WINNIPEG, MB—A study released Thursday by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection has found that servers in the United States hosted 65 percent of commercial websites that feature images of child sexual abuse, and Canada came in a distant second at 8 percent.
According to Canada.com, “The report, released this week by Cybertip.ca, examined more than 15,000 websites worldwide containing child pornography. It found Canada ranked a distant second among nations in terms of the number of commercial websites it hosts involving pornographic content featuring children.”
Other countries hosting such websites included Russia (5.6 percent), the Netherlands (2.9 percent) and Germany (1.8 percent), says the report, adding that more than 50 percent of the websites take credit cards from people wanting to purchase the photos.
“The report also details how child pornography websites cover their tracks,” reports Canada.ca. “In one 48-hour period, Cybertip.ca watched a website cycle through 212 unique IP addresses in 16 different countries—making the specific location of the information very difficult for law enforcement to track.”
Other findings from the report include:
* 82.1 percent of the images analyzed included depicted very young, pre-pubescent children under the age of 12.
* Of the 4,110 unique images assessed by analysts, over 35 percent showed sexual assaults against children.
* 77.6 percent of webpages had at least one child abuse image of a child less than 8 years of age, with many showing infants and toddlers being abused.
* 83 percent of the images were of female children.
* More than 35 percent of the images showed serious sexual assaults, including, torture, bestiality and torture.
* At the time of the analysis (2002-2009), more than 60 countries were hosting websites with images of child sexual abuse.
"What makes this particularly concerning is the very young age of the children in the images. These children are most likely being accessed and sexually abused by someone they know. Not only is it devastating for a child to be abused, but to have the abuse recorded and distributed on the Internet adds another layer of trauma." said Lianna McDonald, executive director of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection.
The complete report can be found here.
