[Big Sexy]

CHILD pornography

By Andy Ho
April 8, 2006
The Straits Times

CHILD pornography is a growing scourge on the Internet. This month, the deputy press secretary of the United States Department of Homeland Security, Brian Doyle, 55, was arrested for using the Internet to transmit child pornography to a minor. Then Andrew West Reid, a children's TV artist who directed and produced shows your kids may have watched, was arrested for possession of child porn.

Last month, US officials busted a chatroom that broadcast child sex abuse - live and on demand - over the Internet through peer-to-peer file sharing programs and private instant messaging services. The authorities noted then that paedophiles now seek each other out through chatrooms and sometimes require new members to prove they are not police by sharing live videos of molestations.

The victims are getting younger and younger - even infants - and the images are getting more violent too, the authorities noted. This when the US has laws against child porn.


In Singapore, which has no such specific law, men have become notorious for travelling to Batam for cheap sex with girls as young as 14. Last month, the Government announced that Singaporeans who travel abroad for sex with minors will be prosecuted on their return when an ongoing Penal Code review is completed, at some unspecified date.

As to child porn, the relevant provisions of the Penal Code as it stands now, as well as Sections 3 and 4 of the Children and Young Persons Act, should cover situations involving such material, whether distributed over the Internet or otherwise. In 2001, the police said they would invoke the Emergency (Public Order and Prevention of Crime) Ordinance 1969 (Ordinance 5) Section 3(1) to immediately detain porn peddlers without trial should they threaten a police officer.

Checks by The Straits Times with local authorities showed that, otherwise, no measures are being taken proactively to curb Internet child porn here. So it was gratifying that Mr Mike DeNoma, group executive director for consumer banking at Standard Chartered Bank here, has decided to lead the local effort of an international coalition of businesses and non-profit groups trying to stop this US$20 billion (S$32 billion) business.

In partnership with card companies MasterCard, Visa and American Express, consulting firm McKinsey and advertising agency TBWA, StanChart is forming a working group here to fight this scourge. The idea is to follow the money and stop the payments. By taking away profitability, it will be difficult for perpetrators to sustain their most nefarious commercial activities.

These operators can not only hide their real identities electronically and get paid via the most secure e-commerce channels but also run round archaic cyber-crime laws, as Deputy Prime Minister S. Jayakumar noted at a regional legal meet last month.

So what is needed now is a specific and up-to-date child porn law.

One issue it must deal with is the putative ability to create child porn without using real children. Called virtual child pornography in US terminology, or pseudo photographs in British parlance, this has created legal problems for prosecutors in these countries.

By creating and manipulating digital images, paedophiles now claim their porn does not use real children, so there is no abuse. The problem with child porn is it is not just harmless fantasy, but a form of forced sex: There is child abuse and a permanent record of that abuse. Then there is further harm to other children since it is known that paedophiles often resort to such porn to seduce other kids into sex. They use it to persuade children that if other kids are doing it, then the behaviour must be acceptable. However, if no real children are used, the peddlers argue, no child is harmed.

How valid is this defence?

In fact, the state of technology cannot yet produce images of virtual children that are indistinguishable from images of real children. Computer-generated image consists of polygons, which are made up of pixels. Since polygons are formed from straight lines, you cannot create accurate curves: Artificial curves really comprise a number of straight lines put together to look like curves.

Then there are problems with colour, texture and shadowing. How real such images appear depends on the skill of the artist using the relevant software which, to date, still cannot create details like veins visible through skin. But cutting and pasting pre-existing images and morphing them does give more realistic pictures.

Existing software also cannot automatically create proper lighting effects, so the artist must put in the effects of light, such as shadows cast by one body upon another surface. Also, internal inconsistencies in the background, known as artifacts, will not appear in computer-generated images.

The game Final Fantasy, which became a great success on Sony's PlayStation 3, is an example of state-of-the-art computer-generated film. Even then, its images are far from indistinguishable from real people. Yet it cost US$115 million and four years to make, using 200 animators, 200 workstations and 1,100 custom-designed chips.

At 90 minutes in length, it was made up of 130,000 frames. At 25 frames per second, each second cost US$20,000 to make and each worker produced just eight seconds of film a year. Even then, Final Fantasy shows human skin only of the face, neck, arms and hands. Close-up shots of these body parts make up only a small fraction of the film, which implies that the cost of depicting human skin is even higher than the averages above.

In practice, it remains difficult to render realistic facial expressions, skin colour and texture - human skin both absorbs and reflects light - and the slight imperfections of physical appearance real people have. Our eyes are very sensitive to subtle details in texture of objects, especially images of people.

Creating realistic images of people - three-dimensional objects with realistic illumination conditions - continues to be very difficult. The time, expertise and resources needed to do so are huge. Why do it when real images are much less expensive, even free?

Still, we need a good law to deal with this defence that paedophiles might raise. In the US, with its obsession with its constitutionally protected freedom of expression, a 1996 child porn law was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2002 as unconstitutional, especially with the virtual child porn defence. Although Congress passed a new law in 2003, this is likely to be struck down if it is challenged.

The British, on the other hand, do not obsess over constitutional rights but pay more attention to whether children were harmed, the rationale being that children deserve a higher level of protection by the law. Thus they have successfully prosecuted child porn peddlers - even those who purport to trade only in pseudo-photographs - under their Protection of Children Act and the Criminal Justice Act.

Even if there are really 'pseudo-photographs' indistinguishable from real child porn, so no children were harmed in their production, British courts have held that they would still have a negative impact when shown to kids.

The British courts have focused on sentencing guidelines, rather than whether to acquit on the basis of a freedom of expression. This is the model Singapore should adopt. In sentencing, British courts have looked at various factors including how young are the kids involved; whether they were in obvious distress; if the offender took part in producing the image; whether the images were shown to a child; how many of such images the offender had; did he distribute them methodically or only used them himself; and so on.

Case-specific details can show that real children were involved. A forensic examination of the accused's computer hard drive will show what other websites he has visited, and what he did with downloaded images. These can help prosecutors make a better case: If the accused traded or sold his images secretively, this points to guilt. If the images were virtual, why behave furtively?

What was said in chats or e-mail messages may also reveal if the accused had assessed whether real children were used. All this will help establish a definite pattern of planning, practice and intent.


Meanwhile, Singaporeans looking for child porn, real or virtual, on the Internet, be warned even if there is no specific law against it yet: Police from the US, Australia, Britain and France are tracking you too. These specialists trawl the Internet for paedophiles, monitoring chatlines and forums to identify those who use the Internet to get child porn and kids for sex.

Since July 2003, more than 6,000 arrests worldwide have been made, 85 per cent of whom were non-US citizens who were nabbed when they crossed US borders.

It is high time for Singapore to have a similar law so perpetrators of this monstrous crime against children can be apprehended and dealt with here as well.