The Darkest Web Storyville on iplayer

I finally finished watching it and, despite it being an emotional rollercoaster, I'm very glad I did. These law enforcement officers are so amazingly tenacious, dedicated and clever in how they go after the evil bastards who do this to children. It's also scary to realise just how much luck is involved sometimes in catching these criminals.

It's fucking ridiculous that there are only 50 people involved in this worldwide police team - I know it's not work suited to a wide range of people but surely governments and law enforcement should prioritise recruiting and funding a higher number or people because this is a very serious (evil) crime and paedophiles should not be able to judge that the odds of getting away with it are in their favour.

I think I was most shocked by the info that offenders are getting younger (men in their 20s), that those who set up the sites on the dark web primarily work in computers, that lack of adequate safeguarding/common sense means these men have access to children, and that these animals feel no shame or remorse for what they inflict on children.

@ElenOfTheWays 18/02/2026 21:07
I am very sorry For what happened when you were four. 💐

It can't be shut down - it's not managed or run by any one centralised authority, it's based on many, many individual servers around the world. In the same way, it is (almost) impossible to shut down the internet completely - you'd need some sort of worldwide unanimous agreement to turn everything off.

There are legitimate - and important - uses for it, such as allowing those in censorious and oppressive regimes to communicate with or read about the outside world (even major sites like the BBC have TOR-accessible web content), allowing military and security forces to communicate globally under the radar etc.

Yes, I think this is true.

In some ways, because of technology, I think we are really beginning to reap the consequences of some of the ideas that were promoted during the sexual revolution.

If you don't have a sex life you are bound to be unhappy (unless you have zero sexual desire.)
If fantasies stay in your head they are not harmful.
Thinking about things doesn't change you.
Sex is fundamentally a healthy drive and suppressing your natural sex drive is unhealthy.
Sexual boundaries are prudish. As an individual and in society.
There is no mental/psychological downside to transactional sex as long as there is consent, for anyone involved.
There is no value in practising sexual continence.

I think these were always dangerous wrongheaded ideas, but when you can subject your brain to almost any type of content, for 10 or more hours a day, we see how that can stunt young people, change who they are, create perverts and addicts who will never have a satisfying relationship and are a danger to society.

It;s not just men either, young women are increasingly directly affected as well, more often through print media.

And of course the ones most at risk are the ones who are most vulnerable for other reasons.

When I watched this I was actually dumbfounded that USA created the Dark Web and left it up and open to the public. I am not techy and have no desire to find anything dubious enough to need to go on the dark web, but this seems to be why we can't track them and other gang crimes - why is it still enabled?

@Foxybingo32 No! 😄It's just a high degree of personal privacy. Obviously, crims like to be private but so do a lot of law-abiding people. The Dark Web is where you go, not what you use to get there.

Ha ha! I dont believe he is doing anything illegale, but yes he said vpn and tor. Is that the dark web?

I remember reading a few years ago that UK police were so under-resourced in this area that they had to rely on whatever seized computers they had that were no longer required in evidence & could not be returned to their owners.
Investigation of CSA ought to be a priority allocation of POCA resources.

Do you mean he visits drug dealing/ forged document/other criminal services & activities sites ie; the Dark Web, or just, "he uses Tor & a VPN"?

Edited for missing word

My brother uses the dark web. Claims privacy /data /government etc 🙄.

I think I’m going to have to watch this in segments. I started tearing up after 10 minutes.

I really admire the law enforcement teams working to catch these evil men. I’m in awe of how they manage to cope with what they have to see and what they have to process as part of their jobs.

Your first paragraph - that's exactly what I was thinking. 2 of my dc are older than 2 of the predators - I don't know why that shocked me, but it did.

I had to watch this in bursts - it was truly harrowing. The men and women who dedicate their lives to finding and catching these people are incredible. I think it said at the end that there are something like a million users of these forums. The number is just increasing all the time. Awful.

It also makes me think of the report into young Russian men flying drones and killing civilians in Ukraine. We are allowing young people to grow up seeing actual human civilians as NPCs in a video game. The lack of empathy and basic humanity is astonishing. Interestingly it was a young woman coordinating their activities. For young men unable to interact with women because of low social skills she's like a variant of the classic honeytrap. A way to gain kudos from a young woman, just a really lethal twist.

