Chatroom ban not enough to stop abusers, says expert

MICROSOFT’S decision to close all chatrooms run through its MSN service will only marginally impact on paedophilia using the internet.

The warning came yesterday from an expert on child abuse, Professor Maxwell Taylor, who insisted the distribution of pornographic images continued to pose a greater risk than chatrooms.

As Britain, in particular, prepares legislation to criminalise the online grooming of youngsters for sex abuse, Geoff Sutton, Europe’s general manager of Microsoft MSN, conceded that chatrooms had become more sinister. He said that over the past year or so, they had become increasingly seedy, increasingly dangerous and, for parents, increasingly worrying.

Prof Taylor is head of the Applied Psychology Department at University College Cork, which is instrumental in assisting police forces worldwide to track down peddlers of child pornography through its unique COPINE project.

“The Microsoft decision is courting public attention but it will have little effect on our work,” he said. “The decision is significant to the extent that someone is prepared to take responsibility for the problem.

“The misuse of chatroom services is an issue but not one of the real issues. The biggest issue is the pornographic trade’s production and distribution of obscene images and on a scale far greater than what we know about chatroom seduction. Restricting access to chatrooms will not have a noticeable effect on that trade.”

Other online service providers such as Yahoo and AOL will continue to offer access to chatrooms.

Lancaster University’s Dr Rachel O’Connell, a graduate of UCC who worked on the COPINE project, also urged caution. She said that killing off chatrooms would precipitate a knee-jerk reaction among children.

“I think it is naive to think if we take away all the public web-based chat facilities, that kids won’t want to talk. The decision will encourage children to go to other less-monitored parts of the internet and create a far more complex set of problems.”

Microsoft accepted the forums were a haven for peddlers of junk e-mail and sex predators.

Its MSN chat services in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and much of Latin America will close down from October 14. However, it will run a subscription-only service in the US, Canada and Japan. This requires users to disclose their credit card details.

Mr Sutton said parents were very unclear about how safe their children were online. There was a real danger, he said, that the future of the internet could be stalled and blocked because of the actions of a small minority.

The Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (ISPCC) welcomed the decision but called on all internet service providers to be more accountable and show leadership in taking steps to protect children.

“This decision has massive implications for other internet service providers and for parents. It places an obligation on companies to ensure their chatrooms are safe for children while parents should be extremely vigilant regarding their children’s use of online services.”

The ISPCC said while steps were being taken to limit usage of chatrooms to people who would harm children, further measures were needed to enable children and young people access the internet in a safe and secure manner.