Who's Looking at Child Porn Now (and Why)?

On Friday, more news broke regarding the child pornography scandal at the Pentagon that surfaced this summer. In July, it was discovered that more than 250 civilian and military employees of the Defense Department — including some with the highest available security clearance — used credit cards or PayPal to purchase images of children in sexual situations. This was out of the total 5,000 Americans who were discovered to be purchasing child pornography through the investigation.

This Friday, it was reported that only 52 of the suspects at the Pentagon were investigated and just 10 were charged with viewing or purchasing child pornography. The investigation evidently focused on individuals who had high-security clearance and could be subject to blackmail.

In July, news reports focused mostly on the Pentagon, presumably because individuals who are a part of national security should be morally and legally held to a higher standard than the average citizen. Likewise, the news reports on Friday focused on the low numbers of people actually charged - the disappointment in all probability again because of this standard and that people in these roles in our government should not be able to get away with such behavior.

However, there is another story in all of this that deserves coverage as well: What about the 5,000 Americans that were all purchasing child pornography with their credit cards or through Paypal? In spite of ever-increasing sophisticated methods authorities have to track the images and track down and arrest users, child pornography is a multi-billion dollar industry and among the fastest-growing criminal segments on the Internet. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children claims that around 20% of all pornography contains children, and the US Department of Justice estimates that pornographers have recorded the abuse of more than one million children in the United States alone.

Obviously, there is a story here about the children being sexually abused and record of their abuse being distributed and sold to millions of viewers. That story is horrible in and of itself. But the other story is of the viewers and purchasers of these images.

To be sure, some percentages of those individuals viewing the images are pedophiles — individuals who suffer from a sexual disorder that makes them attracted to prepubescent children. And some of those individuals will also sexually abuse children during the course of their life.

Nevertheless, a great number of the individuals viewing child pornography are not in this category. These individuals are often engaged in compulsive sexual behavior or "sex addiction," viewing pornography for hours at a time, searching for more and more intense images in order to get the same addictive rush. They stumble upon child pornography and are often horrified when they see it for the first time. But then there is something so taboo and so charged about it that they find themselves returning for the "high"... even when the thought of children being sexually abused makes their skin crawl and they feel sickened by it when they think about what they are looking at.

There is something about the Internet and its illusion of privacy and, even more importantly, is illusion of it being "unreal" that makes it the perfect venue for people to end up doing things that they would never consider doing otherwise — be it having affairs, gambling, stealing, shopping, exposing their genitals, or looking at child pornography. Even for people working at the Pentagon.