146: The Reality of Online Child Abuse (w/Håkon Høydal)
Conspiritualists are not wrong that Jeffery Epstein’s downline has so far evaded justice. Or that the highest levels of the Catholic Church aided and abetted child sexual abuse for generations. They are not wrong about the existence of child sexual abuse materials circulating online, and that children are coerced, abducted, and sometimes killed in order to make them.
But their narratives are contorted by panic, mythology, stereotypes, paranoid and grandiose assumptions, and the antisemitic conspiracy theorizing of QAnon, which spread like wildfire through yoga and wellness social media during the pandemic and has now normalized as the “groomer” meme. They say that child sexual abuse is a planned, nefarious, top-down attack on innocents. They say that its purpose is to turn the world away from God, to starve humanity of hope.
Matthew sits down with Håkon Høydal, an investigative journalist in Norway who has spent years researching and exposing the most abject behaviors on the dark web. His work reveals a very different landscape. It’s a banal world, close to home, hiding in plain sight, presided over by young men who are making reckless choices after having decided that their pathological and criminally harmful impulses will never be understood, much less treated.
Show Notes
Hunting Warhead | CBC News
VG exposed the largest child sexual abuse forum. It was run by the police.
Porn site founder accused of sex trafficking arrested in Spain - The Globe and Mail
Sex offender treatment scheme led to increase in reoffending | UK news | The Guardian
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Hello everybody, it's Matthew here piloting Conspiratuality Podcast while Julian and Derek
are off this week researching and writing.
Remember that you can catch us on Apple Podcast subscriptions, on Twitter, on Instagram, and on Patreon, and you can pre-order our book through the link at the bottom of the show notes for this episode.
Episode 147 The Reality of Online Child Abuse with Håkon Heudel I'll give a trigger warning at the start.
This episode and interview with Norwegian investigative journalist Håkan Høydahl will refer to child abuse materials circulating on the dark web.
It will also refer to the crimes committed in order to produce these materials.
And we'll be talking a little bit about some of the men who commit those crimes.
All relevant links will be included in the show notes.
A note on language.
You might have already noticed that I'll be following the best practice of not using the phrase child pornography, which is usually a blatant contradiction given that there's never anything consensual about the production or consumption of these materials, given the fact that they aren't lucrative, that there's nothing erotic about them, that isn't also a violation of law and dignity.
We're really talking about a social economy that traffics criminal evidence in return for status and likes.
Before we get to the interview, I'm going to provide some framing and to explain my angle here.
And I also want to summarize some of the reporting that Heutel has put forward, because his ongoing investigations of the operators of dark web child abuse sites is intricate and detailed.
And as we'll see, it's in those details that we can see this world a little more clearly, with a little more empathy.
Okay, so what's my angle?
We've got a chapter in our upcoming book called Conspiritualists Are Not Wrong.
We talk about how they are not wrong, about the lies that governments tell, about the fact that for-profit medical care can be predatory, exclusionary, and neglectful.
They are not wrong, we say, that working people have been immiserated by decades of cruel neoliberalism.
They are not wrong that the champagne sippers at Davos are completely out of touch with regular folks.
They are not wrong that Jeffrey Epstein and his network, or Downline, have so far evaded justice.
They are not wrong when they point out that the highest levels of the Catholic Church aided and abetted child sexual abuse for generations.
They are not wrong that accountability for crimes, both vast and mundane, is seemingly impossible to secure.
And they are not wrong about the reality of child sexual abuse materials circulating online, and that children are coerced, abducted, and sometimes killed in order to make them.
But with this last topic, the trees are clumped in a forest of panic,
mythology, stereotypes, paranoid and grandiose assumptions, and the antisemitic conspiracy theorizing of QAnon,
which spread like wildfire through yoga and wellness social media during the pandemic,
and has now normalized itself through the groomer meme.
The story told by this anxious and bloodthirsty discourse is that child sexual abuse is a planned,
nefarious, top-down attack on innocence, and in a sense, writ large.
But for as much attention as they seem to pay to the impacts of this criminality on children, They also say that it has a more important purpose, to turn the world away from God, to starve humanity of hope.
And once that happens, through the abject and ritual humiliation of children, so goes the story, the elites will have full mind and soul control over the planet.
They will hold everything in their cold, clammy hands.
Now if you caught our episode 123 called The Red-Pilled Academic Who Named Our Podcast, you'll know that Charlotte Ward, the co-author of The Emergence of Conspirituality in 2011, this is the paper that helped define our subject, had an alter ego named Jackie Farmer who wrote a completely cursed book called The Illuminati Party.
Now here's what she has to say.
