More than 850 men a month are arrested for online child abuse offences in England and Wales.They come from every walk of life: teachers, police officers, doctors, TV presenters.And the numbers are rising every year.How did this happen?Andy was enjoying a weekend away with his wife when it happened.“My neighbour phoned me and said, ‘The police are in your house.

They’re looking for you.’” He didn’t need to wonder why.“You know.You know the reason.I was petrified when I got that call.

It wasn’t just the thought of other people knowing what I had done; I also had to face myself, and that is a sick feeling – it is guilt, shame.”Andy had been watching and sharing images of children being sexually abused for several months before the police appeared at his door.He tried at first to keep it from his wife: “I was afraid she would ask me to leave.I wouldn’t have blamed her if she had.”When they got home, he told her his story: that a spiralling porn addiction had led him to ever darker places, chatrooms where people talked about sex and porn, and shared images and videos.

“That was where someone sent me a picture of a child, in exchange for some porn I sent them,”Unlike Andy, Mark didn’t immediately realise why the police had come for him,“My then wife came in looking worried and said, ‘There are police at the door,’ We were living in a wealthy area, so I thought they were there about some recent burglaries,But then they told me they needed to speak to me alone.

They said I was being arrested for having indecent images of children,”Mark claims he was shellshocked,“I knew I had looked at lots of porn but I genuinely did not think there was anybody underage in there,They said they had found 200 illegal images,” From the outside, Mark was a successful businessman, travelling regularly for work.

His arrest was a public humiliation,“There were four of them, with body cameras on, in two cars,They told my boys, ‘Don’t worry, Daddy is just helping us out’ and put me in the back of one of the cars,In the picture the police took that day, I look suicidal,”In England and Wales, 850 men a month are arrested for online child abuse offences.

They come from every walk of life: teachers, police officers, bus drivers, doctors,Those on the frontline are warning of another alarming trend: a significant shift towards younger offenders among those picked up for watching illegal material,The arrests are just one metric pointing towards a spiralling global crisis,Last year was the worst on record for instances of online child sexual abuse imagery, with the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation acting to remove content from 300,000 web pages, each containing at least one, if not hundreds or thousands, of illegal images and videos,Now, police, charities, lawyers and child protection experts are asking what is driving this tidal wave of offending, and finding one common thread: the explosion over the past 10 to 20 years of free-to-view and easily accessible online pornography.

Material so violent it would have been considered highly extreme a generation ago is now readily available on iPads, desktops and the phones in teenagers’ pockets.A growing body of research is beginning to warn of how problematic porn habits can be a pathway into viewing images of children being abused.I have been writing about the online child abuse crisis for five years.Time and again I have heard warnings from those on the frontline that there is an unambiguous link between the two.Do the sites that profit from porn have questions to answer about this link? Can the connection be broken? And the big question: is the explosion of child abuse imagery online feeding a demand for this material, or creating one?The scale of the problem faced by the police was made clear to the public last year, when former BBC presenter Huw Edwards was given a suspended sentence, avoiding jail time, after being found guilty of accessing indecent photographs of children as young as seven.

This highlighted the fact that most people – around eight out of 10 – caught with images of children being sexually abused are not jailed.The National Crime Agency has called for more prison sentences, warning that up to 830,000 adults in the UK, 1.6% of the population, pose a threat to children.Andy was sent to prison for six months for watching and sharing images of child abuse.I spoke to him through the Leeds-based national agency Safer Lives, which works with men at every stage, from arrest to post-conviction counselling, to help them change their behaviour.

Like many of the men they encounter, Andy argues that he has no intrinsic interest in children, but was led through a porn addiction to seek out ever more extreme images,“I am fully accountable,” Andy tells me on the phone,“None of this is an excuse,I look back at what I did with huge regret and shame,But I didn’t start out wanting to see kids.

I was addicted to porn and I went down a road of being totally desensitised as I got further and further from what was normal.“I was using porn as a coping mechanism for all sorts of things – stress, loss, general life problems.When you masturbate to porn, you get an intense dopamine hit.Then those first videos start to become boring.Your brain starts to say, that’s not good enough.

Soon you are watching rape fantasies – there are loads of categories like this on mainstream sites.Then it’s teenagers.The algorithms keep showing you more extreme stuff.”He argues that the mainstream porn sites encourage an interest in young girls.“They push the boundaries as much as they can, with content around young women dressed in school uniforms, for example; incest themes; old men paired with young women.

