02Jan09b Re Decline of CSA (Mark)

Robin writes,

>> At my voir dire in 1998 the police expert repeatedly claimed that there had been a "tidal wave" of child pornography due to the Internet. ...  By the middle 1980s [child pornography]  was rare ... Starting in the 90s with the growth of the Internet it again became plentiful and more widely available than ever before. <<

Have you seen any proof of this growth?  

Although the U.S. government also claims the Internet has made “child pornography ... more readily available in the United States now than it has been since the late 1970s", in the same report it acknowledges there is no research which shows child porn is available in any quantity. (Child Pornography: The Criminal-Justice-System Response, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, March 2001, available at the NCMEC, p. 8)  

The government admits the measurement of the quality of child porn available is "an inexact science". It says there are no reliable estimates of the number of children affected and says what studies have been done lack scientific rigor and are based on extremely small sample sizes and therefore cannot be generalized to a larger population. (Ibid., 129.)   In addition, claims about the amount of child porn available were absent from the government's brief in the recent Supreme Court hearing for the "virtual" child porn case.   

_Mark