European Affairs: Child sex abuse online – full debate

Demand for child sex abuse material is at an all time high, with more than half of all explicit content being hosted in Europe. Several high profile cases, most recently the conviction of Mark Bridger in the UK for the murder and abuse of five-year-old April Jones, have brought the issue into the public consciousness again.

Along with the higher volumes of material being distributed, experts say the victims are getting younger – including toddlers and babies. Head of Interpol’s Crimes Against Children Unit, Michael Moran, attributes this to the fact that younger children are less able to expose their abusers. He says: “pre-speech children cannot disclose, pre-speech children can’t tell on you basically”.

In June 2012, the European Union and United States launched a Global Alliance – with the aim of improving international cooperation in efforts to track down and catch offenders and to help the victims of such abuse.

Alongside this, an EU directive on combating the sexual abuse and exploitation of children is due to come into effect later this year across all member states.

http://www.euronews.com/2013/06/12/hunting-web-child-sex-predators

To watch the full debate on child sex abuse on the internet with Michael Moran, Head of INTERPOL’s Crimes Against Children Unit and Peter Saunders from National Association for People Abused in Childhood (NAPAC), please click on the video link.

http://www.euronews.com/2013/06/12/child-sex-abuse-online-full-debate

Olympicana_Reloaded wrote:Demand for child sex abuse material is at an all time high, with more than half of all explicit content being hosted in Europe.

So the mighty European Union can determine what shape of banana may be sold.

And make us buy 1lb. jars of honey labelled '454g'.

But not do anything to stop evil money-makers pandering to some of the worst and basest tendencies of mankind and so causing the death of innocent children.

A Global Alliance against Child Sexual Abuse Online

Child sexual abuse is a hideous crime. For the vast majority of us, the idea of violating, hurting and abusing a child is intolerable. Nonetheless, these crimes are not as rare as we would like to think. Every day, countless children around the world are sexually abused and exploited, and images and videos of the abuse are circulated. Already in 2005, an estimated one million child sexual abuse images were online. 50.000 new child abuse images are added each year. More than 70% of reported images feature children below 10 years of age. And these images never disappear. Children that have been identified and rescued years ago still have to face the fact that their abuse remains freely available for anyone to view online, and are re-victimized over and over.

We cannot afford to remain passive, and we cannot afford to act alone. This is no phenomenon that any country can tackle on its own. Modern technology allows criminals to move images, videos and contacts quickly between jurisdictions, exploiting legal loopholes and the anonymity the Internet provides. International cooperation is essential if we want to stand a chance of rescuing victims, putting a stop to continuing re-victimization and of finding and prosecuting offenders.

In response to this challenge, and on a joint initiative by the EU and the US, 49 countries from around the world have gathered in a Global Alliance against Child Sexual Abuse Online. The Alliance was launched on 5 December 2012 and unites Ministers of the Interior and of Justice behind four shared political targets that should hopefully result in a larger number of rescued victims, more effective prosecution, and an overall reduction in the amount of child sexual abuse images available online.

Concrete policy targets and goals


Endorsing the Declaration on the Launch of the Global Alliance against child sexual abuse online, the countries participating in the Alliance commit to four key policy targets:

•     enhancing efforts to identify victims and ensuring that they receive the necessary assistance, support and protection;
  
•     enhancing efforts to investigate cases of child sexual abuse online and to identify and prosecute offenders;
  
•     increasing awareness among children, parents, educators and the community at large about the risks;
  
•     reducing the availability of child pornography online and the re-victimization of children.
  

Guiding principles annexed to the Declaration set out concrete operational goals and examples of potential actions that participants could undertake to reach these goals.

The Participants

The participation in the Global Alliance is open to any country willing to join. To-date, 49 countries have committed to its goals: the 27 EU Member States, Albania, Australia, Cambodia, Croatia, Georgia, Ghana, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Moldova, Montenegro, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Philippines, Serbia, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, United States, and Vietnam.

Commitments

Each participant’s concrete actions will be published here soon.

