EU urged to help combat online child sexual abuse

A campaign is underway aimed at stamping out the “scourge” of child pornography on the internet.

The initiative, launched in parliament on Wednesday, is the brainchild of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF).

Worldwide, there are about 3,000 websites containing child sexual abuse content and UK Conservative MEP Jonathan Evans told a meeting that these need to more effectively tracked and policed.

He said much more needs to be done at EU level to tackle the distribution of child sexual abuse content.

“One of the main challenges is to raise awareness of this problem," said Evans.

“The IWF has been very successful in the UK in helping to remove illegal child sexual content from British-based internet servers.

“This has been partly achieved with the active participation of industry and European commission support.

“But what we now need to do is to raise awareness of this problem at an EU-level and generate more public support in order to tackle the scourge of online child abuse.”

Evans said the key was for telecommunications companies and internet service providers to work more closely as they do in the UK.

His comments were echoed by Viviane Reding, the information commissioner, who told the meeting the issue should be pushed up the political agenda.

She said, “The internet, of course, offers wonderful opportunities but the online world can also be a very dangerous place.

“The main problem with the Net is the amount of illegal material it contains. This continues to increase and child sexual content on the net is increasingly getting more and more disgusting.”

The IWF tracks the movement ands activities of websites associated with the distribution of child sexual abuse content.

Its CEO, Peter Robbins, said that there are almost 3,000 websites containing such content abroad, mostly outside Europe.

“It is possible the IWF model, based on partnership with the online industry, could be applied in other European countries,” he said.

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