Jenkins estimates that a hard core of sophisticated child-porn boards and newsgroups attracts a regular audience of 100,000, of whom, only a few hundred – the most inept – are likely to face legal consequences.
One of the most prized porn collections available is "KG," where nude photographs and videos of girls between ages 3 to 6 are available to anyone with minimal computer expertise, with a hard-porn version of adult-child sex, "KX," Jenkins notes. The child-porn trade operates on clandestine Web sites worldwide and evade detection through proxy, a "false flag" address, rendering the host computer and participants virtually unidentifiable. These sites exist for only a few minutes or hours, allowing child pornographers to stay one step ahead of the law, Jenkins notes. Yet, once enthusiasts, known as lolita lovers, learn of the new site, they flock to it immediately until it is disconnected.
Pornographers also use newsgroups like abpept-t, alt-binaries-pictures-erotica-pre-teen, a usenet group which is, however, available through virtually no legitimate servers. This offers the very worst of the material. Through following the exchanges on the boards and newsgroups, Jenkins was able to explore the child porn subculture without downloading any visual images – a necessary precaution since even looking at any such material would have been a criminal offense. "Our society has to proceed carefully, because the worst response would be to enact new sweeping laws suppressing adult or controversial materials on the Internet," he says. "Such a policy would threaten the usefulness of the Internet, while barely denting the specialized and heavily insulated child-porn subculture.
"We already have all the laws we need to combat child-oriented materials," says the Penn State researcher. "We just have to find a way to enforce them, including cooperation between police agencies and private businesses, particularly Internet-service providers across national borders."
Jenkins is a prominent researcher on the underlying roots of perceived social threats and the public's responses, known as moral panics. While his past arguments say that most panics are overblown, his most recent research found that a serious "fan" could easily collect 50,000 to 100,000 child-porn images, all illegal and very damaging in the types of activity depicted and the age of the children. While not downloading illegal images, he studied messages on the newsgroups, bulletin boards and message boards that provided the framework for the organizing community.
"There was an amazing amount of information about the child-porn subculture, not only about their attitudes and beliefs, but also how they get away with behavior that is criminalized in nearly every nation," adds the Penn State researcher. He emphasizes that sexually explicit adult material does not fall into this category of concern because the "crucial difference lies in the area of consent, where a clear distinction exists between sexual material depicting adults and that focused on children," says Jenkins. "Currently, police agencies focus on the small fry they catch in obvious stings," says the Penn State historian. "But it will take skilled personnel to mount an effective challenge to this computerized crime. Also, creating more public awareness about the child-porn subculture and pressing policymakers to act against major suppliers and trafficking institutions would help forestall the next generation of horrors like KG and KX."
Jenkins is the author of, "Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography on the Internet" (New York University Press).