BY SHAY CULLEN
ALTHOUGH the arrivals of international child sex tourists have fallen in the Philippines, there are still resident foreign pedophiles abusing children.
The famous Internet Watch Foundation, the leading charity tracing pedophiles online and monitoring and closing down child abusing web sites, has reported that there were 8.8 million attempts by child sex abusers in the United Kingdom to access these sites during lock down since 2020 and this year.
Yes, the live streaming of child sexual abuse and the proliferation of child abuse materials and images that leads to the sexual abuse and rape of children has greatly expanded during the pandemic.
The pedophiles are using their Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to access abusive videos and sexual abuse images of children online, to share them and order sex acts online where children are abused to order. This is shocking and astonishing and this 8.8 million figure is from the UK alone.
The traffic of child sexual abuse material through the ISPs is hundreds if not thousands of millions world-wide. The IWF is one of the few effective organizations battling the abusers and trying to reduce the number being abused. Yet they cannot stop all and millions more around the world are surely getting child abuse material through the ISPs.
“Anyone providing Internet Services should be doing everything they can to keep the users on their network safe and to protect them. Of course, the Internet doesn’t respect borders, so it is key that companies step up as well,” so declared Susie Hardgrave, OBE and the CEO of the Internet Watch Foundation.
This very dedicated CEO is calling on ISPs companies worldwide to get involved, do their moral and legal duty in blocking the proliferation of child sexual abuse images.
At present, the ISPs depend on the IWF to do the work for them and the IWF finds and shares with the ISPs the abusive websites and images they find and advise the ISPs to delete and block them.
But this is primarily the duty of the ISPs themselves. The IWF can’t police the entire world, they are showing the way. How much should the ordinary subscriber be responsible for subscribing to an ISP that does not block or filter child abuse material and should they not hold their ISP to account.
Their own children might become victims of the child abuse material or be influenced or groomed online.
Since every ISP is connected to every other ISP, there is a global responsibility for them to work together to install the blocking software. This will make it very difficult for pedophiles and child abusers to peddle, watch and share abusive material.
In most nations around the world, ISPs claim that they are not responsible for what their customers and the users post there. They deny that they are responsible for the offensive abusive material. Some ISPs claim that they deploy web crawler software and according to IWF, 155 ISPs have opted to deploy Microsoft DNA software. (To be continued)/PN
