British police are calling for a national center to take on rising Internet child porn, in the wake of new reporting showing an explosion in convictions for child porn, especially in hand with a rise in nations cracking down more severely against child porn on and offline.
“It’s the way forward,” said Stuart Hyde, assistant chief constable of the Association of Chief Police Officers, about a national Internet child porn center for Britain. “It’s making sure we have joined up-thinking and working between the agencies and across the industry.”
Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection executive director Joan Irvine applauded the call. “It is important to have a national center for collecting information on child pornography,” she told AVNOnline.com. “The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children provides this function in the US. However, it is sometimes more expedient to send information to ISP, domain registrars, billing companies which is ASACP’s plan in 2005.”
The ACPO plans to ask Home Secretary Charles Clarke to pressure Internet service providers to block customers from known child porn sites.
The British children’s charity NCH said this week that arrests and convictions in Britain alone quadrupled in two years, showing 2,234 people warned or indicted for child porn in 2003 over a mere 549 in 2001.
NCH Internet safety advisor John Carr said the rise ties to the high-profile anti-child porn sweeps known as Operation Ore and to the rise in home Internet surfing, but he was careful not to blame the Internet itself.
“But we can say,” he said, “that the Internet has facilitated a massive increase in this type of criminal behavior. I think that what's happened is that the Internet has made it easier for a lot of people who might previously have suppressed their interest in this type of material.”
Carr said NCH also intended to write to Home Secretary Charles Clarke to ask him to put pressure on more ISPs to block customers from accessing known child pornography sites.
