Watchdog: online child porn more brutal

[Shammu]

Watchdog: online child porn more brutal

By YUXING ZHENG, Associated Press Writer 2 hours, 4 minutes ago

LONDON - Child pornography on the Internet is becoming more brutal and graphic, and the number of images depicting violent abuse has risen fourfold since 2003, according to an Internet watchdog report published Tuesday.

The British-based Internet Watch Foundation said in its annual review that it received nearly 32,000 reports of potentially illegal content on its hot line last year, marking a 34 percent increase from the previous year.

"Although there is a volume issue, the worrying issue is the severity and the gravity of the images is increasing," said the foundation's chief executive, Peter Robbins. "We're talking about prepubescent children being raped."

The foundation identified about 10,700 individual Internet addresses on 3,000 sites containing child pornography content.

About 80 percent of the children in the abusive images are female, and 91 percent appear to be children under the age of 12, it said.

More than three in five child pornography Web sites were hosted in the U.S., while nearly a third were based in Russia.

The U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children last year completed a pilot program in partnership with financial institutions aimed at cutting off child pornography Web sites' revenues. They identified sites that accepted credit card payments, then contacted individual banks to stop the flow of money to the sites. The center also operates a child sexual abuse hot line.

More than 20 such tip lines exist around the world, but the international scope of the Internet makes prosecution difficult.

Some commercial child abuse Web sites store their images on different servers and occasionally in fragments, with each piece stored in a different country. Individual fragments often are not illegal.

"Many of them hop around between countries, between legal jurisdictions, which is a problem of an international nature," Robbins said Monday, before the report's release. "Law enforcement agencies have to reconsider their strategy."

One site has been reported 54 times since 2000 and has been found using seven different servers in various countries, the report said.

The foundation, which is funded by the European Union and the online industry, shares its information with law enforcement organizations, including Interpol. It also provides a list of offensive Web sites to British Internet service providers for them to block.

"You need many other bits in the jigsaw to make it work, but the prevention of access to these sites is one part of the solution," Robbins said.

Watchdog: online child porn more brutal

[Faithin1]

The sexual molestation of innocent children is the most vile and damaging form of abuse.  These children are often ruined for life, and unable to develop normal healthy relationships as adults.  I am sure more can be done to stop this, if only society placed more value on children.  Unfortunately, in many instances, our society treats animals better than children.  Recently, a woman was 'fined' for leaving her 5 children and her dog home alone in utter filth which was determined to be unfit for human habitation.  The penalty for the dog was greater than that for the children, which is addressed in the article below from the Washington Post.   


Cruelty to Children
Maryland needs to update its abuse law.
Washington Post Editorial

Thursday, March 15, 2007; Page A18

IT WAS 1874, and the only way a New York City social worker could rescue a 9-year-old girl who was being horribly abused was to get help from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. There were no laws on the books dealing with the protection of children. One has to wonder how far we've come: Today in Maryland there still are harsher penalties for neglecting a dog than for neglecting a child.

That was the revelation from the recent arrest of a woman on charges that she left her five young sons unattended in a squalid basement apartment in Prince George's County. The children were hungry and living in filth. Yet, as reported by The Post's Ruben Castaneda, the mother faces a maximum penalty of only 30 days in jail on each misdemeanor charge of leaving a child unattended. In contrast, she faces 90 days in jail on an animal cruelty charge because a dog also had been left in bad conditions. It has been established that those who abuse animals often progress to mistreating people, and that's just one of the many good reasons for having laws to protect animals. Clearly, though, the disparity here just doesn't make sense.

Maryland is the only state that doesn't have a criminal child neglect statute, according to the National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse. Instead, there's a gap between its laws regarding leaving a child unattended (a provision of family law aimed at situations such as a parent leaving a child in a car) and child abuse (overt action that results in physical injury with penalties of up to 25 years incarceration). Prince George's State's Attorney Glenn F. Ivey rightly sees this as a problem and says the legislature needs to act.

It's probably too late for the General Assembly to do something this year, but it shouldn't wait for another dreadful case to hit the news before it brings its laws protecting children into this century.