Australia sees explosion in online child porn

Australia : Australian police Wednesday warned of an epidemic in child pornography, saying paedophiles were increasingly recording themselves abusing children and sharing these images with child sex networks.

Australian Federal Police (AFP) said officers used to find hundreds of photographs on a suspect's computer but they were now confronting people hoarding hundreds of thousands or even millions of images and videos. Head of the AFP's cyber crime unit, Assistant Commissioner Neil Gaughan, said while it did not necessarily reflect an increase in the number of child sex assaults, more were being recorded and uploaded onto the Internet. "There's no empirical evidence of an increase in child abuse, but we're seeing an increase in the number of violent images that clearly have not been commercially made," Gaughan told The Age newspaper. The number of Australians arrested by the AFP for child pornography offences in 2011 was 180, compared with 136 the previous year -- about a 30 percent rise.

Gaughan said police had enhanced their technical ability to stop child abusers sharing pornographic imagery in recent years.

"We're not going to (be able to) stop people sexually assaulting their kids, that's a community issue," Gaughan said. "But if we can work with industry to get better tools to stop the dissemination, we can hopefully cut some of the supply." The AFP said cooperation with authorities around the world was also important, given that images and videos of child sex were being used as "currency" by offenders to buy their way into transnational paedophile groups. Child protection group Save the Children praised the approach taken by police given that technology now enabled disturbed people to establish their own networks, in turn increasing demand for these exploitative images.

"There is a massive increase in the images and now evidence that the images are becoming more graphic and more violent," spokeswoman Karen Flanagan said. AFP