Child-abuse website shut down

A website full of young girls' obscene photos has recently been shut down by the police bureau of Beijing.

Illicit picture of young girls posted at the Eight Wolves Forum. [Photo: wechat account of the Youth League]

The website, called Eight Wolves Forum, enticed users to join its account of an online group chat room registered on Tencent's QQ platform, and then sent them illicit pictures.

After receiving several reports, the Youth League, an organization among young people in China, used its WeChat (China's equivalent of Twitter) account - Tuan Tuan, to go undercover. Disguised as a new user asking for access to the website, they were overwhelmed by the multiple erotic photos of young girls.

The perpetrator surnamed Du, a 20-year technical school student from a divorced family in Nanchong, Sichuan Province, projected that the pornographic business would make him a fortune.

"I wanted a new computer, but every time I asked my parents to finance me they would berate me. Now I have a step father who makes my situation even worse," Du told Tuan through the online chat room.

However, Du was not alone in sending photos online. What was worse, according to the League, many of the photos were posted by pedophiles.

"The emergence of such websites will greatly threaten the safety of children, by motivating pedophiles," said Prof. Long Di (PhD), from the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

In 1984, US professor David Finkelhor, researched crimes against children and coined a theory of Four Preconditions, namely, the motivation to sexually abuse a child, overcoming internal inhibitors, overcoming external inhibitors and overcoming child resistance, before one resolves to molest a child.

"The motivation of pedophiles can be constrained according to the first two conditions. However, the photos and content in such websites tempts and galvanizes their desire and leads them to infringe upon the rights of children, by using the young bodies to satisfy their sexual or psychological desires," Long said.

"It can be exemplified as a person who causes no damage, even though, he desires food when he is starving. But once he starts to loot groceries to feed himself, he definitely violates laws and brings agonies and hurts to others," she explained.