In general, our second main energetic center is about sex and creativity.
I don't need to point out that there's a lot of sex around, a lot more than there was 20 years ago, and there was enough back then.
This is not about being prudish, but when I recently saw Nicki Minaj singing about an anaconda, I had to sigh at the degradation.
The Illuminati are dangling all this sex in front of us to keep us stuck in our second center.
They've deliberately unleashed a huge addictive internet pornography industry that makes them billions and serves to proliferate their child pornography.
There are no longer taboos.
Children are being sexualized earlier.
Child abuse scandals reverberate through the media.
Homosexuality is promoted.
I have nothing against homosexuality.
My own gay brother asked me to break the news to my parents that he was gay.
They were fine about it.
And I once had a crush on a woman myself.
Homosexuality occurs in nature.
Still, it is not the natural way.
It is an aberration and, as such, should not be encouraged or promoted.
So setting the casual homophobia aside, notice the fantasy of intention here.
With her take on pornography, she's not describing a complex world of costs and compromises in which sex workers strive to stay safe and preserve their dignity and perhaps from time to time feel empowered.
By objectifying and simplifying a global industry, she does what she complains about.
And on the child sexual abuse tip, it's not child abuse that harms children full stop.
It's that pornography and child abuse materials are instrumental to the mind control of populations.
So for Charlotte Ward, Jackie Farmer, that begins with hijacking our esoteric sources of creativity.
The Illuminati, she explains, want us stuck in our second chakra.
I mean, this implies that everyone is on a tantric path of awakening, whether they know it or not.
But beyond hampering our personal ascensions, porn and child abuse materials are understood as tools in geopolitical and ultimately cosmic conflict.
In Ward's world, pedophilic disorder is not a psychiatric condition that affects between 1% and 5% of the adult male population.
It's not a public and social health problem that tears apart families and souls.
For Ward Farmer, it can't just be another entry in the DSM, because that would point the way towards a workable solution undertaken by trained healthcare workers using evidence-based practices and supported by accountable agencies and democratic governments, and maybe even socialized healthcare funding.
In the conspirituality world, none of those instruments are trustworthy, or even real.
So the morbid fantasy is locked in by an a priori belief in the corruption of everything.
Because if a problem like pedophilic disorder was viewed as treatable, or at least something that could be mitigated, the conspiritualist would suddenly find themselves in a world in which they would have to do something, beginning with, maybe, going back to school.
Now, this idea that pedophiles are actually puppets of the powers that be goes way back.
Here's a clip of Michelle Smith, co-author with her husband and hypnotherapist, Dr. Lawrence Pazder, of the satanic ritual abuse original bestseller, Michelle Remembers.
She's appearing on CBC's Midday program.
It's somewhere around 1984, and the anchor is Valerie Pringle.
Michelle Smith, what are the goals of these cults?
They want to possess the soul of the child.
It's not just they want to capture them physically, but they want to have the child theirs.
And these are people whose families are rather involved in these cults, or who, because of you, because of some connection, fell into their hands?
Or through such vehicles as daycare centers, where they have access to the child.
You know, when you say something like that, that's alarm.
I mean, people get terrified by this sort of thing.
I mean, are they rightfully terrified?
I think that today that it's very, very wise to take a good hard look at where you place your children and to whose care you place your child.
They want to possess the soul of the child.
It's not just that they want to capture them physically, but they want to have the child theirs.
In the QAnon era, this idea of total domination for a higher purpose filters down into insinuations that liberal media and tech giants facilitate or fund child abuse materials to destabilize society.
Anons will claim that Jack Dorsey turned a blind eye to child abuse materials on Twitter, This false claim was later pseudo-supported by the lie that Parag Agrawal was arrested for child abuse materials.
He wasn't.
On Telegram, QAnon channels spread fake posts about Bill Gates and Paul Pelosi being arrested for possession and that a child abuse materials production site was found in California Governor Newsom's basement.
That's not true either.
Anons will also conflate crimes of sex trafficking of minors on lucrative mainstream pornography sites with dark websites dedicated to child abuse.
As in the case of the New Zealander Michael James Pratt, who was arrested this past December on a number of sex crime charges related to an American website he ran from 2009 until 2020.
During which time it's alleged that he trafficked and filmed one minor.
At the same time, many of these same QAnon influencers will parrot Andrew Tate's claim that he's been framed by the Matrix.
For some conspirituality influencers, the real-world gravity of child trafficking and the materials associated with it becomes absolutely abstract and symbolic, just part of the swamp of internalized and projected guilt from which they can save themselves and their customers through workshops and online courses.
