Child Sexual Exploitation Material (CSEM) is not just a hidden crime, it is also a silent war.
A war fought behind screens, funded by tycoons, enabled by unchecked technology, and measured in the shattered lives of children and families. This is no fringe issue. It is a global battleground where profit is prioritised over people, and the casualties are mounting.
While governments rally to draft young men into conventional wars, another generation is being conscripted into darkness through addiction, coercion, and digital entrapment. Behind every image is a wound. Behind every low-level offender is often a deeper story of emotional collapse or moral confusion. But at the top of the chain? War profiteers. Hidden hands. Silent weapons.
This brochure aims to expose some of the victims in this complex system. A global economy of harm, enabled by denial, secrecy, and technological complicity. The most dangerous people at the top want to silence us. They take advantage of regular people at the bottom of the hierarchy. Those who are easy to detect and apprehend.
Those at the bottom are not innocent either, they take the bait. Our most vulnerable people who enter this corrupt system via mainstream pornographic or social media websites feed their sexual desires that escalate addictions to dark SEM that keeps them trapped. They are easily apprehended and these low-risk offenders’ families are left floundering with no signposting nor knowledge of what they were dealing with.
When ‘the knock’ comes to your house, nothing can prepare you for the shock and the onslaught that follows. These innocent family members of offenders are slowly dying of shame and trauma without getting the help they need. They are taking the brunt for anger about the whole system because the other more dangerous players are invisible.
The Knock Club website has produced this report to give a voice to one of the most marginalised groups in modern society ~ families of CSEM offenders. Even though you won’t find the demonisation of these low-risk offenders in this booklet, it does not mean we condone any CSEM for any reason. Yet it must be acknowledged by society that “normal” non-paedophilic pathways to CSEM exist. We believe that all offenders can be rehabilitated and the offenders in our families are the easiest sub-group of CSEM offenders to rehabilitate, with very low reoffending rates (between 2-6%) (Bryce 2017).
We need a multi-system approach to end this war. To stop our children being used as sexual objects and to stop our sons (and daughters) from taking the bait. The criminal justice system, international police, academic disciplines, governments, schools, social services, media, parents, platform providers, and international regulatory bodies need to work collectively to put an end to the CSEM pandemic.
Link to the report Click Here.