Pictures flicker across a computer screen. A little girl, no more than five or six. Bound and tortured. Raped. Begging Daddy to stop. Horror fiction? No — an ever more alarming reality.
”Eighty percent of the abuse seen in online child porn is done by people the children know,” said Leila Ben Debba, of the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.
Experts like Ben Debba believe direct family members to be responsible for 45% of the abuse that is later downloaded and viewed by thousands of ”customers”. The rest are doctors, teachers, sports coaches or other persons of authority, permeating all social levels.
Child pornography and child abuse may be as old as mankind, but the internet has opened new channels and forums for distribution, experts gathered at a Vienna conference agree.
At the initiative of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), law-enforcement specialists, NGOs, private-sector companies and lawmakers got together last week to work on joint approaches.
No one was aware of the scale of online child porn until about 1999, when a major police operation in the United States uncovered 300 000 users worldwide just from one provider, conference organiser Tim Del Vecchio from the OSCE’s police unit said.
Education
One in seven children receives sexual offers via the internet, a US study found, 70% when sitting at their home computers. But educating children offers a way out. If children are informed and empowered, they recognise those chat-room predators, Bed Debba said.
A key problem is lack of legislation: 95 nations have no laws against child pornography or are in complete denial of the problem, making the lives of criminals easy. ”Japan is a case in point,” one expert said. Only 20 countries currently regard downloading and owning child porn a crime.
”Curiosity will lead to abuse,” Ben Debba warned. Users have to understand that downloading increases demand, destroying the life of victims, she said.
Online criminals are no über-geeks, Zdenek Jiricek of Microsoft Europe said, but use techniques such as phishing or identity theft more skilfully. ”They are not much better technically, but they are better at social engineering,” he said.
With ever-changing technology, police need to keep abreast of developments. One potential abuse ”anti-missile” is Microsoft’s Child Exploitation Tracking System (Cets), developed in cooperation with Canada’s police force.
Cets, currently deployed in a number of countries from Canada to Spain, is a tool putting pieces of the porn puzzle together, storing, tracking and searching offenders, and linking nicknames and aliases to databases or different search warrants, Jiricek said.
Given the right tools, police can make a difference. Officers need training in understanding how the operating system works. ”We show them what you can do, what is tracked on the computer,” Jiricek said.
Global business
Online child porn is a global business. Conservative estimates dating from 2003 put the volume of business created by net child porn to at least $3-billion. ”There is more and more interest in child abuse as source of profit,” Jiricek said.
The traffic is staggering. There are an estimated 500 000 original images, and the number is growing steadily. One investigation traced a single image being traded 800 000 times within six months, involving six million different IP addresses.
Those children abused are getting younger, and the abuse increasingly brutal: 19% of the children are under three, almost half between three and five. Altogether 86% of the victims are under 12. ”This is no case of is she 16 or 18, but plain nastiness,” Del Vecchio said.
”We are not talking about children in suggestive poses here,” Ben Debba said. ”It is getting more and more sadistic.”
Explicit sexual acts and genitalia are shown in 92% of the images, 80% show penetration and 21% rape, bondage or torture of children.
The experts’ wish list after the conference?
”Education, education, education,” Ben Debba suggested. Educating parents, children, lawmakers and the society as a whole about the crime is a top priority.
Secondly, he says what is necessary is overcoming the backlog in legislation as well as better training for law-enforcement officers, and improved networking and cooperation from IP providers or banks that are only slowly waking up to their responsibilities.
Once people are aware of the horrors, they are ready to fight them, Debba believes. ”Police, for example. They do it. Once you have seen the rape of a two-month-old baby, this is something you never forget. Never.” — Sapa-dpa