It's midnight in an empty building in Cork when Rachel goes into the "room". Her fingers hover over the keyboard: "I'm lonely," she types. "My parents are never home. I hate school." A few moments later, comes the response: "I understand. I'll be your friend. How old are you?"
"Ten," she answers. "I know what it's like to be 10," her new friend confides.
"You do?"
"I'll take care of you."
Drawing Rachel deeper into intimacy, her questioner asks her seemingly innocuous questions, such as, "What are your favourite TV shows?"
Then, as the "friendship" grows, the questions become more personal: "What do you look like? What are you wearing? Do you have breasts yet? Do you ever touch them?"
And so, gradually and insidiously, Rachel allows herself to be "seduced" into the sick fantasy world of a paedophile.
"Rachel" was actually researcher Rachel O'Connell (31), a Cork woman who has subsequently become a European expert on child sexual abuse via the Internet and has addressed the House of Lords, London and the European Parliament. Currently a lecturer in forensic psychology at the University of Lancashire, Rachel spent four years at University College Cork infiltrating these harrowing networks as part of her PhD thesis. This work was sanctioned by the Government and conducted in co-operation with the Garda. The findings of this research contributed in a small way to an extensive review conducted by a Government sub-committee that was set up to explore the issues surrounding illegal and harmful content - including child pornography - on the Internet. Subsequently, the Government introduced the 1998 Child Pornography Act, which is considered to be a leading piece of legislation.
Like Alice in Through the Looking Glass, Rachel, who was 26 years old when she started the research, walked through the mirror of the paedophile's distorted mind into a virtual reality in which child sex abusers brag about their crimes and network with one another in real time through newsgroups in which they cleverly hide their electronic tracks. She spent more than 20 hours in Internet Relay Chatrooms dedicated to child sex, gathering information about adult sexual interest in children. This illegal activity, once underground, has burgeoned in the past three years due to easy Internet access.
Online victimisation of children has exploded in the US, and while there are no Irish statistics yet, there is no doubt that due to the international nature of the Internet, Irish children are as vulnerable as any others.
In 1998, there were 55 newsgroups devoted to "child sex" and Rachel explored three to determine the structure and social organisation of paedophile activity within newsgroups. Paedophile activity on the Internet is characterised by a co-operative structure whereby individuals network with one another and provide information and technical support to educate new users - to help protect them from detection.
The trading of images can sometimes have a complex game structure, in which paedophiles can only gain access to massive collections of images by first proving that they have large collections of images. Often, these people use e-mail or DCC - direct client to client communication - to hide their exchanges from prying eyes. Through ICQ (I seek you), paedophiles can discuss and engage in their activities on-line without any delay in communication.
They trade pictures, which are usually produced in "series", with names like "the Lisa series". These collections of images - which may number as many as 500 consecutive images - are often named after the actual children who are being abused in the pictures, which only adds to the degradation. On the Internet, paedophiles casually say things like: "I'm missing series four, pictures 43 and 52 of the Lisa series, can anyone fill these in for me?"
The most terrifying thing is that they don't think they are doing anything wrong. One network, called The Wonderland Club, typically celebrated sex with children as a desirable way of life. But images spread by such people are not "pornography", as we know it in the adult sense of erotica, Rachel argues. She believes that the term "child porn" is inappropriate to describe what are, in reality, visual records of sexual assaults on children. From an investigative point of view the images can be regarded as a record of the crime scenes i.e. actual evidence posted by paedophiles arrogant enough to believe that they will never be caught. These images, Rachel realised, could be analysed like any other crime scene in order to expose and arrest perpetrators.
She gained access to thousands of pictures of children, many of which were images from the appalling 1969-1979 period in Denmark when child pornography was decriminalised. The "Lolita" series produced then by the Colour Climax Corporation continues to be disseminated. In the past three years, however, digital scanning, digital cameras and easy Internet access have led to an explosion of new, contemporary images. The digital camera is the paedophile's ultimate tool, bringing images of child sex out of the closet and online, so that specific areas in cyberspace are pumping with indecent images of children. Many of these images are described as "Erotica", consisting of seemingly "innocent" views of children in various stages of undress.
Some of these images are of children on beaches taken with long-range lenses - disturbing in itself when you think that images of your children on holiday can become playthings in the sex acts of a sick mind. These progress to children in their own bedrooms in orchestrated and suggestive poses in which the child "pleads" for sexual knowledge. About one-third of the images depict blatant sex acts, which sometimes involve toddlers. The fact that these images are recorded in the child's bedroom with stuffed toys or cartoons in the background serves to normalise and sanitise sexual contact with children.
Usually the victims are children to whom the paedophile has easy access. But in some cases, paedophiles have groomed strangers' children through Internet conversations, then set up physical meetings with them during which they have sexually abused the children, sometimes taking digital pictures of their actions.
There were eight such cases in the UK last year, including one which captured media attention this week, when 33-year-old Patrick Green, an exports clerk from Iver Heath, Bucks, was jailed for five years after luring a 13-year-old girl to his home for sex after meeting her though an Internet chatroom. It is believed to be the first prosecution of its kind in Britain.
In an attempt to expose similar such incidents and bring paedophiles to the attention of law enforcement agencies, Rachel spent hundreds of hours analysing and cataloguing the worst kinds of depravity in 1,000 images. She categorised series of pictures into groups which she gave titles such as "waiting" and "ready and inserting", which is as much as anyone needs to know. Many of the thousands of images she viewed are too disturbing to describe, even if you could find words harsh enough to accurately convey the harm involved.
Filled with indignation that such abuse was allowed to continue in the public space of the Internet, Rachel would work on-line in one of the offices in the UCC psychology department from midnight until 4 a.m., night after night, the time when the paedophile rings are busiest.
The FBI call it the "risky shift" because paedophiles have a false illusion of security when they are communicating with each other in huge numbers. They become like gamblers on a roll, more likely to take risks with their security because the club feeling gives them the illusion of anonymity and safety.
Rachel learned the codes, the etiquette, the early hours journeying into chatrooms where adults with a sexual interest in children exchanged fantasies and alleged experiences of child sex.