In 1995 Greater Manchester Police seized 12 examples of child pornography - all either on paper or video. Four years later, with the internet still in its infancy, the same force seized 41,000 images - all but three of them held on computers.  Last year in Britain a man was convicted of possessing 450,000 indecent images of children while another offender was found to have 250,000 images on his computer.  While many of the images in circulation among paedophiles are duplicated and some are up to 30 years old, there is evidence that organised criminal gangs in Europe, Asia and the United States are now involved in expanding the trade in child pornography.  Research by the University of Cork into paedophile newsgroups shows that more children are being abused to feed the demand for internet pornography.  In 1999, the Cork unit found four new children appearing each month in abusive images posted on the newsgroups. By mid-2002 a study of the same newsgroups found images of 20 new children appearing in a six-week period.  The researchers report that the abuse the children were being subjected to was increasingly sadistic.  The new report - which for the first time draws together research on paedophile internet crime - is written by John Carr, an internet consultant with the children's charity NCH and a Home Office adviser.  "An amazing number of people have never accepted any link between the development of the internet and the increase in child pornography and the consequent abuse of children," said Mr Carr.  "The numbers speak for themselves. The scale of the problem has changed beyond recognition in just over a decade."  An increasing area of concern for police and campaigners is the link between internet pornography and incidents of child abuse.  British police are tracking offenders to establish any connection but the largest available study - conducted by the US Postal Inspection Service - found that 35 per cent of men arrested for possessing indecent images were also child molesters.  Mr Carr said everyone found in possession of child abuse images should be investigated to see if they had abused children in the past and assessed to determine if they posed a future risk.  The British internet industry has clamped down on paedophile sites but images continue to flood in from abroad - especially the United States from where half of all child pornography comes.
The growth of the internet has created a 1,500 per cent rise in child pornography offences, according to a study of the link between computers and paedophile crime published today.