Images of Abuse : A Review of the Evidence on Child Pornography

Commissioned by the NSPCC, this report provides an overview of the findings from a literature review into our past and current knowledge of child pornography, or 'images of abuse' as it is now referred to.

With very little written specifically on child pornography, and with much of the data subsumed within broader studies of child sexual abuse and sexual exploitation, the report goes some way to outlining the findings extracted and collated from studies conducted over the past two decades.

These include: how child pornography has been, and is currently, defined; what is known regarding its scope and character (within and beyond the UK), findings relating to patterns of production, distribution and consumption, the effect upon children and young people used to produce child pornography.

There is also an extensive chapter detailing the impact of computer technologies in the transformation of child pornography into a global cottage industry, where boundaries between consumers, distributors and producers of child pornography become blurred.