UN: Internet porn is fuelling child abuse

November 16, 2004

Bangkok - An explosion of child pornography on the Internet is fuelling global child abuse. Minors are also being sold into prostitution, according to the United Nations.

The Internet has sparked enormous growth in child exploitation through prostitution, pornography, sex tourism and trafficking, and by paedophiles using it to stalk children, said Gopalan Balagopal, a senior adviser with the UN's children fund Unicef.

"The problem is growing in several parts of the world such as Asia, where the number of people using the Internet is rapidly increasing," Balagopal said at the start of a three-day international meeting in Bangkok on child trafficking, prostitution and pornography on Monday.

"Over the last few years we have already seen child pornography on the Internet and the resultant abuse become enormous problems in countries such as the United States and Russia," he said.

About 55 percent of the Internet child porn industry is based in the United States, while Russia runs second at 23 percent, according to the United Kingdom children's charity National Children's Homes (NCH), which says such sites are directly to blame for the rise in child-sex offences.

But on Monday NCH associate director John Carr said people from all over the world were accessing these sites.

"Before it was very hard to get hold of. You had to know a friend or be in a paedophile ring, but now anyone... can find child pornography on the Net."

He said about 550 child pornography offenders were either cautioned or charged in Britain in 2001, compared with only 35 in 1988.

Surveys of convicted paedophiles showed that up to 70 percent were inspired to commit their crimes after viewing child porn on the Internet, he revealed.

Carr said the demand for children to work in the sex industry, caused by the dramatic rise in the number of paedophiles, was being increasingly handled by organised crime.

"Crime gangs, especially in Russia and Eastern Europe, are systematically recruiting children to be filmed having sex, whereas six to seven years ago there was no commercial market at all," he said.

"One website in Eastern Europe... was generating $2-million (about R12-million) a month from child pornography," he said.

Carr went on to say that Japan and South Korea also had significant child porn industries, and rapid technological growth across much of the developing world would likely see a major increase in the exploitation of children if steps were not taken to prosecute offending sites and users.

He mentioned the bust of a US website in 2001 which had about a quarter-of-a-million subscribers from 59 countries.

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