Combating Sexual Abuse on-line

COMBATING CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE ON-LINE

The commercial trade in child sexual abuse images is a reality. It involves thousands of commercial child sex abuse sites and an estimated 50,000 new child sexual abuse images are produced each year. The industry is estimated to be worth about US$250 million globally.

The purchase and trade in commercial sexual abuse material generates a market and ongoing demand for human rights abuses, involved in the production of the material.  Human trafficking particularly feeds the commercial child sexual abuse industry on the Internet.

The Federal Government is seeking to require Australian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block ready access to sexual abuse material online. However, this has met with strong opposition from those who argue there should be no restrictions on what website Australians should be allowed to visit. They argue the only response should be to arrest and prosecute those accessing child sexual abuse material. However, the police are not able to cope with the number of offenders currently accessing child sexual abuse material. The UN Office of Drugs and Crime estimate police may be catching as little as 1% of such offenders globally. We need more tools to combat this criminal activity.  

Blocking ready access to child sexual abuse material is an important tool in the struggle against the commercial child sexual abuse industry. Organised criminals, mainly in Eastern Europe and growingly in Asia, run ‘businesses’ selling images and videos of child sexual abuse online primarily to make money. It is this activity that ISP level access disruption has the greatest benefit in combating.

There are two types of child sexual abuse networks online. Non-commercial peer-to-peer networks and commercial child sexual abuse operations, often involving the World Wide Web. Non-commercial networks are generally used by dedicated offenders who share images with other sex offenders. Commercial networks are primarily criminal operations whose primary aim is to produce profit. These commercial networks are more likely to involve younger children than non-commercial material. The Internet Watch Foundation found that 73% of the child victims on commercial child sexual abuse sites appear to be under 10 years old and 66% of the images and videos depicted sexual activity between adults and children including the rape and sexual torture of the child. It is this industry that ISP level access disruption based on urls is particularly useful in disrupting.

Permitting access to child sexual abuse material violates the rights of victims.  Victims who have pictures of their abuse online suffer extreme feelings of powerlessness and are ‘re-victimised’ each time the image is viewed. While it is desirable to locate and remove such images whenever possible, often it is very difficult. Blocking ready access to child sexual abuse material blocks inadvertent access and disrupts deliberate attempts to access such images and protects the rights of victims not to have their images viewed.

ISPs should not be allowed to profit from clients engaged in criminal activity, such as accessing and downloading child sexual abuse material. ISPs need to take reasonable steps to disrupt the ability of their customers to freely use their service for criminal activity.

ISP filtering is supported by the international police organisation INTERPOL. They summarise the advantages of access blocking as: The system prevents crimes from being committed, limits the number of criminals having to be investigated in cases related to commercial child sexual abuse material web pages and protects victims. By preventing crime and thereby reducing the amount of work for the police, more resources can be put into investigations and subsequent court proceedings.
It is important to note that ISP access disruption is only one tool in ending the abuse of children to produce images.

ISP level access disruption to child sexual abuse material does not replace the role of education of both parents and minors and the need for parents to assist their children in safe use of the online environment. It does provide some level of a safety net where these other measures are not adequately in place.

Please print and sign the petition (by clicking on the picture on the right) that asks the Senate to Pass legislation that requires Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block all websites that contain material classified as ‘Refused Classification’, regardless of where such sites are hosted.

 

Current Actions

August 2011

 


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