Consider QAnon massage therapist Bernard Gunther on Telegram who makes it clear he's concerned about crimes not in themselves but as signs of corruption in the collective unconscious.
Quote, I know a lot of people don't want to hear this but getting rid of all the elite pedophiles global human child trafficking operations satanists etc and arresting the cabal is not going to do shit unless you and we also do the necessary inner work to confront our own
darkness, wounds, addictions, and traumas we all have, for the darkness of the world is also a
reflection of our own unacknowledged and unconscious pain and shadow to an extent. He goes on
writing, even if all the child trafficking pedophiles would be rounded up and executed right now, it
would all manifest again at some point until we have faced our own pain and darkness which is
ultimately grounded in the illusion of being separate from God.
God.
In other words, says this conspiritualist, crimes against children are really the manifestation of your own corruption.
At the end of the day, it's all just internal spiritual work.
You save the children by saving your inner child.
So how does this fantastical story emerge?
Is it possible that when we know such crime exists, and accountability is nowhere to be found, that people will exaggerate the facts?
That if it's plausible that Epstein was murdered in his cell before he could rat out his downline, that the real reach of his network is vastly underreported?
That if Cardinal Ratzinger can become Pope Benedict in part on the strength of vigorously defending the Church against legitimate grievances of child sexual abuse survivors, why wouldn't the story also be far worse than currently known?
The story of widespread cultic child sexual abuse, especially when inflamed with the language of satanic ritual abuse, is powerful because it offers many layers of salvation in relation to many unsolvable problems.
It explains this terrible conjunction of aggressions and tragedies through the heuristic of evil.
It creates recognizable villains who rub their hands and twirl their mustaches, or who look like goblins who symbolize foreigners or Jews.
It creates a cinematic arc that rushes towards a revelatory conclusion, at which point all demonic things will end.
And when this story is brought to its inevitable conclusion, the result won't simply be the end of child sexual abuse, but the redemption of all humanity.
Here, we might recall that the final pages of the book that started it all, Michelle Remembers, published by Pazder and Smith in 1980, ends with Michelle, as a child, having a rapturous vision of the Virgin Mary, who essentially tells her that the suffering she endured in the satanic cult was necessary because it would lead people to God after she remembered it.
That fantasy at the heart of satanic ritual abuse is not only about scapegoats.
It's about perfect, transcendent resolutions that human beings cannot achieve on their own.
The perfect subject of satanic ritual abuse is the survivor who can transform their abject story into mystical wisdom and their broken body into a vessel for God.
But in the real world, Heutel and his internet expert colleague Einar Stankvig show us a very different landscape.
In exposing both the operators of dark web child sexual abuse material sites and the police that infiltrate those sites and sometimes impersonate the operators, they illuminate a frighteningly banal world, close to home, hiding in plain sight.
Presided over by young men who are making reckless choices after having decided that their pathological and criminally harmful impulses will never be understood, much less treated.
They uncover an eccentric, scurrying, fragile network of pedophiles who bounce back and forth between shame and self-righteousness, and live in constant fear of being caught.
They collect abuse materials as much as they consume them, and they gain social status as their archives of material grow.
They use laptops, not mainframes.
They work in bedrooms, not underground bunkers.
They have side gigs in IT, sometimes in security, which gives them the skills they need to keep ahead of surveillance.
There is no shadowy government, corporation, church, or funding that can protect them from the consequences of their actions.
The men Heutel tracked down and studied are adults.
They did not grow up in the wilderness.
They have been exposed to legal, cultural, and moral norms all of their lives.
They know what the consequences are for acting out, and they accordingly design lives for themselves of high-tech secrecy.
They exert power over the children whose images they traffic.
They monetize the pain and suffering of absolute innocence.
And they have to rationalize all of this for themselves.
They have to imagine or guess that the children they abused or that they watched being abused really didn't mind so much, that it could have been a positive and nurturing form of attention.
And if the perpetrators are intellectually minded, they might even come up with historical justifications involving whatever they know about ancient Greek culture.
On our podcast, we're very familiar with these rationalizations.
They're a form of bypassing.
So, these are guys who know what they're doing.
But also, their power is not institutional.
They have no higher plan beyond their pleasure and evading arrest.
They don't want the world to be anything other than it is, aside from it being easier to get away with what they do.
They are organized, but not for power.
They are organized for self-protection, as they satisfy themselves.
They are just human beings.
And so when CBC reporter Damon Fairless spoke to Benjamin Faulkner's family following his conviction, they remembered normal stuff.
Faulkner was convicted of running the largest child sexual abuse sites in the world.
His parents said the things that parents say.
Quote, he was, according to his mother, a happy boy.
