Combating child cyberporn
Last week, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) wrapped up a two-day meeting on the sexual abuse of children with a call for greater regulation of cyberspace by both governments and the computer industry.
"The criminal activity of paedophiles and child pornographers who use and abuse children on the Internet is an issue of immediate and urgent concern," declared the conference's final communiqué. "While the benefits of the Internet far outweigh its potential drawbacks, these dangers cannot be ignored."
Experts representing police agencies, rights groups, Internet service providers and non-governmental organisations, hope the plan which was agreed in Paris will raise awareness of the problem and eventually establish a world network that will be able to track down criminals on the net.
The meeting, attended by 300 specialists in the field, was told that paedophilia was flourishing via contacts made in chat rooms and forum groups which increasingly pepper the Internet, and was spreading even more widely with the help of electronic mail.
"The Internet is fast becoming the most significant factor in the sexual abuse of children," said Agnès Fournier de Saint Maur, a member of the Specialised Crime Unit of the International Police Organisation (Interpol).
"The boundaries of horror will continue to be pushed back with the assistance, albeit unintentional, of technological progress," she predicted, adding that so far, criminals had generally proved more computer-literate than the majority of the world's police forces.
Fournier de Saint Maur said a recent probe had caught 96 people in 12 countries. One of the arrested, a Finn, had an estimated 250,000 child porn images stashed on his computer.
Other investigations have uncovered criminals organising "made-to-measure" child rapes, which were then videotaped and sent directly to subscribers over the Internet.
The UNESCO conference called for self-regulation by Internet service providers to prevent children from becoming victims of abuse, and to make sure the 15 million youngsters surfing the net today are spared the sight of the sordid scenes which are now accessible on many web sites.
The plan of action called for UNESCO to play a key role in collecting and diffusing legal information concerning paedophilia and child pornography on-line. It also called for close cooperation between governments, international agencies, the computer industry, educators and the media.
The plan recommended that parents use filters and screening tools, and called for aggressive information campaigns about the long-term harm suffered by sexually abused children. However, for some of those attending the conference, these recommendations did not go far enough.
"The plan of action doesn't deal with the specific dangers of child pornography and paedophilia in cyberspace," said Debbie Mahoney, whose 10-year-old son was abused 37 times by a neighbour.
Meanwhile, the emphasis on self-regulation by providers disappointed some participants. "Self-regulation is ridiculous," said Malta Marcovich, of France's Movement Against Pornography and Prostitution. Marcovich cited examples of web sites which were able to show pictures of fully clothed children quite legally, even though they were accompanied by suggestive captions. "We have laws against incitement to racial hatred. We need similar laws to combat incitement to child pornography and paedophilia," she said.
Although some countries, including Belgium, France and Germany, have established special police units to combat such crime, there is still a lack of coordination among enforcement agencies worldwide. Meanwhile, many Internet service providers are reluctant to take a stand and monitor child cyberporn.
To illustrate the enormous quantity of pornography available on the Internet, a member of Interpol cited a 1995 study by the University of Pittsburgh, which estimated it was possible to download about one million sexually explicit photos and video clips involving children from specialised Internet sites.
With massive amounts of data now travelling around the world in a matter of seconds, the race is now on between police and paedophile net users. Our children's lives may depend upon who wins.
Compiled from wires by Heba Samir
