‘I didn’t start out wanting to see kids’: are porn algorithms feeding a generation of paedophiles – or creating one?

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...