My journey into the hell that is internet child porn: We asked AMANDA PLATELL to view the websites that twisted the mind of little Tia's killer



Victim: Tia Sharp, 12, was killed by porn user Stuart Hazell

Pictures of a sweet youngster with pigtails and round spectacles dance across my office computer screen. I had typed the words ‘little girls in glasses’ into Google and clicked through the images which popped up.



This is the same phrase that Stuart Hazell — the killer of 12-year-old Tia Sharp and a habitual child porn user — typed into his home computer prior to his sickening attack on the little girl. You see, Tia wore glasses. And Google allowed Hazell to turn this innocuous phrase into something vile, something no right-minded person would ever wish to imagine.



Indeed, the judge found it was access to this porn which had fuelled Hazell’s sick fantasies, leading him to sexually assault Tia. He even took souvenir pictures of her dead, naked, violated body propped up in bed — one last image to satisfy his perversions.



Like millions of others, I read the details of Tia’s murder with a sense of both horror and profound disconnection. Horror that a vulnerable girl could be left in the care of her grandmother and her partner, a man with 30 convictions for drugs and violence, because it seemed better than the hell-hole that was her own home.



And disconnection because it was an alien world. Habitual criminals, feckless families, wife-beaters, abused children, drug dealers and benefit scroungers... a hellish universe that was far removed from my comfortable middle-class existence.



My abiding feeling, after this horrific trial closed and Hazell was led off to start his life sentence, was one of profound relief that his was not my world. Never could such horror sully my existence.



Or so I thought. Because, during the past two harrowing days, I have discovered how easy it is to enter Hazell’s world. Not through desire, nor curiosity, but to expose first-hand the horrendous world of child pornography that is now so freely available online, and to warn parents how close their own children come to it every time they log on to the internet.

The judge found it was access to this porn which had fuelled Hazell's sick fantasies, leading him to sexually assault Tia

No checks, no passwords, just one click — and you’re met with a tsunami of images of young girls and boys, being sadistically, repeatedly raped and forced to perform sex acts on men, all captured in sickening close-up.



I typed those sickeningly banal words of Hazell’s — ‘little girls in glasses’ — into Google and up popped innocent images.



Then I added the word ‘porn’ to that phrase — and was deluged with video clips.

Often nearly half an hour long, these clips act as an online guide for paedophiles on how to groom their victims.

I apologise to Mail readers, who may feel this is not appropriate journalism for a family newspaper and that we should not give such obscene material the oxygen of publicity. But someone has to speak up.



Tia's Father Steven Carter punches the air as he leaves court after the Hazell was found guilty

The fact is that these repulsive videos are available in every home in this country via Google, the search engine most children use to do their homework. They are a malign cancer, which is beginning to undermine any sense of moral structure in parts of British society. They are images depraving perverted appetites, and children like Tia are dying as a result.



One video I watched, of 24 minutes in length, came up when I typed ‘teen schoolgirls abused’ — another of Hazell’s searched-for phrases.



It starts with a sweet-looking girl in her early teens, walking home in her school uniform: long white socks, short skirt and, as we discover later, pristine white cotton underwear.



It’s a stilted performance. But while the girl is clearly acting a role, the fear in her face appears to be all too real.



A man is watching her in a car parked outside her house. His accent is a peculiar hybrid of British and American. We learn he’s been stalking the girl for weeks. He knows when she gets home from school that she is alone for an hour before her parents arrive back from work.



He tricks his way into her home and within minutes is violating her, before forcing her to perform a sex act on him. Then he rapes her, in every possible position, all captured in close-up. ‘No one has to get hurt,’ he says to the child, ‘if you do what I say.’ He tells her she’s ‘secretly enjoying it’.



His other repeated refrain is: ‘Don’t you tell a soul or I’ll come back and hurt you.’ And hurt her he does. Not forgetting his final phrase: ‘This is our secret.’



As the transcripts of many paedophile court cases reveal, this is a classic grooming technique — force, fear, cajoling, praise, then threats. The psychology of the pervert is to make the child feel they are somehow complicit; that they asked for it, enjoyed it, that they are to blame.



Other key search phrases Hazell used, as revealed in court, included ‘schoolgirl abuse’, ‘daddy daughter pictures’ and ‘under-age incest galleries’.



I typed in ‘schoolgirl abuse’ and in 0.16 seconds Google delivered me 6,860,000 results; page after page of young girls being violated, some in English, many from other countries.



But then you don’t need to understand the dialogue to see what’s going on.



‘Under-aged incest galleries’ delivers 5,470,000 vile images in 20 seconds.

Victim: Tia Sharp, 12, was smothered by Hazell. He had previously looked for child porn and had filmed the girl as she slept

The thought that these images could be accessed in any home with a computer is, I would argue, almost beyond belief in a country that calls itself civilised.



Many paedophiles start off like Hazell, dabbling in adult online porn. In the same way marijuana can lead to heroin, it’s a gateway drug. Before they know it, they become addicted and they are seeking the kind of websites that Hazell sought before he murdered Tia.



For more than a year, this newspaper has waged a campaign to force internet service providers to have a mandatory ‘opt-in’ policy. This would mean the user must specify that they want access to porn when they buy and set up their computer, otherwise the material would automatically be blocked, thus safeguarding children from discovering pornography.



And while you say that your child would never seek out such material, it can happen so innocently.



A friend told me that her ten-year-old daughter was recently at a party. One of the girls went onto the YouTube website to show her friends a funny video of two cats playing.



