Although some Internet offenders have been found guilty of abusing children,
Middleton and his team found that most have not had any previous convictions.
Online child pornography is a growing problem worldwide. A UK-based Web
monitoring group, the Internet Watch Foundation, received more than 14,000
reports in the first six months of 2006 involving potentially illegal content, a
50 percent increase from the previous year.
Middleton, who presented his findings to a psychiatry conference in Prague,
compared the psychological characteristics of 213 convicted Internet offenders
and 191 paedophiles.
Difficulty in establishing and maintaining an age-appropriate relationship
was another shared characteristic between the two groups.
The researchers also identified a separate group of men who got on well in
employment and in relationships but who were not able to deal appropriately with
emotional stress.
"The majority of people don't appear to escalate their behaviour. But a
substantial minority do. Various studies have looked at this and put it
somewhere between one in six and one in 10," Middleton said.
"The more of these markers that they have in their psychological profile
might suggest they are more likely to have more entrenched problems which will
lead them to escalate their behaviour," he added.
Although the rapid pace of Internet usage has probably outstripped the pace
of research in this field, Middleton said, the psychological markers could be
used to help assess Internet offenders for treatment programmes and levels of
risk.
© Reuters 2007. All Rights Reserved.
Is seeing doing?
Child porn offenders "similar to paedophiles"
To protect our young from the dangers posed by paedophiles we must speak
up about the sexualisation of children in everyday life.
By David Wilson found at commentisfree.guardian.co.uk
What is the relationship between thinking and doing? Specifically, what is
the relationship between those who download pornographic images of children
from the internet, and those who act upon those images and go on to commit
sexual offences against children?
There has been very little research in this area, although one historic
American study suggested that only about one in every three people convicted
of downloading child pornography had actually committed offences against
children, and more recent British research would deny a direct causal link
between viewing pornography and subsequent offending.
New
research from De Montfort University - presented to the annual conference
of the Royal College of Psychiatrists - concludes that there is more of a link
than has previously been suggested and that people who download child
pornography from the internet share the same psychological characteristics as
paedophiles who commit contact offences against children, in that both groups
used the internet and sites depicting children to relieve stress (related to
work, family or money), or to seek pseudo-intimacy with children. This
research also suggests that "some, but not the majority" of internet
offenders had already engaged in contact offences against children - although
most had no previous convictions whatsoever, and that more research was needed
to develop offence-specific assessment tools to understand the particular
factors that led a person from simply viewing, to doing.
Research of this kind is valuable, and as someone who has worked
extensively with paedophiles both in custody and in the community, I - and
fellow professionals in the field - should also acknowledge that it is very
difficult to do. How do you establish trust? How can you be certain that what
you are being told is actually what the person believes, or did? How do you
protect your own sensibilities from the information to which, inevitably, you
are given access? The authors are to be congratulated for opening up this
territory, but their conclusions are not definitive, and are certainly not the
end of the matter.
There are at least two reasons for making this argument: the first related
to paedophiles and paedophilia; the second pertaining, more generally, to the
issue of thinking and doing.
I have yet to encounter a single profile that accurately describes or
accounts for all paedophiles, and I doubt that one will ever emerge. The label
"paedophile" seems to imply a once-and-for-all, taken-for-granted
category, but, in fact, masks a wide range of backgrounds and behaviours. Even
if the paedophile downloads child pornography, this variety of factors might,
or might not, lead him into contact offending against children depending on,
for example, his ease of access to children, or the presence or absence of
other issues in the paedophile's life, such as how socially isolated he might
feel.
So, too, we know in a common sense way that we do not act upon all, or any,
of our fantasies in our own lives. And we know that fantasy can serve many
purposes without the need for that fantasy to become "real". For
many (and it is difficult to be precise about how many), fantasy will remain
just that - unrealised - and, as such, could serve to reduce, not increase,
the amount of actual behaviour that is being fantasised about, thus performing
a positive social purpose.
This is important research, but I can't help wondering if we would do more
to protect children from the dangers posed by paedophiles if we spoke up more
loudly about the growing sexualisation of children in our everyday lives,
where young girls are encouraged to wear inappropriate clothes (so that they
look like scaled versions of adult women), and young boys are increasingly
under the same pressures, too, with a relentless advertising focus on their
"washboard abs" and bulging pecs. Perhaps if we challenged this
growing corporate, commercial paedophilia, we might, in the end, do more to
protect children from the threats posed in the chatrooms and on the internet.
