Child pornography: A possible prelude to molesting

PANAMA. Traffic in online child pornography has exploded in recent years, and what has been dubbed as men just looking at pictures could now prove to be, in fact, nothing less than predators. A recent US government study of convicted Internet offenders suggests that the number of men who download explicit sexual images of children and then proceed to molest them is startlingly high: 85 percent of the offenders confessed to have committed acts of sexual abuse against minors? running a gamut from inappropriate touching to rape.

The study, called “The ‘Butner Study’ Redux: A report on the incidence of hands-on child victimization by child pornography offenders,” was published last year in the Journal of Family Violence. It was carried out by psychologists Michael L Bourke and Andres E. Hernandez at the Federal Bureau of Prisons in the United States, and is the first in-depth survey of such online offenders’ sexual behavior done by prison therapists who were actively performing treatment.

The study compared two groups of child pornography offenders participating in a voluntary treatment program: men whose known sexual offense history at the time of judicial sentencing involved the possession, receipt, or distribution of child abuse images, but did not include any “hands-on” sexual abuse; and men convicted of similar offenses who had documented histories of hands-on sexual offending against at least one child victim.

The psychologists’ goal was to determine whether the former group of offenders were “merely” collectors of child pornography at little risk for engaging in hands-on sexual offenses, or if they were contact sex offenders whose criminal sexual behavior involving children, with the exception of Internet crimes, went undetected.

Their findings show that the Internet offenders in the sample size of 155 male inmates were significantly more likely than not to have sexually abused a child via a hands-on act.

More than 85 percent admitted to abusing at least one child. They also indicate that the offenders who abused children were likely to have offended against multiple victims, and that the incidence of “crossover” by gender and age is high.

Dr. Hernandez and Dr. Bourke concluded in the paper that “many Internet child pornography offenders may be undetected child molesters.”

However, they also cautioned that offenders who volunteer for treatment may differ in their behavior from those who do not seek treatment. The findings are based on sex offenders serving prison, and many experts, including the officials from the Bureau of Prisions, believe it does not necessarily apply to the large and diverse group of adults who have at some point downloaded child pornography and whose behavior is too variable to be captured by a single study.

The findings stirred a vehement debate among psychologists, law enforcement officers and prison officers on the implications for public safety and law enforcement.

Those who are arrested on charges of possession or distribution of child pornography generally receive lighter sentences and shorter parole periods than sexual abusers in the United States.