Someone who was always friendly, well-liked, gentle, and patient.
His father said he had lots of friends in high school, not a partier by any means.
Faulkner was more of a gamer and obsessed with computers.
He also worked as a lifeguard and swim instructor, one of those teachers who kids would request by name.
If there was anything out of the ordinary about Faulkner, it was that he didn't have a girlfriend, his mother said.
I kind of thought that he was gay, if only that were the case.
So there are no cartoon villains here.
No cabal bureaucrat counting gold coins in the crypt.
Faulkner was just a kid almost everyone in his rural northern Ontario town thought was normal.
He had successfully hidden his earliest crimes like his omitted abuse of a family member who was just four when he started.
And then when he was a teen, he started texting a girl who was 12, and she told her parents, and her family lured him out to the edge of a remote lake to confront him.
This terrified Benjamin, and so he decided to see a psychologist, and he disclosed his secret.
The psychologist, according to Benjamin, brushed him off, told him to just deal with it, and so he never went back.
Now if that story is true, that's an instance of therapeutic malpractice that went on to have devastating effect on many, many lives.
Because not every pedophile acts out, and it's possible Faulkner could have been helped, especially given that he was brave enough, again, if this is true, to seek help.
The CBC report also revealed phone conversations with Faulkner in prison, in which he suggested that even if he had received reasonable help, he's not sure he would have had the willpower to restrain himself from acting out.
But who really knows what people have to say to console themselves in prison, or how comforting it might be to believe in destiny.
Faulkner had a criminal urge he learned to exercise by teaching himself to become a computer wizard.
And at some point he found others like him.
Others who would understand.
Including Patrick Fawlty, who lived in his parents' basement in Knoxville, Tennessee, and who became Faulkner's co-conspirator.
How were they caught?
They were caught when Faulkner drove across the border into the U.S.
to meet Fawlty.
They were headed to the Virginia and Washington, D.C.
area where they had made plans with a man who had agreed to let them abuse his four-year-old daughter on camera.
That was the conspiracy.
The real extent of it.
That's how it happens.
It's quite simple.
Alarmingly predictable.
It's not cosmic, mythic, or geopolitical.
It's happening right under our noses.
It's an alternate universe, but it's also sitting right here with us.
and no amount of exaggerated storytelling will make it any clearer or safer.
Welcome to Conspirituality Podcast.
Thank you.
Now, your subject matter is extremely disturbing, and I've given content warnings in the preamble, and I'm going to ask you about the impacts of your work on your mental health in a bit.
But just to start, why do you do this work, and why do you think it's important for regular people around the world to understand the reality of child abuse materials on the dark web?
Well, I think it's important to know not only what goes on on the dark web, but also what we need to look after when we are sending our kids out online.
But I'm also interested in not only, I think we need to, in order to save the children from possible predators, we need to understand why Men, mostly men, because most of these abusers are men.
So we need to understand why do men, some men want to abuse children?
What lies behind that?
So I think we need to, people, many people are calling these guys monsters and we need to understand why they want to do the things that they do, the horrible things against children.
And we need to meet them with empathy and understanding.
Your investigation of this material on the dark web really took off when Einar Stangvik contacted you about previous dark web reporting that you had done, and he said that you were wrong about a bunch of things.
You were out of your depth.
And I think, like, I resonated with that because I think there's a lot of people who feel that way in relation to these internet zones that have to be accessed through Tor browsers and other strange, you know, windows.
What do you feel most laypeople don't understand about how the dark web works and who uses it for what?
Most people think that the dark web is something mysterious and something completely different than the rest of the internet.
And it isn't.
It's more or less Like the rest of the internet, only it's encrypted and you need to access it via a special browser and you need to have some more knowledge about the addresses.
It's not just like www and then some letters.
Most of these addresses are strings of numbers and letters, which don't make sense.
But besides that, when you enter these sites, they look more or less like like the rest of the Internet. So I think many people find
it, they think it's a very mysterious and well, yeah, dark place. But it's once you get there, it's
mostly like the rest of the Internet.
Now, when you say that people have to have special knowledge of
the URLs, does that mean that they're not searchable?
Yeah, I mean, they used not to be searchable right now.
I mean these days you can find, I mean there are services that scrape the dark web and makes it searchable on the regular web.
But it's harder to find these addresses and especially if you want to find these places that deal with child abuse, drug sales, gun sales, things like that.
Then you need to Do some digging on your own.
Eventually you will be able to find these addresses on some obscure internet forums, I guess.
But you have to go looking.
Now, I mean, it's a very common experience in modern online life that people feel lonely or isolated or overwhelmed by data.
