Call for online IDs to protect children

A VERIFIABLE online identity card should be required to access social networking sites in order to protect children from paedophiles, according to a new report.

This would confirm whether people accessing sites such as Bebo or My-Space are who they say they are and what age they are.

A report by children’s charity Barnardos also called for legislation to allow gardaí to order Internet Service Providers or ISPs to block sites containing child pornography.

In addition, Barnardos wants a dedicated Garda Paedophile Investigation Unit to be highly publicised to deter paedophiles.

The report — written by internet security expert Pat McKenna — said that, as it stands, on social networking sites:

* People can create a profile, along with fake photos, pretending to be a child or young teenager.

* People can hijack another person’s identity, again with photos, and claim to be that person.

* There is no minimum age for allowing a teenager to share personal information, including photos.

“A seven to eight-year-old — and we’ve come across examples of these on social networking sites — can pretend a great deal more physical, emotional, sexual maturity than they have and indeed a 50-year-old can pretend to be a teenager,” said Barnardos chief executive Fergus Finlay.

“There’s a dangerous element to social networking that needs to be examined.”

Mr McKenna said: “It is extremely easy to find children on Bebo: where they live, their ages, their likes and dislikes, the school they attend, etc. And it is very easy to find examples of children, often very young, behaving in ways that would not be out of place on adult sites.

“Data of this kind, and behaviour on site that is inappropriate to the age of the child, makes children very vulnerable. Predators frequently create profiles that are not truly real and lace those profiles with features designed to attract and manipulate the personalities of young people. The absence of any age limit is a crucial issue.”

The report called for a viable Age Verification and Identity Management Program. It also called for changes to the law to make it a criminal offence for adults to misrepresent themselves as a child when contacting children.

Mr Finlay said there was an “enormous and growing” problem of child exploitation and child sex abuse on the internet.

He said these could include images of degradation, sexual abuse, torture and even murder.

“Every time you visit one of those sites you are visiting the scene of a crime as well as participating in a crime,” he said.

“We’ve called for the introduction of legislation, if necessary, to compel the blockage of those sites and enable the gardaí, in particular, to order that all such sites be blocked from access to Ireland.”

Launching the report, Children’s Minister Barry Andrews said the report would feed into a Data Protection Review ordered by Justice Minister Dermot Ahern.