The terrible thing about Nathan Gaunt's job is that it's a growth area. He is a cyber psychologist, dealing with men who delve into the vast world of the internet to find sexual images of children.

Which is putting it nicely. Some of these images are so horrific they defy belief. Baby rape, for example, is common and relatively easy to find on the net, when you know how, and if you actually want, to look.

Most people do not. But there are plenty who do and who distribute, trade and obsessively hoard images such as this - and they are here in clean, green New Zealand.

It is such a growing problem that the organisation for which Gaunt works, the Safe treatment programme for sexual abusers, is setting up a group just for online child abusers.

And make no mistake, he says, it is abuse. There is no such thing as just looking, when each ghastly image represents the abuse of a real child.

The abusers come in all shapes, sizes and ages, and span all professions. Gaunt will not reveal details of his clients but throughout the world online abusers come from all walks of life. Heterosexual and straight, married and single, with and without children.

Some may indeed "just look", but others buy and sell, some have already abused children "hands-on" and others may go on to abuse children "hands-on".

Some have just a few images. Others are collectors with huge libraries on their computers, painstakingly catalogued.

In New Zealand at any one time there are 20 or 30 cases of online abusers before the courts and others under investigation.

But even if it may seem as if there is a child abuser under every rock, when Time magazine last week asked the question: "Is New Zealand a haven for paedophiles?" it was wildly exaggerating, say the experts.

New Zealand is no more a haven than Australia or America or any other country. The trouble is, the exact extent of the problem is not known anywhere.

The paedophile haven question was raised in the South Pacific edition of Time in connection with Operation Falcon, one of an increasing number of international sting operations nabbing online child abusers.

The FBI supplied several countries with lists of suspects caught out by their credit cards buying and distributing images from child pornography sites in Belarus.

The police here have been criticised for making no arrests so far, unlike Australia where hundreds of people have been investigated, nine of whom have committed suicide.

It was claimed in Parliament on Thursday that the police had officers ready to investigate more than 70 Operation Falcon names but then called them off without explanation. But Vince Cholewa from Internal Affairs is angry at the Time article which he says was written by an Australian reporter and is "Kiwi-bashing".