Cynthia Guttman, UNESCO Courier journalist
In Chicago, DeNashatae Horton shows her mother and sister some of the tools developed on its web site by the Ameritech company to help parents and children surf the Internet safely.
‘Internet, insofar as crimes against children go, calls into question the entire wain which police forces work. We have to envisage legislative changes that take this into account, because without laws, police can do absolutely nothing’
On October 20, 1996, more than 300,000 people took part in a “white march” in Brussels (Belgium) to demonstrate solidarity with the victims of paedophiles.
A foreign sex tourist in a ‘girly bar’ in Pattaya (Thailand).
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Glossary • Internet Service Providers (ISP): Services offering direct, full access
to the Internet at a flat, monthly rate. |
To combat child pornography
on the Net, there is a strong consensus that governments, law enforcement, industry
and users each have a role to play
The most cunning criminals
have always sought to outsmart police, and cyberspace is no exception. The virtual,
borderless universe frequented by some 130 million netizens provides the detective
writer with every ingredient for a labyrinthine thriller: an anonymous interface,
characters miles apart adopting nicknames and fake addresses, sometimes disguising
their identities to entice a victim into a real-life meeting, or sending encrypted
materials that are just about impossible for outsiders to decode.
It could be a thriller, except when the material being traded is child pornography
and the people enticed are under-age. Images range from innocent photographs of young
children with neutral or smiling expressions to extreme cases: in 1996, members of
the Orchid Club chat room (see glossary) used a digital camera connected to a computer
to photograph a 10-year-old child posing in a sexually explicit manner. The pictures
were transmitted to other online ring members who made requests for the girl to pose
in other positions. The ring was an international one, and its members were arrested
in several countries.
Innocence in
danger
As the online population grows,
countries and organizations are stepping up efforts to curtail child pornography
on the Internet. By the medium’s very nature, the venture is international. In April
1999 UNESCO launched its Innocence in Danger movement that
aims to sensitize public opinion to child pornography on the Internet and mobilize
resources to make the Net safer for children. In May, a victory was scored when Japan,
one of the largest producers of child porn material, passed a law banning its production
and distribution. In September, top European and American judicial and police officials,
along with industry representatives and NGOs, are meeting in Austria to discuss strategies
for reinforcing co-operation in the field.
Just how pervasive is child pornography on the Net? In researching her forthcoming
book, A Parents’ Guide to Protecting Children in Cyberspace, Parry Aftab, an American
cyberspace lawyer and former director of Cyberangels, the largest U.S. online safety
and education programme, compiled a list of 30,000 sites relating to child abuse
or paedophilia, out of an estimated total of 4.3 million sites. Looking more closely
at newsgroups (see glossary), Rachel O’Connell, a psychologist from the University
of Cork (Ireland) who is co-ordinating a European research project (COPINE) on the
issue, found that child pornography amounted to 0.07 per cent of around 40,000 newsgroups
worldwide. According to Ruth Dixon, manager of a British hotline run by the Internet
Watch Foundation, the worst material is concentrated in some 20 newsgroups. Trading
child pornography, however, is just one face of the coin, the other is the danger
of children entering online chat groups with the intention of making friends or sharing
interests, and ending up face-to-face with a person who turns out to be much older
than claimed and seeking a sexual encounter.
One of the greatest concerns is that the Internet has made child pornography more
visible and accessible, giving paedophiles the sense of being connected to a community
of like-minded individuals. According to O’Connell, “one of the most significant
factors influencing the growth of child pornography on the Internet is the ease of
dissemination and collection. Anonymity and convenience have revealed an extraordinary
level of sexual interest in children. Presumably, this interest was either dormant
or latent on this scale in the past.” As Martine Brousse, head of the French NGO
Voix de l’Enfant, puts it, “the person who might not have gone through the process
of buying a particular magazine to nurture his fantasies can now just go on the Net,
it’s not difficult.” In newsgroups devoted to child porn, users typically recount
claimed experiences and fantasies to each other and exchange pictures, sometimes
by the hundreds. O’Connell has found that they tend to be a fairly cohesive and well-structured
community, and provide advice to each other on how to avoid detection. Money rarely
comes into the equation.
Legal loopholes
There is nothing illegal about
exchanging fantasies. What is illegal in most countries–but not in all–is the production
and distribution of child pornography. This can make it difficult for authorities
to take action at the source, where materials are being uploaded. Nor is the possession
of child pornography a criminal offence everywhere. The definition of a child’s legal
age varies from one country to another, and so does the definition of indecency.
And while the majority of users are based in developed countries, NGOs such as Casa
Alianza and ECPAT (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children
for Sexual Purposes), express concern that child sex tourism is being promoted via
Internet, putting children at further risk of not only being abused but having their
photographs taken and transmitted online from countries where rules relating to child
pornography are lax or non-existent. Faced with these loopholes, police, NGOs, judicial
authorities and law enforcement are pressing for national legislations to be better
harmonized.
Since the mid-1990s, police forces in a number of countries have set up units specialized
in tracking down online child pornography. In Britain, Scotland Yard’s paedophilia
unit started to take the Net seriously when investigations led to the seizure of
computer hard drives containing child pornography images. The U.S. Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI) launched an undercover operation dubbed Innocent Images in
1994 to target people trading in child porn or expressing an interest in travelling
inter-state with the intention of having sex with minors. “We pretty much have this
down to a fine tuned science,” explains veteran FBI agent Peter Gulotta. “Typically,
most of our work involves going into chat rooms that we have reason to believe are
involved in child pornography. We pose as adults willing to trade in child porn or
as a young boy or a young girl. In a very short period of time, a predator will engage
us in a conversation about our sexual activity. Some will very quickly express a
willingness to actually travel to meet us.” This technique has led, since 1995, to
357 arrests, with a 99 per cent conviction rate.