”I ask where his own moral judgment was when watching videos of teenagers.“Yes, I could have wondered if those girls were really over 18.But you think, well, I’m on a site anyone can access, it’s legal.You can watch this on the bus, right? You are in an environment that is eroding your sense of responsibility.”As many offenders do, he moved to chatrooms where men shared images and videos from porn sites they liked.

It was in this space, he says, that he was first sent a picture that was clearly of a child.“You know it’s wrong, but the dopamine hit from what you are doing overrides everything else.I think the pathways in my brain had been changed by all the porn I had watched.”Afterwards, he admits, “You feel sick and horrible.For years I didn’t talk about this.

But now I want to stop other men continuing down the path I went down,”Mark has a similar story,He is open in saying his interest began with legal material of teen girls but says he was taken to images of children through hours of clicking on everything offered to him,“I have gone through about 40 sessions of counselling to try to understand why I ended up in a place where someone could knock on my door to arrest me,I was horrified and disgusted with myself, and I will be until the day I die.

”Porn was a coping mechanism when he was away from his family, he says, and it quickly got out of control,“I worked abroad a lot and was bored and lonely,I was bringing up porn on my phone the moment I was travelling, watching it sometimes for five hours a day,“The police never found a single search for images of children: it was all from clicking through links – what the algorithms were offering me,Porn sites have a button that says ‘See more like this’.

I was desensitised, I had looked at so much teen porn,”Mark was convicted of possessing images in categories A, B and C,The worst of these, A, involves the penetration of children under 18,“I understand now that my reaction should have been to turn off the computer when I was being offered images of young girls,But when you have been watching porn for three or four hours, you might have clicked 200 times.

You are in such a bizarre place, your hormones are all over the place,You – your brain – are out of control,”As part of his counselling, Mark has written a letter to one of the young girls he watched, “not to send, but for therapy,She could, I suppose, have been 16 or 17,It was a long letter.

I explained how I got to be there, I was hugely apologetic.”The idea that there is a path that for some people leads from legal porn to videos of children being abused is controversial.Many of the men being arrested for online child abuse offences pose a serious risk to children.But there is no doubt that the profile of offenders has changed in recent years.Michael Sheath worked with child abusers for more than 30 years and now advises police forces around Europe on offender profiling.

When I speak to him, he has just returned from an Interpol conference on online child abuse.“I’ve been every year for 14 years and we have seen a shift over that time, from what we would call serious criminal paedophiles, the type who are organising the abuse of kids in the Philippines, and we still see those, to a huge number of lower-level offenders.It’s a huge burden on the police.”He is in no doubt that the change is linked to increasingly easy access to violent and extreme pornography.“I see men who have gone down what I call an ‘escalating pathway’.

The link is unambiguous,”Sheath speaks powerfully about what he sees as a horrific impact of porn on societal taboos that have traditionally protected children,“The threshold for abusive behaviour is through the floor,It used to be that child abuse material was hard to find and looking at it was extremely risky,The mindset of someone searching for it would be ‘I am a total sex criminal’ - they knew they were leaving the norms of society.

Now it is barely taboo to watch children being abused, and that is linked to porn.Look on a mainstream porn site and you’ll immediately see titles like ‘Auntie takes the boys’ virginity’ or ‘Stepdad and stepdaughter’.When I started working 30 years ago, that was really out-there outrageous, pervy and wrong.Now it’s seen as a laugh.”The videos he is referring to are legal content acted by adults, not hidden but watched by millions in the UK.

“There is a slope and it is slippery, but that doesn’t mean men shouldn’t be held to account for being complicit in the abuse of the child.”Serious research is now being done into how this slippery slope works.In a groundbreaking two-year project, Finnish group Protect Children posted questionnaires on the dark web to reach people viewing illegal material in several countries, including the UK.They collected data from 4,549 anonymous child sexual abuse offenders.A third of respondents admitted that sexual interest in children was a key reason why they searched for child sexual abuse material.

Nearly two-thirds reported a sexual interest in under-18s – mostly teens between 15 and 17.Heavy use of pornography is described as one of the “facilitating factors” that can play an important role in lowering the barrier to offending.More than 50% of those who admitted watching online child abuse said they were not seeking these images when they were first exposed to them.This did not mean they did not go on to search for violent and harmful images of children.The prevalence of this “accidental viewing” is underlined by the huge number of respondents – over two-thirds – who said they first saw child sexual abuse material when they were under 18