And I'm wondering if it's fair to say that, you know, those who use the dark web find those feelings or those associations increased in some way, or are you saying that it's for them, it's just a normal experience just through a different browser?
I think you might be right that some of them might go to the dark web because they feel they need to find people with shared interests.
You find forums there for people who call themselves boy lovers, for instance.
It might not be easy to find similar forums on the open web, clear web.
If you're interested in things like that, then it's easier to find people with these interests as you're going on the dark web.
Now, one of the strangest parts of your investigation into the child abuse materials site called Child's Play, and all of the sites connected to it, was that it led you to confront the men that you thought were running it.
And so you fly to Sydney, you meet them at a burger joint, you tell them what you've discovered, and then you find out that they're cops who have taken over the site to monitor and build cases against the site's users.
Now, what followed for you, and I think for everybody who covered this story, was a long contemplation on the ethics of that policing.
But if I can ask you, what was your first impression on realizing that the police were aiding and abetting crimes for the purpose of fighting them?
Well, I was a bit surprised, I have to say that.
As you say, I was really convinced that now I was going to find the criminals behind these sites, the people who are running the site, and that they would be criminals.
And after having talked to them, I would go to the police, or perhaps there would be a police investigation.
What I actually found was that the police had been there, you know, for several months already and taken over the sites and had been running it for themselves in order to catch the criminals.
Right.
And as you say, it's...
I mean, they are going close to an ethical border that someone might say that they stepped over it.
But I think that's an interesting discussion.
I mean, how far do you go in order to catch the criminals?
And just to be clear for the listeners running the forum from the project name Argos, is that right?
Yeah, Task Force Argos.
Yeah, it involved them issuing regular statements as if they were from the correct owner.
It involved them allowing the materials to continue to be trafficked.
It occasionally involved the police actually posting materials.
Is that correct?
Yeah, that's correct.
They had to do it in order to, you know, so that they could be seen as, you know, credible admins of the site.
Right, and actually all of the users of these sites are extremely hyper-vigilant with regard to who the admins actually are and if there's any kind of strange behavior or anything is even off schedule in a way.
Yeah, then they're gone.
Then they'd be exposed, right.
I mean, I think this question of how the policing is carried out is super important because, you know, the issues of child abuse materials and trafficking are very much tied up in questions about trust and how much people everywhere trust their governments and trust their police.
What is your thought now about this type of policing?
I know that you understand that it's difficult, but have you seen any clear ethical advancements in how it's carried out, or how are you feeling about it now?
Well, as you say, I understand why the police felt that this was a necessary way to go forward.
The dark web is, I mean, the sites are encrypted.
It's really hard to identify the users there unless you are the administrators on the site.
And perhaps even if you're the administrators, you might not be able to identify them unless you are able to use the site and use some techniques that will make it able for you to identify and locate these other users of the site.
So you have to, if you're the police, you have to have the site up and running.
But as you say, that means that when the site is running, it might instigate people to, you know, create more child abuse material because they want to post it and show it to their friends on this site.
And of course, it's a really hard question, but Task Force Argos, they had been investigating this kind of sites for many, many years.
I'm not sure if this is why, but if you take down one site, immediately a similar site jumps up somewhere else.
And then you have to take down that site, and the next one, and the next one.
So these people And the users and the administrators, they don't go away even if you take down one site.
So I think I can understand why the police felt that this was a necessary way to do it.
That they should take control over this one site in order to once and for all take the people.
Right.
Because there were central players as we discovered.
Yeah.
Right.
Now, in terms of the stakes of the police ethics, you know, there's this discussion of, well, how many children, how many people are impacted by these materials?
Now, during the height of a conspiracy theory sort of fever that we covered here on the podcast called Save the Children, which erupted in the summer of 2020, there was this fake statistic that was circulated saying that 800,000 children in the U.S.
were being sex trafficked and exploited for pornography every year.
And, you know, everybody who works in the actual anti-sex trafficking social services regards that number as wildly inflated, but it's been circulating for decades.
And in 1988, for example, Ellen Bass and Laura Davis wrote a book called The Courage to Heal, which was about recovering memories of traumatic abuse, including satanic ritual abuse and trafficking.
And there's a footnote where they say, you know, between 500,000 and a million children are involved in prostitution and pornography in this country.
A high percentage of them are victims of incest.
And, you know, as I said, the actual statistics of child victims of trafficking are much lower, according to the experts, between 15,000 and 50,000 in the U.S.
And that's according, you know, that's all trafficking, including kidnapping and forced labor.
So in your research, I'm wondering what you came to understand about the total numbers of children globally exploited by child abuse material factories on the dark web.
