Online Child Abuse Complaints Rising

by Jordan Yerman | April 16, 2007 at 10:51 pm

330 views | 0 Recommendations | 0 comments

I don't know if people are getting more into pedophilia, or if more pedophiles are going online; neither prospect thrills me.

The US figures heavily in these statistics, but one shouldn't jump to conclusions: the US has, per capita, a higher online population than most other countries in the world, and hosts a vast number of server farms.

Reports of websites that contain images of child abuse have continued to climb in the last year, a report has shown.

In 2006, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) investigated more than 31,000 reports of sites that contained alleged images, an increase of 34% since 2005.

More than 10,000 of the reported pages on more than 3,000 websites were found to contain illegal child abuse content.

The increase was in part due to greater awareness of the IWF and its reporting procedures, the organisation said.

As well as outlining the numbers of web pages and sites containing images, the IWF annual report also revealed the increasing severity of content held on the sites.

More than 3,000 web pages contained images depicting the most severe abuse, such as penetrative and sadistic sexual activity, the report said. Most children involved were under the age of 12.

"The images we are seeing are predominantly prepubescent, young children," said Peter Robbins, chief executive of the IWF.

"They have no choice. There is no consent - they are being raped."