Presentazione

da "www.news.com.au"

August 12, 2009
 
THREE victims of child pornography are identified and moved into protection every month because of the work of a specialist Australian police unit.

A team from Queensland Police, which includes the chair of Interpol’s Computer Facilitated Crimes Against Children group Paul Griffiths, has managed to identify and track down 18 exploited kids in the past six months.

Mr Griffiths, formerly an officer at Greater Manchester Police in the UK, said the new team has had some early success.

"I’ve been working there since February," he said. "We, as a team, have been fortunate enough to identify 18 victims and basically take those victims out of the situation where they were being abused and take them away from harm."

He said networking and file-sharing technology used by child predators has been instrumental in tracking down victims.

New technology from Microsoft has also been developed to allow police from around the world to enter images and films into a special database, which cross-references faces and identifying information, he said.

"The key element is finding new material," he said. "We use technology to assist us in finding material that we haven’t seen before.

"Then we examine the content of that material to find clues within it.

"It might be things like a local newspaper you can see, it might be a television program you can see in the background."

Unfortunately, the violent abuse of children depicted in images and videos seized by police is expected to worsen, according to a detective who has led some of the biggest child predator investigations in the world.

Detective Inspector Jon Rouse from Queensland Police said the growing violence in the adult film industry was being reflected in the evidence he had come across.

“I’ve seen images now of very young children, (aged) two to three months old. I don’t know how much younger than that you can get," he said.

"Even in the adult pornography industry, that is now going towards a realm of violence against women. It seems to me that the human psyche needs a new fix.

"It needs something more exciting to cause arousal and I don’t think it’s any different with child exploitation material.

"Yeah, I think it’s only going to get worse."

He said the increasing amount of material being traded online had made those with sexual preferences for children feel like their desire was more acceptable.

"Instead of sitting in isolation thinking that they are the only person with a sexual preference for three-year-old children, they can find other people with a sexual preference for three-year-old children and they network," Insp Rouse said.

He said that was the case in one recent operation, which found "like-minded individuals who had a sex preference for the violent abuse of very young children and they supported each other".