Experts say that 25% of the pornography on global Internet websites contains child pornography. Among these, more than 50% contain child pornography from Russia. Although the precise number of children involved in the production of Russian pornography is unknown, experts report there are some tens of thousands of such children.
The business is run by criminal networks that manufacture, distribute and export (to Germany, Britain, the United States, Italy, Canada and elsewhere) photographs and video records of a pornographic nature, including violent sexual assaults on children.
The production and consumption of pornographic products featuring children is especially pronounced in Moscow and St Petersburg. In the mid-1990s, pornographic images were mostly imported into Russia. They were expensive and distributed in narrow circles. Nowadays, one can buy videocassettes with child pornography at practically any railway station or marketplace in these towns. Prices for child pornography on the Moscow market are practically the same as for a licensed film cassette, 165 to 170 roubles (US$6-7); huge turnover makes these low prices possible. A well-known 12-part pornographic film called Malyavki (Little Ones) features boys as young as 6 years old. The popular Russian web search system Jandex yields no less than 405 sites and 19,864 pages in reply to the request for “child porn in Moscow”.
