The Child Porn Epidemic in Australia.

• Child porn at “epidemic proportions” say AFP
• Arrests up by 30% since 2010

Not so long ago, allegations of child abuse would be enough to strike fear in any community.

Who can forget the notorious pedophile Dennis Ferguson, who was convicted of kidnapping and raping three children in Queensland in the 1980s and served 14 years in jail for the crime.

Dennis Ferguson

Ferguson was straight out of the central casting for the stereotypical character of a creepy
convicted pedophile;  angry, slightly crazed looking with a
tendency to poke his tongue out.

Since his release in 2004 he has been free to live in the community, and at that time, whenever residents discovered he was living in their community, he was invariably hounded out of town and relocated elsewhere.

In the space of a few short years since then, society’s attitudes towards pedophilia and child sex exploitation material has changed considerably.

The spate of arrests, charges and convictions, aided by the prevalence of such offending in the Catholic Church no doubt, has led to a state of almost nonchalance whenever new child sex abuse arrests are made or when child exploitation material is found on an otherwise “respectable” individual’s computer equipment.

We don’t have to stray far for examples.

Andy Muirhead

This week alone, former popular “boy next door” presenter of the popular ABC family show “The Collectors,” 35 year old Andy Muirhead, faced Court on child porn charges and is expected to enter a “guilty” plea.

Also this week, the son of British comedian Ronnie Barker of “The Two Ronnies” fame, 44 year old Adam Barker faced Court on child porn offences.

Police seized a computer from Barker’s home in Ealing, west London, which allegedly contained 2,601 indecent images of children, of which two were said to be in category five, the worst level including photographs of sadism and bestiality, 24 in category four, 153 in category three, 354 in category two and 2068 in category one.

According to the Australian Federal police, child pornography has now reached “epidemic proportions” in Australia, with pedophiles increasingly recording footage of themselves molesting children and swapping the images with other abusers over private internet networks.

With the rise of file-swapping, the images and videos are used as ”currency” by abusers to buy their way into transnational groups, which trade the files.

Police report that in some arrests they have found terrabytes of material, too much to store on a personal computer.

There was a 30 per cent jump in the number of Australians arrested for child pornography offences in 2010-11, from 136 to 180.

The head of the Australian Federal Police’s serious organised crime unit, Assistant Commissioner Kevin Zuccato, recently stated that it was accurate to describe the level of child pornography in Australia as at “epidemic proportions.”

He stated that where federal police would once have been overwhelmed by finding “hundreds of images” on a suspect’s computer, they were now finding “hundreds of thousands” and even “millions.”

If you think the “epidemic proportions” claim is an exaggeration, click here (okay for work).