The European Cybercrime Center (EC3), part of Europol, has today published the Virtual Global Taskforce Environmental Scan 2012. The Virtual Global Taskforce is a collaborative partnership comprising European law enforcement agencies and other agencies around the world (it is currently chaired by ICE, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency) that work together to combat online child pornography. The Environmental Scan 2012 is the latest assessment of methods and scope of online child pornography.
It represents, says Cecilia Malmström, European commissioner for home affairs, “a valuable contribution to better understand trends and behaviors of child sexual offenders both online and offline and is a very useful tool to define more effective policies to prevent and fight child sexual abuse.” It is a remarkably reasonable and non-political analysis of child abuse, seeking to understand the problem rather than simply calling for additional legislation.
It is also very realistic. It recognises that the relationship between viewing online material and physical hands-on abuse is not fully understood – indeed, there seems to be clinical differences between the two types of abuser. The former may progress to the latter, but it is not an inevitability.
While Europe has tended to use the term ‘child sexual abuse’ for online material, the US has maintained the term ‘child pornography’. “It may well be possible to prevent some offences by engaging with potential offenders,” says the report. “There may, for instance, be some benefit in developing international support networks for clinically diagnosed paedophiles who do not want to act on their urges.” Controversially, the report further suggests that using the term ‘child pornography’ for online offenses, and ‘child abuse’ for physical abuse may make it easier to engage with online offenders to better understand the more dangerous physical abuser.
Equally realistically and controversially it touches upon the growing problem of ‘self-generated indecent material,’ particularly among the young. While sometimes originally produced for private consumption, loss of such material can cause severe distress and even suicide. It suggests that, “further research is required to distinguish problematic behaviours involving mass or frequent distribution of self-generated indecent material from production of content which, while risky, is arguably now a part of adolescent development.”
But the report nowhere loses touch with the scope, and growing scope, of the problem that law enforcement faces in tackling online child pornography. Both the continuing expansion of the internet (two-thirds of the world remains to be connected), and the increasing “use of hidden services, anonymisers and encryption,” will lead to “the identification of new offenders, new victims and new methods of offending.”
“As internet technology further develops and previously underconnected parts of the world come online, we can expect to see new offenders, new victims, and new means of committing crimes against children,” says Troels Oerting, Head of EC3. Nevertheless, “police agencies are still preventing crimes and bringing criminals to justice more effectively than ever before."