The Deep/Dark Web

"The alternative is not to look under the stone, and we cannot afford not to look under this stone. There are very significant volumes of people viewing this material in this country and abroad."
"We are going to need to understand as a society how we are going to confront this issue. We are not going to be able to arrest our way out of it. The numbers are significant, the volumes are huge."
"This operation has been about protecting children who are victims of, or might become victims of, sexual exploitation. Children are victimized not only when they are abused and the images first taken, but at every subsequent time that image is viewed by further offenders or distributed."
Phil Gormley, deputy director-general of the National Crime Agency (NCA), Britain

"This is an important two-pronged operation, which has rescued children from abuse and also identified many previously unknown sex offenders. Direct action like this sends a strong message to those who subject children to harrowing sexual assaults that they can and will be traced and prosecuted."
"But law enforcement agencies alone cannot deal with the vast problem of illegal images, which continue to flood the market. Industry has to find inventive ways of blocking the flow of such horrendous pictures, which are only produced through the suffering of defenceless children -- many of whom are not even old enough to go to school."
"So while this operation must be rightly applauded we should view it as yet another warning sign that far more needs to be done if we are to stem the sordid trade in these images, which are often used by those who go on to abuse children."
Claire Lilley, head of online safety, National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children

Britain has suddenly aroused itself out of its torpor of oblivion to the prevalence of child predation that appeared to have been accepted in certain levels of society when it was celebrities who were known to pursue those mind-numbingly odious desecrations of children's innocence. Onlookers who knew what was happening, but just attributed it to behaviour that must be tolerated because to do otherwise would upset order.

When child abuse was recognized as occurring at the hands of Roman Catholic priests preying on trusting children, being shuffled from one parish to another with no one in authority taking any steps to halt those predations, the public did become incensed. When it was those in the nursing and other health professions knowing that a national celebrity had free reign in their hospitals to abuse children and said nothing because he was a generous charitable contributor to them, it was another story.

With the recent revelations that such popular celebrities, political figures and others engaged in child molestation, the British conscience was suddenly awakened. Prompting detectives from every force in the country to collaborate in joint efforts to reveal the presence of pedophiles endangering the lives and futures of children. People suspected of downloading and distributing images of children in debased-trust situations were pursued, resulting in over 600 arrests.

Among them are doctors, teachers, care workers and former police officers whom Operation Notarise, an six-month investigation, were revealed to be involved in a wide-ranging underground child-abuse network. Over 400 children were identified as being at risk of sexual predation. Many of those arrested had access to children through their workplace. Of the total number 39 were known sex offenders. There was one grandfather with access to 17 grandchildren two of whom he abused.


What connected them was their horrible fascination with children as sex objects. The uncovering of this dark netherworld of sexual predators on society's vulnerable revealed a network of society's conscienceless psychopaths for whom the suffering and misery they were responsible for inflicting on the defenceless meant nothing other than their personal gratification, diminishing their humanity beyond belief.

And bringing to the public information perhaps never before understood. That on the Internet there is a portion of it which has been named the "dark web". The investigation led police to search 833 properties, examine 9,172 computers, phones and hard drives. The dark web represents a huge portion of the Internet difficult to police where users are able to operate in anonymity in an online marketplace for guns and drugs and images of child abuse.