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Increasingly, these teams are focusing their attention on the Internet and the way it has made this type of material available to a far greater number of people.

This week we saw rock star Pete Townshend fess up to the fact that he'd paid to access one of the kiddy-porn sites raided by US police -- but it was just research for a book he was writing right?

I guess if we were to use that logic as a defense then it'd be okay to commit any illegal act, even murder, providing you were just doing so in order to perform research for a book -- right?

The thing I find most worrying about the growing number of arrests for possession, creation and trafficking in child porn is simply the number and diversity of those involved.

So far we've seen numerous policemen, members of the clergy, hi-flying business-people, teenagers, unemployed builders -- in fact a very complete cross-section of society -- all convicted for kiddy-porn offenses.

This kind of blows away the stereotype of someone with kiddy-porn being another dirty old man in raincoat doesn't it?

And, when you realise that for every person actually identified and arrested there are probably thousands of others who remain undetected and anonymous, the scale of the problem becomes frightening.

Readers Say (updated irregularly) Here's a view... - Claire Pete's a good guy... - Scott Have Your Say

Take this another step further and assume that, for ever person who actually downloads kiddy-porn, there may be thousands of others who experience the urge to do so but whose morals (or respect for the law) stop them from actually performing the act, and you realise that lusting after little kids may be a very widespread affliction.

So is the Internet really the villainous medium it would appear to be?

Is the seemingly meteoric rise in child-porn offenses due to the way that the Net makes it so much easier to get ahold of such material?

Is child porn as addictive as heroin insomuch as once a "curious" person starts downloading it they find themselves needing more and more material to satisfy their needs?

Is there an established link between viewing kiddy-porn and actually committing sexual assaults on pre-adolescent children?

What percentage of the general public find pictures of pre-pubescent children to be sexually arousing? Is it really as high as my extrapolations might suggest?

Will the increasing link between child porn and the Net be more justification for introducing a universal online identification system?

And, perhaps most important of all: has the arrival of the Net actually increased the number of people with an interest in kiddy-porn, or has it simply allowed us to properly realise the scale of a problem that has previously been less visible?

It would be nice if the mainstream media set about answering some of these questions instead of simply rolling out another list of the rich and famous who have been caught with this stuff.

Important questions deserving some answers.

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