By Douglas Carew
The growing flood of child porn is threatening to engulf the Internet - about a million pornographic pictures depicting children are now on the World Wide Web - and it's having a terrible impact on South Africa.
An estimated 90 percent of all paedophile-related activities involve the Internet.
Those shocking statistics were revealed this week by Iyavar Chetty, the senior executive of the South African Film and Publication Board.
The internet's profoundly dramatic impact on the creation and trafficking of child abuse images was the topic of Chetty's address to the Internet Service Providers Association during Internet Week in Gauteng.
Chetty said he was not out to demonise the internet because everybody knew that this most disturbing of all crimes against children pre-dated the Internet.
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But according to the Internet Watch Foundation, an industry-supported hotline in Britain, there were around one million images of child abuse in circulation on the internet and the number is expanding by about 200 a day.
There was plenty of money to be made in the industry and Thomas and Janice Reedy, a Texas couple who were convicted last year for distributing child pornography on the internet, had reportedly made R11,2-million in just a month.
The Internet was the medium of choice for paedophiles because it made child abuse images more easily accessible and made accessing such images more anonymous.
It also provided "legitimisation" for paedophiles and their behaviour because it made it appear "normal and acceptable" conduct.
Chetty said until the Internet came along, the paedophile had been a lonely, pathetic figure, unable to share his perverse interests with his friends and neighbours, and often shunned and hounded out of a neighbourhood once identified.
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