Online Killers (16 page)

In the U.K., at least 600,000 male internet users are hooked on cyber sex.

Cyber sex is the crack cocaine of sexual addiction and it reinforces and normalizes sexual disorder. A public health disaster is coming because very few are recognizing it as such or taking it seriously.

Recent studies, including the MSNBC/Stanford/Duquesne Study, agree that men prefer visual erotica twice as much as women. Women favor chat rooms twice as much as men. Women
have a slightly lower rate of sexually compulsive internet behavior, and 70 percent keep their habit a secret.

There are over 12,200 websites—and these are just the advertised sites—dedicated to snuff rape and killings, cannibalism and necrophilia.

Every year many thousands of Western males travel to Eastern Europe, the Far East and Central and South America in search of cheap, most often sordid, sex. One company based in Miami, Florida, offers its clients tours to Costa Rica, the Caribbean and South America and advertises: “Whatever your personal preference, Latin, blonde, black, mulatto, petite, etc., [the girls] will be friendly, attentive and eager to please you.”

Sexually transmitted diseases caught through sex tourism are reaching epidemic proportions, adding to the 333 million new cases being reported worldwide each year.

Thanks to the criminals who use the internet, the United Nations estimates, between 700,000 and four million women and children are now trafficked around the world for the purposes of forced prostitution, labor and other forms of exploitation every year. Trafficking is, on its own, estimated to be a $7-billion-a-year business. Victims of trafficking are subject to gross human rights violations, including rape, torture, forced abortions, starvation and threats of torture or murder of family members.

Some 2.5 million sites promote “Boy Sex” and four million advertise “Extreme Sex.”

Despite a crackdown in recent years, the U.S. Customs Service calculates that there are more than 100,000 websites offering child pornography—which is illegal worldwide. Estimates of the industry’s revenue range from about $200 million to more than $1 billion per year. These unlawful sexual images can be purchased as easily as music, DVDs or vacations on the internet.
“Subscribers” typically use credit cards to pay a monthly fee of between $30 and $50 to download photos and videos, or a onetime fee of a few dollars for single images.

The U.S. National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children reported on October 8, 2003, “More than 20,000 images of child pornography are posted on the internet every week. 140,000 child pornography images were posted to the internet according to researchers who monitored the internet over a six-week period. Twenty children were estimated to have been abused for the first time and more than 1,000 images of each child created and downloaded.” The British watchdog group Internet Watch Foundation reported that the number of child pornography images on the internet quadrupled in the next four years. The U.S. Department of Justice conservatively estimates that at any given time, despite law enforcement efforts to take them down, there are more than one million child porn images on the World Wide Web—with 91 percent depicting subjects age 12 or younger.

 

Professor Max Taylor, of Combating Pedophile Information Networks in Europe, stated in March 2003, “Demand for pornographic images of babies and toddlers on the internet is soaring. More babies and toddlers are appearing on the net and the abuse is getting worse. It is more torturous and sadistic than it was before. The typical age of children is between six and 12, but the profile is getting younger.”

The same report said, “Approximately 20 new children appear on the porn sites every month—many have been kidnapped or sold into sex.”

Perhaps even more disturbing is to learn that there are just under ten million websites dedicated to teen sex, each containing
thousands of photographs and hundreds of streaming video clips.

And there are also the collateral financial costs to consider. Billions of dollars and pounds are lost each year to all industries and governments through staff logging on during working hours to surf the internet for sex. Individuals from all walks of life: the judiciary, police, the Church and teachers are hooked on pornography.

As we said, this is just the very tip of the iceberg. Unless we wake up, we face a cyber Armageddon.

Christopher Berry-Dee
is an investigative criminologist who has published several papers and books, including
Serial Killers: Up Close and Personal
and
How to Make a Serial Killer
. He is the director of The Criminology Research Institute and owner of
The New Criminologist
, the world’s most respected professional journal on all matters criminology. He consults with law enforcement worldwide, lectures on serial murder and is responsible for solving a number of U.S. murder cases. Chris has homes in the U.K. and Samara, Russia.

 

Steven Morris
, co-author of
How to Make a Serial Killer
, has immense knowledge of serial homicide, psychology, the causation of serial murder and internet crime in all its varied forms. He lives on the south coast of England.

 

Published in the United States by
ULYSSES PRESS
P.O. Box 3440
Berkeley, CA 94703
www.ulyssespress.com

 

First published as
Killers on the Web
in 2006 in the U.K.

by John Blake Publishing Ltd.

 

eISBN : 978-1-569-75942-4

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2009943776

 

 

 

Acquisitions: Keith Riegert

Managing Editor: Claire Chun

Editor: Richard Harris

Editorial/Production: Lauren Harrison, Judith Metzener

Interior photographs: ©
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