The Consumption of Internet Child Pornography and Violent and Sex offending

One might assume that the consumption of child pornography would be a risk factor for hands-on sex offenses. According to this article, it states that there is still an ongoing debate on whether these consumers of child pornography would make them want to commit hands-on sex offenses. It would make sense that when a person gets intrigued by something, he/she may want to do whatever it is to satisfy him/herself.

This article actually goes in depth of defining what child pornography is and the punishment for sale production, and possession of it. What I found interesting is that the legal definition of what child pornography is varies from country to country. Also the punishment varies for the crime. Well since this article dealt mainly with the population in Switzerland, it data from other researchers and collaborated with their research to back up their conclusion of the research. The research of course had its limitations, yet the results were astounding.

It may have proved a lot for that one country, but for the rest of the world, that would have to be a totally different case. The study conducted for this topic, was done for over a period of six years, which started in the year 2002. That would be quite some time to conduct a study but the results were quite an outcome. Since the main focus was on a particular population in Switzerland, the researchers did their homework on how child pornography was viewed in that country and also how the law handled it. According to the Swiss penal law, "possession of pornographic material depicting sexual acts with children, excrement, animals, as well as violent sexual intercourse", and also it does not specify the age which discriminates children from adults nor stating the characteristics of pornography.

With this law, the article goes into detail about how the main question of whether the consumption of child pornography is a risk factor for hands-on sex offenses. During their research, they found that the typical user of child pornography would be male, also the evidence showed that the consumers would have a high educational background. According to the findings by Wolak, Finkelhor and Mitchell, "38% out of 1713 convicted consumers of child pornography users in the U.S had a high school diploma, 21% went to college at some point, 16% held a college diploma, and 4% finished their education at a doctoral level".

Towards the end of the research, basically the consumers were just guilty of consuming the explicit material and they were not likely to commit hands-on sex offenses. The sample group for this experiment was a group of 231 people who were suspected of having consumed illegal pornographic material. These materials were consumed when a website that was owned by the US Company Landslide Productions distributed illegal pornography over the internet. The website was eventually shut down, but it was discovered that over 400 people had consumed the