The Content of “Indecent Images”
1 May 2008It is often claimed that child pornography involves violence and sexual abuse against children. That claim is used to justify a vast amount of funding for organisations such as CEOP, as well as restrictive and illiberal legislation.
The book Child Pornography: Crime, Computers and Society provides insight into the content of indecent images, using a sample of 106 cases in Ireland, between 2000 and 2004. The content of the images was described by police officers who had investigated the cases, and the following (legal) definitions are used:
| Level | Definition |
| Level 1 | Images depicting erotic posing with no sexual activity |
| Level 2 | Sexual activity between children or solo masturbation by a child. |
| Level 3 | Non-penetrative sexual activity between adults and children. |
| Level 4 | Penetrative sexual activity between children and adults. |
| Level 5 | Sadism or bestiality |
The figures below - which can be found in page 123 of the book - refer to the most serious level of images involved in each case:
| Level 1 | Level 2 | Level 3 | Level 4 | Level 5 |
| 44% (47 cases) | 7% (7 cases) | 7% (7 cases) | 37% (40 cases) | 5% (5 cases) |
This suggests that, in roughly 44% of cases involving “child pornography” (in Ireland), people’s lives are being destroyed due to their possession of images which show no sexual activity at all.
2 Responses to “The Content of “Indecent Images””
May 3rd, 2008 at 6:49 pm
Thanks for this source.
Jan Schuijer and Benjamin Rossen reported similar findings in http://www.ipt-forensics.com/journal/volume4/j4_2_1.htm : 62% of the child pornography they surveyed did not show sexual contact.
May 4th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
“62% of the child pornography they surveyed did not show sexual contact.”
Thanks. The figures in the IPT Journal are useful, but potentially misleading.
Although the authors studied images from “child pornography publications”, the description of the images suggests that many would not fall within the legal definition of “pornographic” or even “indecent”. For example, images which are clothed (and not erotically posed) would not even be illegal in the UK. The study states that 8.5% of the images were clothed. Nudist images, which comprised 19.6% of all images in the study, would probably not be illegal in the USA.
If one ignores the figures for Level 0 and Level 1, one has an accurate indication of the content of images which would be illegal under US law. According to the figures for Level 2 and above, 45.7% of images which are illegal in the USA show no sexual contact.
Ignoring the figures for Level 0, one has an accurate indication of the content of images which would be illegal under UK law. According to the figures for Level 1 and above, 57.4% of images which are illegal in the UK show no sexual contact.