Measuring the Child-Porn Trade [article]

Unlike, say, the soft-drink or airline industries, the child-pornography industry doesn't report its annual sales to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Yet in a press release ahead of a recent House of Representatives hearing aimed at curbing the industry, Texas Republican Joe Barton said, "Child pornography is apparently a multibillion … my staff analysis says $20 billion-a-year business. Twenty billion dollars." Some press reports said the figure applied only to the industry's online segment. The New York Times reported, "the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet is a $20 billion industry that continues to expand in the United States and abroad," citing witnesses at the hearing. (The Online Journal's Real Time column also quoted the estimate from the hearing.)

My efforts this week to track down the number's source -- and free-lance journalist Daniel Radosh's similar quest on his blog -- yielded lots of dead ends. It turns out it can be easier to enter a big number into the Congressional record, and national press coverage, than to locate its origin. (Numbers Guy reader Brian Flanagan suggested I look into the estimate.)

What was Rep. Barton's staff analysis? A spokesman for the House Energy and Commerce Committee told me the source of the number was the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a group that advocates for the protection of children. When I first talked with that group's president, Ernie Allen, he told me that Standard Chartered bank, which has worked with the NCMEC to cut off funding to child-porn traffickers, wanted a quantitative analysis of the problem, so it asked for a measurement from consulting firm McKinsey & Co.

Mr. Allen faxed me an NCMEC paper that cites the McKinsey study in placing the child-porn industry at $6 billion in 1999, and $20 billion in 2004.

But a McKinsey spokesman painted a different picture for me: "The number was not calculated or generated by McKinsey," he wrote in an email. Instead, for a pro bono analysis for Standard Chartered, he said, McKinsey used a number that appeared in a report last year by End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes, an international advocacy group.

But the trail didn't end there: That report, in turn, attributed the number to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as did a report last year from the Council of Europe, a Strasbourg, France-based human-rights watchdog. Both of those reports noted that estimates range widely, from $3 billion to $20 billion.

FBI spokesman Paul Bresson told me in an email, "The FBI has not stated the $20 billion figure... . I have asked many people who would know for sure if we have attached the $20 billion number to this problem. I have scoured our Web site, too. Nothing!"

I went back to the NCMEC Monday and shared what I found. In an email response, spokeswoman Joann Donnellan said, "If it is determined that this ends up not being a reliable statistic, NCMEC will stop citing McKinsey as the source and will also stop citing a specific number. Rather, NCMEC will revert to what it has said previously… that commercial child pornography is a multi-billion dollar industry."

This isn't the first number from the NCMEC that struck me as questionable. The group provided the estimate that one in five children is sexually solicited online, which appeared in public-service ads distributed by the Ad Council. The stat has received a fresh round of publicity thanks to donated air time from MySpace, a site popular with teens. As I wrote last year, the "one in five" estimate was based on research that was five years old which only covered children who spent time online. The survey also used a broad definition of sexual solicitation. Yet the stat persists. The NCMEC told me last July it hoped to have new research by the end of last year. Now, spokeswoman Tina Schwartz says the group expects new research to be released in the next couple of months.

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