More and more children use the internet around the world regularly, often spend hours online a day. The internet and different websites facilitate communication and make easier to gather information. Unfortunately, it also facilities online child sexual abuse and exposes children to constant harm.
In 2018 UK’s government described the definition of online-facilitated child sexual abuse. According to it “the exploitation of children online is becoming easier and more extreme (…). Child sex offenders are becoming more sophisticated, using social media, image and file sharing sites, gaming sites and dating sites to groom potential victims. In response to law enforcement efforts to apprehend them, they are using encryption, anonymization and destruction measures on the dark web and the open internet (…).”
In connection with this The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), operating in England and Wales, published its research in March 2020 about the growing problem of online-facilitated child sexual abuse. The research’s main goal was to examine “the nature and extent of the use of the internet to facilitate child sexual abuse (…) and the adequacy of the response of government, law enforcement and the internet industry to the phenomena.”
The research concentrates on three types of abuse:
- Indecent images mean every pictures, photographs or pseudo-photographs showing a child/children under the age of 18 in a sexual pose.
- The process of the grooming of a child is when the perpetrator “prepares a child for sexual abuse”. It involves sexual messages to children or when an adult arranges a meeting for sexual purposes. Unfortunately, social media sites make these processes much easier.
- Live streaming of a child means “the broadcasting of realtime, live footage of a child being sexually abused over the internet.”
The conclusion of the report highlights in the last couple of years there have been improvements in the responses of the government, internet industry and law enforcement. Besides, more and more technological advances were designed to decrease the number of online sexual abuse of children and many foundation and charity take action to tackle the phenomena effectively. For example, the UK-based charity, the IWF (Internet Watch Foundation) has removed a huge amount of child sexual abuse material from the internet in the last couple of years. According to the report, in 1996 the UK was responsible for 18% of the worldwide total of indecent images of children online, while in 2018 this number was 0,04%. It can be considered as a real success, however we also have to face the facts that there are still millions of indecent images of children online all around the world. All of the countries, governments and internet-related companies should take steps continuously to protect the children and decrease the number of child sexual abuse online (and of course offline, too).
As the report claims “it is clear that more needs to be done internationally to try and reduce the amount of child sexual abuse content that is available online.”
You can read the whole report here.