The number of images of serious child abuse online has quadrupled over three years, according to figures from Britain's Internet watchdog published yesterday. The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) says the most distressing grade of images account for nearly a third of all reports of child pornography it receives.
The statistics paint a disturbing picture of growth in hardcore child abuse pictures for sale online. In 2003, just 7 percent of the Web pages investigated by the group included the highest levels of abuse. Last year the group says that 29 percent of all the images that its officers investigated fell under the same classification, marking a four-fold rise in the most disturbing cases.
Peter Robbins, the IWF's chairman, said the figures demonstrated an increasing appetite among Internet pedophiles for the most severe sorts of imagery, while sites selling abusive pictures and videos appeared to be turning to increasingly hardcore material in order to fend off competitors.
"The images appear to be on a trend towards more severity, probably because there is greater demand," Robbins said. "The age of the children involved is predominantly under 12, and the commercial sites where these images are being sold are staying up for long periods."
Last year the IWF processed 31,776 reports of illegal images on the Internet -- up from 24,000 in 2005. The material was hosted on more than 3,000 Web sites.
While less than 1 percent of the original material was traced back to Britain, 82 percent of all the images it investigated were hosted on Web sites in Russia or the US, creating serious fears over the possibility of child trafficking and industrial-level abuse.
One expert said greater international cooperation was needed to close down such Web sites.
"There's no doubt that half of the problem is the weakness of international institutions," said John Carr, Internet safety expert for the UK children's charity NCH. "Interpol, Europol, the G8 and the UN could all step up -- but none of them have the political will."
Robbins said that many of the sites were run by organized criminal groups, and their other activities were often of greater concern to police.
Police investigating online abuse are finding that criminals are discovering new ways to connect or develop contact with each other.
"One of the sick things they'll do is film the abuse and actually stick little notes on the child's body with the names of the other person who they are sending it to," said Tom Simmons, intelligence team leader at the Child Exploitation and Online Protection center (CEOP), a branch of the UK's Serious and Organized Crime Squad. "Or sometimes you'll just see the kids saying `Jan and John say hi to whoever,' and that's upsetting because you know that child is going to get abused."
Although a lot of time has been dedicated to tracking down those who download the images, police believe they must dedicate more time to discovering the producers, not just the buyers and distributors.
"What we've got to do is look at this like narcotics, in a way," said Lewis Hunt, CEOP's intelligence group leader. "It's very easy to concentrate on the consumers, but the difficulty is that we have to look back at particular Web sites and people who are producing child abuse images, and that is a really difficult thing to trace."
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