The recent convictions of Mark Bridger, for the murder of April Jones, and Stuart Hazell, for the murder of Tia Sharp, have heightened concerns over a link between viewing indecent images of children online and progressing on to commit more serious criminal acts against children.
Calls for action
The concerns have led Prime Minister David Cameron to call upon internet companies to do more to address the issue effectively, while the Culture Secretary, Maria Miller, will this week chair a meeting with internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and BT, to discuss the matter further.
Child protection and women’s groups have also reacted strongly. Speaking last week, Sue Berelowitz, Deputy Children's Commissioner for England, supported the call for the Government to ban websites that promote simulated rape scenarios.
She also highlighted a recent report from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England, looking at the effects that access and exposure to pornography have on children and young people.
Impact of pornography
The report found that a significant number of children access pornography and that it influences their attitudes towards relationships and sex. It also revealed that accessing pornography is linked to risky behaviour, such as having sex at a younger age and that there is a correlation between holding violent attitudes and accessing more violent media.
The findings are backed up by an earlier report from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), which works to tackle the sexual abuse of children.
The report, ‘A Picture of Abuse’, published in June last year, tried specifically to quantify the links between those who possess indecent images of children (IIOC) and those who commit contact sexual offences against children.
It found that, whilst academic research is divided, there is a clear link between the image offences and sexual contact offences, with one study finding a correlation of 55%.
The Internet Watch Foundation
According to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a charity which works with law enforcement agencies and online organisations to remove child sexual abuse images from the internet, one of the best ways to prevent people from seeing the images, is simply to make them unavailable.
"The UK internet industry is extremely quick and nimble at tackling what is possibly the most horrendous images and videos available on the internet but there is always more to be done,” said IWF spokeswoman Emma Lowther.”
She called on people who come across images of child sexual abuse online to contact the IWF immediately. Where the images are hosted in the UK, the IWF says it is able to remove around 78% of reported images within 2 hours.
Google’s response
Responding to mounting pressure in the run up to its meeting with the Culture Secretary this week, Google told the Telegraph that it is working on a new system that may tackle the problem. The technology will allow a new database to be created, pulling together data from different search engines and other web organisations about flagged images of child sexual abuse.
At the moment this data cannot be shared properly, and the hope is that the new system will allow the images to be blocked by every tech company, and not just some of them.
Contact Lewis Nedas’ Criminal Lawyers in London
If you have been, or believe you will be, charged with offences relating to viewing images of child sexual abuse online and require specialist legal advice, please contact our solicitors Jeffrey Lewis or Siobhain Egan on 020 7387 2032 or complete our online enquiry form here.
This blog post is intended as a news item only- no connection between Lewis Nedas and the parties concerned is intended or implied.