That's a difficult question and I really don't have any answer to give you.
What I know is that Task Force Argos, they gave some numbers after our reporting that I think it was 100 or some, you know, it's in the 100s, I think.
Children that were rescued and saved by task force Argos and their police collaborators from this operation.
And this involves identifying the children in the actual materials, figuring out where they are according to metadata, and then actually issuing the warrants and tracking.
I mean, very, very difficult policing work.
So is the idea that if there are hundreds rescued, that that's the tip of the iceberg?
Yeah, I would guess that's the tip of the iceberg.
Because I mean, it's, it's, there's always people who, who you, I mean, children that will be difficult to, to, to identify and locate.
But, but I don't think, I mean, I don't think it's in, in the thousands, really.
I think it's, it's more in a couple of hundreds.
I mean, but that's on one site.
But then the question is, okay, even if you see some pictures on another site, are these pictures of the same children or are they new children?
And I mean, they are people who are dealing with or sharing child abuse images.
They are collectors and they are always interested in, you know, Yeah, this was something about the economy that I understood from your reporting that hadn't been clear to me before, which is that it seems that the materials are relatively rare and so that there's a lot of recycling and sometimes images will be 20 years old or more.
Yeah, that's correct.
That also means that people who are actively producing those materials are actually very prominent in the social hierarchy of those sites.
Looking at an article now talking about this operation that the Task Force Argos was having against the site that we're talking about.
And the Task Force Argos themselves, they say that they knew of about 100 producers of child abuse images on this site.
So that's kind of an elite group, as it were.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The real abusers, people who are, you know, physically abusing children and then taking the images, taking pictures of it while they're doing it and posting it online, they are the so-called elites, as you say.
Well, there's a distinction to be made there because we can turn now, I think, to who the people are, because that's where you started.
You said that it's important to understand the difference between real people doing real things and monsters doing things that we imagine, but through a glass darkly, maybe.
As co-producer of pretty amazing CBC podcast, Hunting Warhead with Damon Fairless, you got to learn quite a bit about Benjamin Faulkner, who is the guy who cornered a huge part of the market for child abuse materials online.
He was the founder of Child's Play.
And after all you knew about the damage that he had perpetrated, What was it like for you then to go on to learn more about his early life, about his childhood home, about his family?
I've been in contact with him, you know, both before we made this, this podcast and also afterwards.
So I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm in touch with him more or less regularly and, you know, writing with him where he's imprisoned in the United States.
Right.
Because I, I, I find it really fascinating to To learn more about who he is and why he did what he did.
Right.
And for me, first of all, what is most clear to me is that he is mostly normal, as the rest of us.
I think you could say that about both you and me, that we are mostly normal.
And the same goes for Benjamin Falkner.
But he had these urges, as you can say.
For some reason, he was sexually attracted to children and he tried to talk to psychiatrists or psychologists about it when he was a teenager.
But it didn't go anywhere.
I mean, it didn't get the help that I would think that he needed.
I'm not sure that he would have ended up in prison for life as a child abuser if he had had the opportunity to talk openly with a psychiatrist about his thoughts.
Well, with you having been in contact with him, I mean, I didn't know that you were actually in contact with him.
I knew that Damon Fairless, your colleague at CBC, had many phone calls with him.
But knowing what you know about him, do you feel that that moment with that psychologist, which it was kind of a disastrous visit, where he goes and he discloses what he's been up to and how he feels, this is right after A family of a 12-year-old girl that he's been pursuing have confronted him, like, in a rural location, and really, he's been terrified by the event, and it's good that they protected their child, of course, but he goes to the psychologist, he discloses the psychologist, according to Faulkner...
brushes him off and says, you have to deal with this.
Knowing what you know now about him, do you think that really could have been a turning point?
Or do you think that his drives and his ability to rationalize why he does what he does would have been too strong for treatment?
This is an impossible question, but what do you think?
What do you think?
This is something that me and Damon, we were discussing a lot because I guess you could call me a bit more naive perhaps, or I want to think that might have saved him and also in the process saved a lot of children if he had been able to To talk freely to a therapist about his urges.
I mean, this is exactly what we are doing or trying to establish here in Norway.
We are establishing, I mean, the government and the authorities are establishing helplines for people who are having these urges and they can talk to therapists and there's a lot of projects here in Norway which is doing exactly that.
But as you say, it's hard, you know, we still don't know if it has any real effects.
You mean the interventions?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, some people call this some kind of an addiction and they compare it to alcohol addiction, for instance.
Yes.
And it might be perhaps something that you will have with you for life if you are having urges, you know, against children.
