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.
Continues Below ↓
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.
The Internet had changed all that by providing a supportive context in which the child abuser was part of a larger community of like-minds.
It provided a world in which the paedophile felt accepted, reinforcing his belief that his perverse and criminal interest in children was normal because it was shared by many thousands like him in the cyberworld.
Quoting two American researchers, Chetty said the Internet allowed paedophiles:
Instant access to other predators worldwide;
Open discussion of their sexual desires;
To share ideas about ways to lure victims;
Mutual support of their adult-child sex philosophies;
Instant access to potential child victims worldwide;
Disguises for approaching children, even to the point of presenting themselves as members of teen groups;
Ready access to teen chat rooms to find out how and who to target as potential victims;
Means to identify and track down home contact information; and
The ability to build a long-term internet relationship with a potential victim, prior to attempting to engage in physical contact.
Chetty said the last time he had met representatives of Internet service providers, they had been at pains to convince him that it was nothing more than an "information highway" that merely provided a medium of communication.
|
StumbleUpon
Reddit
Digg
Delicious
Newsvine
Facebook
muti
Twitter
