“One million images of child sex abuse have been seized by Lothian and Borders Police as part of a worldwide anti-paedophile dragnet. The force said 33 people were charged in the area, of whom 26 were found guilty, under Operation Ore. A force spokesman said: ‘Each of the million images seized in our area represents a child who has suffered.’” —icDumfries (UK)

You don’t often see quantitative analyses of kiddie porn. Probably it would be hard to estimate exactly how much child pornography there is floating around the internet. No doubt it would also be hard to estimate how much has been printed in the last century, particularly in Japan and the Netherlands. A million images? It sounds enormous when you first hear it, but probably that represents a very small percentage of the total number of images in circulation. Hell, one notorious British pedophile was caught with almost half a million images himself. If one guy can accumulate half a million images, then just imagine what half a million pedophiles — or even casual consumers of child pornography, if you can ever call such a consumer “casual” — must collect. Hundreds of millions? Billions?

However, though exact numbers may be difficult to ascertain, there are some obvious conclusions that you can draw from the very fact that masses of images exist. Evidently child pornography points to an enormous societal problem. And it is a very complicated problem that involves everything from individual psychology to national economics — everything from the lust of a man to the poverty in Bucharest. What’s more, since child pornography is an international problem, it is one that is particularly difficult to solve. In that sense it is like the drug trade. You can sweep up some consumers, raid some producers, and yet how are you ever really going to stamp out the problem? There is obviously demand, and even if nobody ever produced another image of child pornography, the millions already in circulation would guarantee supply. Is Pandora out of her box?

If you were a betting man, you’d put your money on the prospect that child pornography has become another one of the chronic issues besetting society, much like prostitution, drugs, organized crime. Maybe somebody will invent a pattern-recognition program so perfect that it could cleanse the internet of child pornography without deleting pictures of families celebrating birthdays, or maybe somebody will invent some anti-pedo salt-peter equivalent that will cause pedophiles to lose interest in children, or maybe one day — it sounds like a science fiction novel — children will rise up in some kind of organized rebellion against the adults that sexually exploit them. But if you were a betting man, you probably wouldn’t let these far-fetched solutions prevent you from putting your money on the prospect that it’s a chronic problem here to stay.

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