And is it easy to never act on those urges for an entire life, or do you end up doing something?
Well, that seems to be the sort of therapeutic test, right?
Whether an intervention at a certain point would burn somebody who had been acting out on his urges towards not doing that or being able to restrain himself.
Have you heard stories about that, where a person has been either accused or convicted of abusing children, but with therapeutic intervention, they seem to have turned that around or at least not acted out on it.
I've at least heard the opposite.
I can find you the reference afterwards, but I was talking to a Norwegian psychologist who works in this area.
And he told me about some research done in England where they've had therapeutic sessions with inmates who had been sentenced for child abuse and afterwards they looked at When they are released, compared to people who have sentenced on the same thing, but who hasn't had these sessions, who ended up re-offending.
And it's turned out that the people who had had these therapeutic sessions, they were more likely to re-offend.
Oh my gosh!
Oh my gosh, you are laughing.
We're going to get to the mental health question about this later, right?
Well, I mean, did your source have an idea about whether or not it was the wrong therapeutic approach?
Yeah, he was just, you know, my God, I should just quit my job.
And, you know, so he's struggling to find out, you know, how can we, what's the right way of treating people who are dealing with, you know, these urges to, you know, abuse children.
So, yeah.
So he is currently doing a very interesting research project here in Norway about that.
Well, I'll be interested in following up on that.
More on the sort of how the offenders network amongst each other.
The premise within the landscape of conspiracy theories is that, you know, the elites are controlling our children for sex, but by that they mean, you know, people with a lot of social power, people with a lot of financial power, bankers.
Government officials.
The suggestion is that there's a whole echelon of actors who participate in the economy of child abuse materials.
Not because they are users, necessarily, but because they have political motives that extend far beyond, like, satisfying their own needs, or that they're using child abuse materials to fund other nefarious projects.
Now, have you ever come across anything like that at all?
Never, never.
And I'm thinking, you're saying that they are funding other projects with all the money that they have made from, you know, sharing or producing child abuse material?
Yes, that's a common thread that the child pornography, or sorry, child abuse materials economy makes so much money that they can sort of funnel it to other places or use it for other social control projects.
But where's the money?
I mean, there are, I mean...
There's no money.
There's really no money in it.
I mean, of course, if you're a poor, I mean, one of the problems these days, I mean, for the last 10 years or more, are, you know, live streaming of child abuse from especially the Philippines and other places in Asia, but mostly the Philippines, because that's a place in Asia where people are very fluent in English.
So, if you are from a poor family in the Philippines, Then you might be able to make some money by offering up one of your children for child abuse.
But it's, I mean, the money that they are receiving, it's like, and in this area, I've seen, you know, the amount of money that they are receiving.
It's like $20 or $100 or $80 per session or something.
But it's nothing.
So to imagine that this is a larger economy would be to imagine that, you know, somehow that money is being, I don't know, skimmed by a larger organization or that there are other layers of payouts going on.
But it doesn't sound like that's the case at all.
I can't see where this money would... I haven't found any signs of it.
I wrote a story exactly in the autumn of 2021 about a live streaming platform, a US-based live streaming platform that had been used by some live streamers on the Philippines to share online child abuse.
But I mean, the money, it's a couple of hundred dollars now and then.
It's not much money at all.
So I haven't seen any hints or evidence of money on that scale that you're talking about.
It would have to be millions of dollars and I can't find it.
Well, I guess to be clear, the most money that would accumulate in a system like this would be in Benjamin Faulkner's, like, Bitcoin account or something like that, and that would mainly come from subscriptions to the sites that he was running?
Yeah, I guess so.
Did you get the sense of how much he was actually taking in?
No, I really didn't.
But it's not much money at all.
I mean, he didn't do it as a way to earn money.
He just wanted to be the top dog in his community.
And when you're talking about economy, it's much more an economy of You know, of likes and a social economy, sort of, where you are, you know, who is on top and in this hierarchy and the more original images that you will be able to share, you know, the further up in the hierarchy you are.
But it's not an economy, it's not a money-based economy.
It's an image-based.
And it gives you the more images you have, the more social credit you will get from the community.
So we're talking about a very contained network of people who produce and consume these materials that are actually very difficult to monetize, and they're under constant police scrutiny, and they are terrified of being caught all the time.
Yeah.
Yeah, so the notion that this is the work of the powerful is just not, it's not borne out by the facts.
No, I have, at least I haven't found no evidence of it.
And I've, as you say, I've been working in this field for, yeah.
Almost 10 years now, and what I find is lonely guys who are doing bad things.
Well, speaking of the 10 years, you've been open about the mental health impacts of doing this work.
