| Over the past five years, there has been increasing attention paid to child pornography trafficking via the Internet. One area where research has been remiss, however, concerns how online communities involved in child pornography trafficking are established and sustained on the Internet, in particular those whose members maintain no contact outside their cyberspace environments. This thesis presents an ethnographic account of the exchange relations of one Internet-based child pornography ring operating via an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel, and the factors that influence and disrupt these relations. In doing so, the author presents a case study of human adaptation to a particular environmental domain in cyberspace through an examination of the dynamics of this virtual community and the nature of the criminal threat that it poses. |
