When a Lie Is the Truth: Pandering Child Pornogrpahy (00) (Report‪)‬

INTRODUCTION Child pornography is a significant social problem, which the Internet exacerbated. Hundreds of thousand of images of child pornography are routinely seized by police, and increasingly the images are of small children not teens, often provided by international pedophile rings that require members to contribute thousands of images in order to join (Sieg, 2005). A fairly new development concerns the use of avatars, three-dimensional likenesses employed by computer users for gaming and other activities on the Internet. Participants in websites, such as Second Life, can make their avatars look like anything, including children engaging in child-like activities, such as playing on playgrounds; unfortunately, such avatars also may be engaging in simulated child molestation (Wagner, 2007; Meek-Prieto, 2008).