Davey Winder
Sunday, 26 October 2008 16:50
Business IT -
Networking
Page 1 of 2
The true horror of Internet child pornography has been revealed by the Internet Watch Foundation, a UK organisation that works with law enforcement agencies to help prevent such abuse. Be warned, this story does not make for happy reading...
The
Internet Watch Foundation is a British
organisation that works closely with the Child Exploitation and Online
Protection (
CEOP) Centre
and other law enforcement agencies to encourage the
reporting of child
porn online.
It helps Internet Service Providers and web
hosting companies within the United Kingdom to combat the abuse of
their networks by paedophiles by way of a national 'notice and take
down' service to alert them to potentially illegal content.
Beyond this, IWF also provides data to law enforcement agencies both in
the UK and abroad to help assist with investigations into the
distribution of such illegal content.
A new survey by the IWF has shown that less than 1 percent of child
porn can be traced back to UK servers, so much of its work is in
facilitating an industry-led block list initiative to protect users
from inadvertent exposure.
That new survey, published to coincide with IWF Awareness day, also
reveals the truly shocking statistic that 80 percent of the children
featured in these sickening images accessed by the IWF are under 10.
33 percent are under 3, and 10 percent are under 2.
Such figures make you appreciate why the Internet Watch Foundation
itself does not refer to these collectively as being child pornography
or kiddie porn, as it insists that these terms
just serve to legitimise images which are not
pornography.
Instead, it says that they are actually permanent records of children
being sexually abused and as such should be referred to as 'child
sexual abuse images.' To be honest, semantics and language aside, it
does not matter what you call them: this is a sickening and evil trade
that needs to be policed and prevented.
So what else did the Internet Watch Foundation research reveal? More shocking statistics on page 2...
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