We need to act forcefully - Online child abuse

Last night’s programme from the RTÉ Investigations Unit that showed how thousands of pictures of young girls are being hijacked on innocent social media sites and transferred to porn sites is yet another challenge to the international community and the digital communications industry around how an individual’s privacy and dignity can be protected, especially a child’s.

To show how invasive, how intrusive and uncontrolled this practice is, RTÉ created a computer image of a non-existent girl, supposedly 14 years of age, and posted it online. Within a week “Amy” was targeted by men from all around the world who wanted to “befriend” her.

Behind these headlines statistics paint a startling picture of how the web is being used by child pornographers: 750,000 people across the world are using sites offering images of child sexual abuse at any one time; 74% of the children involved are believed to be under the age of 10 and 64% of child abuse material showed adults raping or sexually torturing children. This depravity is a challenge to our commitment to protecting the young and the innocent even if this behaviour seems so very hard to confront much less control. Nevertheless we must do all we can, and it seems that a response at European level might have the impact needed to make the risk involved in this behaviour too great for all but the most determined perverts. We need to act forcefully.