Despite three major takedowns in New Jersey alone over the past year, the creation and distribution of child pornography is far from silenced.

Elie Honig - Director, NJ Division of Criminal Justice
Elie Honig, center, NJ Division of Criminal Justice Director (Townsquare Media)
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The exploitation of young children is still a serious problem, according to one of New Jersey's top law enforcers, and it's a problem that was launched to a whole new level by the World Wide Web. Homemade videos and shady message boards make up a corner of the internet that most of us couldn't even imagine.

"It's disturbing, no question," said Elie Honig, director of the New Jersey Division of Criminal Justice. "We are monitoring those sites to the extent we can. We try to put undercovers into those sites."

Honig said officials aren't only going after the perpetrators; they also have a goal of locating or recovering the young children depicted in the graphic images and videos.

"Every time one of these images is shared, that child is re-victimized," Honig said. "Unfortunately, a lot of these children are based internationally."

More than 1,500 child abuse domains were discovered by the Internet Watch Foundation in 2008, with more than half housed in the United States. The FBI noted convictions and pretrial diversions of "innocent images violations" jumped by more than 1,000 percent from 1996 to 2005, the decade in which online networking came to life.

"There's always going to be a demand for this. There's always going to be people who have this sickness. That doesn't mean we're not going to fight it," added Honig. "You know your fingernails are going to grow back, but you still cut them anyway."

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