No checks, no passwords, just one click - and you're met with a tsunami of images of young girls and boys

They laughed and wanted to see more, so one keyed in ‘cute pussies’. Up came a video of child pornography. Those girls were terrified by what they had found. And their experience can happen any time, anywhere, to anyone.



Research carried out for EU Kids Online shows that in the UK, 24 per cent of 9-16 year-olds say they have seen sexual images in the past 12 months — 11 per cent of them online and five per cent on their mobile phones.



And of the children who saw the images online, 41 per cent did so without their parents’ knowledge.



This week, the Children’s Commissioner for England, Maggie Atkinson, reported that easy access to online pornography encourages teenage boys to see girls as sex objects and to engage in risky sexual behaviour. In this major study, researchers lifted the lid on the corrosive effect of hardcore porn on children, concluding that those who access adult images and videos are more likely to lose their virginity at a younger age.



There were even indications that boys who look at violent porn are more likely to become sexually aggressive. The report called on the Department for Education to ensure that all schools provide relationship and sex education.



But I believe that we have to go further. Google should not enable users to find such disturbing material. It’s worrying enough that it’s desensitising young boys and girls. But it’s also an evil that is rousing men like Stuart Hazell to commit murder.



Yet the fact is that internet service providers and Google still utterly refuse to do anything about it. How ironic that Google’s corporate motto is ‘don’t be evil’. This week, the internet giant has made headlines, not for its refusal to block porn, but for tax avoidance.



The chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, Margaret Hodge, accused Google of being ‘evil’ — not for its refusal to protect children from online pornography, but for paying only £7.3 million in corporate tax on UK turnover of £3 billion.



Moreover, the executive chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, visited Downing Street this week, and the Prime Minister heralded the meeting as a ‘turning point’, as did Nick Clegg.



What Mr Cameron didn’t mention, of course, is that he already has close connections to Google.

Steve Hilton, the Prime Minister’s former chief strategist and closest political adviser, is married to Rachel Whetstone, head of global communications at Google.

The chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, Margaret Hodge, accused Google of being 'evil' for paying only £7.3¿million in corporate tax on UK turnover of £3¿billion

Whetstone and Cameron have known each other since starting at Conservative Central Office in their early 20s. Now Hilton and Whetstone have a Oxfordshire holiday home close to the Camerons.



So while protecting children and regulating the internet was not on the Downing Street agenda, tax avoidance was.



So why don’t Google and other internet service providers act to prevent pornography being displayed on our home computers?



Well, while Google doesn’t have advertising beside the results which are displayed when a user searches for porn, some 25 per cent of all web searches are for such material.



The fact is that internet service providers and Google still utterly refuse to do anything about it. How ironic that Google’s corporate motto is ‘don’t be evil’.

That’s a huge section of the online audience. And if Google acted to stop this, their users would just go to a commercial rival.



A Google spokesperson said: ‘We take this issue extremely seriously. We are members and joint funders of the Internet Watch Foundation — an independent body that searches the web for child abuse imagery and then sends us links, which we remove from our search index.



‘When we discover child abuse imagery, or are made aware of it, we respond quickly to remove and report it to the appropriate law enforcement authorities.’



All well and good. But Google have got to go much further. They must use the money they have accumulated from avoiding tax to cleanse such filth from the internet. They have the technology — we must persuade them to have the will.



The executive chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt (pictured), visited Downing Street this week, and the Prime Minister heralded the meeting as a 'turning point', as did Nick Clegg

With a personal wealth estimated at almost £7 billion, you would have thought Mr Schmidt had earned enough to satisfy even the greediest of men.



Furthermore, given that he is the father of two daughters, one would have imagined he would be the first to set systems in place to stop the online proliferation of child porn.



Authoritative research says the vast majority of children who appear in pornography are not abducted or physically forced to take part. In most cases, they know the producer of the videos. Often it is their father, stepfather, or another male relative and they are manipulated into taking part.



As for such porn fuelling abuse, research also records the effects on users. An individual who sexually abuses children regularly seeks out child pornography as part of their sexual gratification. Many paedophiles view child porn immediately before attacking a child.



Viewing child porn desensitises the user to the harm it causes the victims, and makes them more and more attracted to images of increasing vileness, as it did in Hazell’s case.



Researchers conclude that the use of child pornography may also increase the risk that the person will sexually abuse a child themselves.



After seeing such images for myself, I am not in the least bit surprised to learn of this corruption of the human psyche.

I was particularly shocked by one video of teen abuse where a schoolgirl was seated in a chair in a dark empty room, her hands bound and her legs chained to the wall, her schoolbag protecting her modesty until it was removed by her abuser.



She looked terrified. She was forced to drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes before the abuse began, her pigtails shaking with fear, her long white socks scrunched down around her ankles.



There was no sound throughout, just that awful sight of a young girl being abused violently. I cannot begin to tell you how much that video has affected me.



Indeed, I have found writing this article a deeply troubling experience. It was the most upsetting experience in my 30 years of journalism. But I passionately believe that we all need to fight this evil.



So what have I learnt? That no matter how distant abuse may seem from our comfort-able, middle-class lives, it is an evil that we are tolerating, however unintentionally, by not standing up to Google and other internet giants.



And that those images contained real little girls, as real and innocent as Tia was, their innocence violated to provide pleasure for paedophiles.



While it is too late to save Tia, it’s not too late for the other young girls who, even as you read this, are being abused. It’s not too late to stop the terrible cancer of porn corrupting our society — possibly for ever.



The Daily Mail, which carried out its investigations in the public interest, is reporting these websites to the police. Readers must not access these websites as it is against the law.