Yes, I did consider that myself. Young men who have few social skills, no friends and spend all of their lives gaming or on -line. The children they abuse are not real human beings to them, they are simply characters or parts in their fantasy. There is obviously zero empathy. Brings to mind the recent Canadian trans identified teen who went on a shooting spree killing nine and injuring dozens.

I think that when future sociologists look back on the 2st century, they'll struggle to understand that despite all the warnings that smartphones are not toys and shouldn't be given to children under 16
In 2023, 60 percent of UK children aged between eight and 11 reported having a smartphone and so did almost 100 percent of UK teens.
Mobile app usage of children in the United Kingdom - statistics & facts | Statista

I'm interested in the percentage of these young men who are autistic and who have spent a lot of time online throughout adolescence when more socially skilled young men were out interacting with other teens. Sex can become a 'special interest' to some of these young men and children are seen as 'safer' 'objects' than teens or adults. I think if people understood how young people interact online they would be horrified.

It is unimaginable how these officers deal with having to see that kind of material.

I suppose the reward of saving those children is what makes it worth it, but to live with what you've seen in your head for the rest of your life... I can't even begin to think how horrific that is. You must have to be incredibly strong.

I never thought they were all middle aged. Maybe because the paedophile I came across when I was 4 was an older brother of a friend in his late teens (maybe early 20s.) I didn't know his age but he wasn't a "dad man" he was a "big boy" (my 4 yr old rhetoric)
They always start young I think.
Later on I knew what is now understood to be an AGP who was related to me, he was 25 at the time

Edited to add I was 4 in 1975. So a long time ago. Well before the Internet and easy access to porn

One of the police officers said that if they arrested every man in the UK who committed online child sex abuse offences, there wouldn't be enough prison cells in the whole country to house them all.

Guess we should just shoot them then. I wouldn't have a problem with that.

If they’re young then they’ve grown up steeped in an internet with no guard rails.
There are paedophiles whose aim is to deliberately introduce porn to children online. That’s what they get off on, breaking children’s minds and turning them into porn users and creators so the cycle continues. It’s no surprise this includes CSA.

And daily we see posters here defending their children’s right to have an open access smart phone, or a tablet.

I won’t be able to watch this programme, but salute to those who try to stem this tide.

I've just finished watching...and the one thing that stands out for me is the youth of these abusers. When we tend to think of paedophiles I think we tend to think of middle aged men, but increasingly we are looking at young men in their twenties.

I think the same goes for men with AGP - who then 'transition'. Again we tend to think of middle aged men, married and with children who have been cross dressing all of their adult lives.......but I suggest that most young male transitioners are now motvated by AGP ( they are not of the homosexual variant which you might expect to see).The internet and access to on-line pornography is not only compounding deviant sexual behaviours, but even creating them in the first instance.

It also makaes me think of those men recently found to be working in child day care nurseries who have been sexually absuing children. One of them was only in his twenties, and to unsuspecting eyes he looked like a good looking, fresh faced young man who you may automatically trust with your children. Not so!

Yes it's about the same story

I haven't seen the documentary yet, the article was astounding. The dedication of those police officers is extraordinary. I found details of the abuse very hard to read.

I think I'll give this one a miss, I've watched the Michael Jackson ones on channel four, Lover Liar Predator and Confessions of a Killer on iPlayer and I think I need some comedy on my telly.
I admire the people who try and police this. I know I couldn't do it.

A slight derail but it is related:

some of the online child sex abuse material is generated by children themselves: as well as malicious messaging from boys to girls, dick pics and the likes, 'sexting' between children seems to have become almost acceptable - It's just the way young people communicate these days, we must move with the times'.

Sending naked images of a child is of course illegal, but when the image has been sent by the child themselves, they are not considered to have broken the law, but are considered in need of support and protection. Especially if the other 'child' they sent sexualised pictures to is in fact an adult paedophile..

That's one unfortunate consequence of giving children unrestricted access to their own phone.

Brilliant detective work- and showed their very human feelings during the interviews
I shouldn't be surprised or shocked by the very depths of human depravity out there but I am. It's rife. Vile.