Increase in child porn sparks call for Europol cooperation

Date: 05/06/03

By David Cronin

EUROPOL, the EU's police agency, has been urged to cooperate more with central and eastern European authorities to tackle the mushrooming of child pornography websites in Russia.

The call comes from Save the Children, which published a new report on the sexual exploitation of children this week. The charity says its research reveals the number of child pornography pay-per-view sites has "grown explosively during 2001-2002" and "it appears that many of these new sites are now based or hosted in Russia".

According to the study, it is common for these websites to carry 'child erotica' images on their opening page and then offer more 'hardcore' images of children being sexually abused or posing in a sexually explicit way through payment by credit card.

'Child erotica' sites manage to avoid legal sanctions by promoting themselves as artistic sites. "These sites often contain images of children posing half-dressed or naked with an emphasis on sexualizing the child either overtly or covertly," the report adds.

Save the Children has welcomed a recent agreement by the EU's Council of Ministers to harmonize the penal codes of member states on protecting children from sexual exploitation. But it is critical of a move by the UK, Italy and Germany to set up an international database of images of child sexual exploitation, with a view to identifying both victims and suspects of child abuse.

The charity believes this work amounts to a "considerable duplication of effort" as national libraries of images are already being established in the UK, Sweden and Germany. "This proliferation cannot be in children's interests - since their desire is for as few people as possible to see these images," it adds.

Nevertheless, the charity recognizes the low rate of identifying victims of child pornography as a major problem in tackling the crime. In recent years the most high-profile case of child pornography involved the so-called Wonderland network - yet only 16 of the 1,263 children estimated to have been sexually abused by members of that network have been identified.