Out of control

In the late 1990s, the US Postal Service identified 75,000 members of a Texas-based paedophile website named ‘Landslide’. Credit-card references showed that 7,272 of the subscribers were British. In the naive belief that their personal details would be secure, they had paid £21 a month to download pictures of children being seriously abused. Once they had collected images on their hard drives, they began to trade them with like-minded people. Today, five years later, men from every sector of society and from all over the UK are either under arrest or shaking in their boots, waiting for the early-morning hammering on the door. They will mostly be respectable men – only about 5 per cent will have a criminal record – and they’ll be charged with what has come to be known as the nastiest crime in the book.

For the 21st-century paedophile, however, secrecy is not a problem. The software that you need to keep your secrets out of the reach of the Old Bill comes free on the Web.