Last update: 11/06/2013

http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/organized-crime-and-human-trafficking/global-alliance-against-child-abuse/index_en.htm

Canada joining global alliance against online child sex abuse

Canada is joining a group fighting online child sexual abuse around the world, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said Monday, calling it the next step in the government’s crackdown on child sex predators.

The Global Alliance Against Child Sexual Abuse Online, which includes the United States, the European Union and other countries, was started last December to help authorities better identify and assist victims of abuse and prosecute culprits.

The international nature of online abuse requires co-operation between countries to bring criminals to justice and rescue victims, Nicholson said.

While much is already being done to combat child sex abuse on Canadian soil, working closely with investigators abroad is a necessity given that child pornography rings often span several countries, he added.

“This is just a recognition of what is taking place on the Internet,” the minister said at a news conference in Toronto.

“What this will do is formalize with a whole new range of countries with the intention to share information and to co-operate with each other in these investigations.”

The alliance also wants to raise global awareness of the scope of the problem.

In Canada, sexual violations against children — including instances of online luring — were among the few types of violent crime to rise between 2010 and 2011, according to the latest data provided by Statistics Canada.

Increasingly sophisticated technology makes it easier for predators to obtain pornographic material — and to keep their activities underground, said Det.-Sgt. Kim Gross, who heads Toronto police’s child exploitation investigations unit.

Those who work in that field already trade tips, techniques and other information to keep up with the evolving methods abusers use to hide their tracks, she said.

But cementing those networks will help investigators take action more quickly in cases where a child may be in danger of being harmed, she added.

“Often when we’re talking about children who are young and vulnerable, you may want to act faster than normal because you certainly want to protect that child,” she said.

Monday’s announcement comes months after the Conservative government vowed to stiffen penalties for sex predators who prey on children and give victims a formal role in the country’s criminal justice system.

Nicholson also made a series of funding announcements in the last week of January geared toward child-assault victims.

The Government of Canada Further Contributes to the Global Efforts to Protect Children Online

http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/news-nouv/nr-cp/2013/doc_32911.html

As to the above European debate, how does that work with the Labour government (Jacqui Smith?) having proposed a lowering of the age of consent to 13 and iirc stating that paedophilia is not a crime?

It would be good to keep Harriet Harman's stance on this in mind:

How Hattie’s friends defended paedophilia
By Damian Thompson Politics Last updated: October 19th, 2012

Hattie Harperson: some strange colleagues on the radical Left
From Saturday's Daily Telegraph
Harriet Harman is calling for an independent inquiry into the Jimmy Savile scandal. A key question, she says, is why so many alleged victims felt “they couldn’t complain”.
Well, one answer is that attitudes towards paedophilia in the 1970s were bizarrely relaxed – and not just in Catholic presbyteries or BBC dressing rooms. This was the era when activists on the radical Left lobbied long and hard for changes in the law to reflect a more “enlightened” attitude towards sex between adults and minors.
But that won’t be news to Hattie. In 1978, she became legal officer for the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), which – in its evidence to the Criminal Law Revision Committee in 1976 – had said the following:
“Childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in, with an adult result in no identifiable damage… The real need is a change in the attitude which assumes that all cases of paedophilia result in lasting damage.”
To be fair, the NCCL’s quite revolting parliamentary submission was written two years before Harriet joined its staff.  But one wonders why she wanted to work for an outfit whose views on sex with minors were known to be extreme, even by the standards of the day.
[..]
In April 1978, the NCCL published a briefing paper on the Protection of Children Bill that was before Parliament. The author – one Harriet Harman – was worried that the draft Bill placed the onus on adults caught with film or photographs of nude children to show that they were possessed with a view to “scientific or learned study”.
“Our amendment places the onus of proof on the prosecution to show that the child was actually harmed,” she wrote.
Ms Harman maintains that she always opposed child pornography, and is not on record defending belief in “harmless” paedophilia, though it was held by her employers while she worked there. But no such excuse can be made for Patricia Hewitt, who was general secretary of the NCCL from 1974 to 1983 – i.e., during the period when it issued the notorious 1976 submission.
[..] unquote

Organisations such as the Paedophile information Exchange will only have gone underground after 1984, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paedophile_Information_Exchange.