Not all countries have the resources, skills and legal right to intervene in this
way. An international convention on cyberspace crime is currently in the works, with
a particular focus on procedural problems such as collecting evidence in a crossborder
electronic environment. “Internet, insofar as crimes against children go, calls into
question the entire way in which police forces work,” says Agnès Fournier
de Saint Maur, chief of specialized crime at Interpol. “We have to envisage legislative
changes that take this into account, because without laws, police can do absolutely
nothing. We also need additional resources to equip police forces with the right
tools.” Jim Reynolds, former chief inspector of Scotland Yard’s paedophilia unit,
regrets that not all countries have specialized units or identified points of contact
to whom intelligence on paedophiles can be passed on. There are complaints of reports
being sent from one country to another and not being acted upon for months.
What is far from clear is the relationship between viewing child pornography and
sexually abusing a child, even though an image is already the reflection of an abuse.
“Child pornography is a far more serious issue that merely talking about photographs,
it is the actual visual depiction of the sexual assault of a child,” stresses Reynolds.
“The circulation of these photographs revictimizes the child.” According to French
psychiatrist Bernard Cordier, the Internet can reinforce a paedophile’s tendencies
and increase the risks of committing an offence should a particular set of circumstances
allow it. What concerns Gulotta is that most people arrested have no prior records,
but investigations, which include examining materials on computer software and disks,
have on some occasions revealed previous sexual encounters with children. When pictures
are seized, the first priority of law enforcement is to determine how recent they
are in order to reach children who might be at risk now. In conjunction with police
forces in several countries, the COPINE project has constructed a database of seized
child pornographic videos and pictures traded via the Internet. These images lend
themselves to crime scene analysis, providing clues as to the picture’s origins and
facilitating co-operation, since the same pictures may be reported to police in different
countries.
Partly in response to demand from the police and the public, industry has started
to come forward. “Pressure on them has been extremely strong,” says Saint Maur. “From
the very beginning, everyone, including the police, put the blame on them. But just
as you can’t blame the postal service for shipping porn videos, it’s rather difficult
to really point the finger at Internet Service Providers (ISPs, see glossary). Nonetheless,
this pressure has led ISPs to co-operate with police. For them, it’s out of the question
that they should do the policing.” The bottom line is that without the technical
expertise of industry and its willingess to pass on information to the police, the
fight against illegal content will be ineffective. Police raids on ISPs in Germany
have led to an uneasy relationship between industry and law enforcement bodies. “Law
enforcement in and of itself is not a solution, it has to be part of a broader framework
that includes the taking of responsibility by the industry itself,” says Jens Waltermann
of the Bertelsmann Foundation, which designs and supports projects in a wide number
of fields. At its Internet Content Summit being held on September 9-11, the foundation
will present “practical recommendations for government, industry and users to work
together in developing a new culture of responsibility on the Internet.” These involve
improving mechanisms to deal with harmful and illegal content, namely hotlines as
a feedback mechanism for users, voluntary codes of conduct among ISPs and software
for rating and filtering purposes.
Rising public
awareness
For now, hotlines are the main
mechanism through which potentially illegal content is reported. Such hotlines exist
in less than ten countries and are funded by government, industry, NGOs or a combination.
Links with law enforcement are not always strong enough. The question of a privately
funded line informing police about activities regarding a third party can, in some
countries, be viewed as a breach of privacy. Saint Maur and French cyberspace lawyer
Daniel Kahn both stress that governments should be the ones setting up hotlines,
with direct transmission of the information to a central, specialized police unit.
The British-based NGO ChildNet International is heading an initiative that aims to
harmonize and improve co-operation among hotlines while encouraging new ones. The
European Parliament is expected to adopt a policy by the end of the year that would
encourage member states to set up specialized round-the-clock units to liaise with
ISPs and law enforcement when alleged illegal material is reported.
The fact that reports to all hotlines are increasing points to rising public awareness
of the issue. While industry is working on a number of rating and filtering initiatives,
these are not deemed sophisticated enough to deal with child pornography. Aftab recently
tested all the filtering materials on the market and found that none blocked out
the list of illegal child pornography sites that she had compiled. Cyberangels now
licences this list out to filtering software companies, but so far only one, Net
Nanny, has acquired it. But filtering, even if it works, might protect children online
but certainly not those whose images are being traded.
NGOs, industry and police stress the role of education, both for parents and children,
in raising awareness and reporting illegal material. Aftab believes that children
under 13 should not be taking part in unmonitored chat rooms, which software can
block out. Awareness programmes also emphasize that schools should not be building
web sites featuring pictures of children and divulging personal information about
them. As head of the U.S. National Action Commitee for the Innocence in Danger initiative,
Aftab has every intention of multiplying awareness initiatives, and already has giants
like Microsoft and AOL on her side. Only a public groundswell can prompt governments
to allocate more resources towards what is fundamentally a child protection issue.
“Right now, it’s possible to have a finger on the pulse,” says O’Connell, cautioning
against sensationalizing the problem. “If the threat becomes too large, these individuals
will go further underground, to layers of the Internet where you won’t be able to
find them. It’s only a matter of time before that actually happens.”
• www.unesco.org/webworld/innocence
• www.casa-alianza.org
• www.childnet-int.org
• www.cyberangels.org
• www.ecpat.net
• www.fbi.gov/library/pguide
• www.info.fundp.ac.be/~mapi/plan.html
The Belgian Movement Against Paedophilia on Internet has published a comprehensive report on the issue.
• www.iwf.orguk.
The British Internet Watch Foundation is considered one of the most effective attempts at self-regulation.
• www.stiftung.bertelsmann.de