How did that begin to become apparent to you, and how is it going now?
I find it harder not to work on it, on this subject, than to be able to do the work.
Because it's rewarding to find out more about who these guys are and to be able to... I think that the more we know about who these people are who are running these sites and who are members of these sites, the more we can do to help children not becoming abused.
And it's hard to have this knowledge and not being able to do the work.
So for me, it's harder not to do it.
And also, I think it didn't have the same impact on me, I guess, as it had on my colleague Einar.
And I think I've been working on it for a bit longer than he had.
So I guess when we started going into the dark web, I had already been working on, you know, and interviewing people who had been victims of incest and other forms of abuse.
So I knew a bit more about it.
And I had already gone through some stages of desperation, if you could say that.
It sounds like once you have some investigative success, if you put down the work for a while, you know that the activities are still going on and you know that you have a skill set that can go out and continue to investigate.
And so is that where it comes from, this feeling of, I have to get back to this?
Yeah, absolutely.
When we did this research and when we do it, we are We put up boundaries so that we can shield ourselves from the worst things.
I mean, we are not necessarily looking at a lot of images because you don't have to.
I mean, you know that these images exist and you know that they're bad and you know that they will do a lot of bad things to your head.
So we choose not to look at the images and instead focus on the data, for instance.
Yes, I just wanted to clarify for the listeners that what I understood from your reporting is that you almost are able to look at the images in the same way that we would be looking at the matrix code in the famous films, right?
That you're looking at the data itself and you know what's behind it, but you don't have to expose your brain to it.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, last question.
I have two sons, and when they're a little bit older, I imagine they're going to need to know and understand a little bit about what the dark web is.
So let's just say that in a few years, you continue to be the international expert, or one of them in this field, and you're on a world tour to give talks at high schools, and you come to their high school to give a presentation about online crime and safety.
Yeah.
What advice might you see yourself offering that would give, you know, high school kids, especially boys, an appropriate sense of care and safety around their online lives?
Oh, that's hard.
I think if I had visited a high school, I think they would have much more to learn me than the other way.
Oh, right.
Because, I mean, they are fluent in internet.
Right.
And they know much more about it than you and I do already.
I guess they've probably seen much more than you and I have already, unfortunately.
I have two sons myself, and I'm not that worried because as long as you're a good father, I mean, it comes up to you, I think.
It depends on you.
If you're a good father, a good parent, and you're talking to them and you're interested in their normal life, And, and if you, if you hear them, you know, when, if they are live streaming or, or, you know, playing online with some friends and you hear them talking to people.
You should, you know, you should know, but instead of getting, you know, instead of panicking and thinking, Oh my God, they're talking to strangers on the night, you know, on the online, it's, you should, you know, talk to their kid, talk to them and then, you know, let them tell you what they're experiencing.
And yeah, just, just be there with them.
I think that's, that's the main thing that we, we have to do.
And, and you, you're asking about, you know, the dark web and the dark web is obviously there, but as for, for teenagers, normal teenagers, I think platforms like TikTok and Snapchat and everything, all these normal platforms that most people are on, you can find a lot of bad stuff there also.
I mean, the thing about presence, I wonder if we live in a somewhat more hopeful time because one of the things that stood out about the interviews that Damon did with Benjamin's family was that they recalled just how much time he spent alone as a teenager in his room.
Usually, he was nocturnal.
Usually, he slept through the day.
You know, I'm not criticizing the parents here, but I just think that it seems that there might be more awareness even 10 years on about teenage boys and internet usage, that perhaps it is generally a more informed, safer period.
Yeah, it is.
But I think it's important to say that, I mean, we are now talking about, I mean, you're mentioning teenage boys.
When we are talking about child abusers, and we have to be, you know, this is not a problem for most boys and men at all.
The vast majority not, yes.
Yeah, it's one or two or three percent of the male population.
At the most, who are interested in looking at sexual images of children.
And most of us are, as I said, more or less normal and want to live more or less normal lives and be loved and talk to other people.
So I think this is not a problem for most teenage boys or girls.
Well, I want to thank you for all of the work that you do to make this a little bit more of an open subject and a little bit more discoverable for a general population.
I think you make it really accessible and there's some relief in that as well, that it is not so mysterious, that it's not so almost mystical or incomprehensible.
So thank you for that.
Oh, thank you.
I think we need to not normalize, but as I said in the beginning, people are talking about that these guys are monsters, but that they are not.
We have to accept that these people who are doing these monsters things are actually humans.
At their human beings.
And that's perhaps the most scary thing, to accept that these people, in the same way that you and I are humans, so are they.
