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September 24, 2005
Charity teams with police on child abuse
LONDON: Britain’s leading child protection charity is to team up with police to target paedophiles exchanging images of child abuse over the internet, the charity said yesterday.
Social workers from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) will work with Greater Manchester Police officers to help identify abusers and the child victims whose pictures appear on the internet.
The problem faced by investigators is vast and growing. In 1995, before the spread of the internet, Greater Manchester Police (GMP) seized 12 indecent images of children. By 2004 that had grown to over a million images, the vast majority on the web.
“The internet has provided a means for people who may have a deviant sexual interest in children to get access to the images that they have often thought about or fantasised about,” Colin Turner, head of the NSPCC’s child protection investigation service, said.
“What really concerns us is that every image of a child is actually a real child. “Every time somebody clicks on an image and opens it up, they may not think they are abusing that child, but they are, because that fuels demand for more children to be sexually exploited.”
Under a two year pilot dubbed Project E-Spy, two NSPCC officers will work full-time with the GMP’s six-strong Abusive Images Unit.
“We regard every photo as a crime scene,” said Turner. In once successful case police were able to track down a man abusing his own daughter on the internet from a barcode shown on packaging in the background of one of the images. Turner said the NSPCC’s goal is to end all cruelty to children within a generation.
Posted by Nealus at September 24, 2005 06:45 PM
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