'World needs paedophile database'

By Duncan Walker
BBC News

When images of horrific child abuse were seized in Canada recently, police launched a major hunt for the victim.

Concern remains about children in South East Asia

Unable to trace the girl, they were on the verge of publishing her face when they were called by a Florida officer.

The child, he said, had been rescued three years earlier and the abuser had been in jail for two years.

Such cases underline the need for the shared computer database of sex abuse images proposed by the G8, says John Carr of children's charity NCH.

"Whatever resources we put into (tracing abusers and victims) it's galling to find out when they are being wasted," he says.

Under the G8 plan, due to be approved on Thursday, images of the perpetrators and the children will be shared, to make identifying both easier. A world register of paedophiles will be set up to help prevent them committing further crimes.

'Very poor'

The initiative is not the first - an Interpol database already contains two million images of abuse, involving between 5,000 and 10,000 children, says Mr Carr. And a database run by British police holds 800,000 images.

You don't see the same amount of paedophilia or sex abuse Aarti Kapoor - Afesip

Despite such efforts, NCH suggests that only 350 to 500 victims have been identified worldwide.

"It's a very poor success rate and one of the reasons for that is the guys that make the images usually take a great deal of trouble to make sure there's nothing which gives the location away," says Mr Carr.

It is hoped the G8 system may be able to make inroads against such tactics, with the backgrounds of pictures also compared to look for similarities.

Sex tourists

Further problems may lie in the fact that many of the children abused for images posted on the internet are in Eastern Europe and South East Asia, where technology and legal protection need improving.

Calls for tougher controls on ISPs have been demanded

Aarti Kapoor, a British barrister working for the charity Afesip in Cambodia, says many paedophiles travel to the country, where "it's really easy to produce child pornography (because) there's very few laws against it".

Nevertheless, Western nations' efforts to work more closely with Cambodian police and to develop their own laws against sex tourism have hit paedophiles, with many arrested and brothels with children closed.

Ms Kapoor says that, in the two years she has been in Phnom Penh, cooperation between international and Cambodian officials has improved "and you don't see the same amount of paedophilia or sex abuse".

If G8 countries shared a database of abuse images, she suggests, the fight against paedophiles would be strengthened further.

Operation Ore

Back in the UK there is still more that can be done to reduce the number of children abused for images.

In particular, internet service providers need to make sure that such pictures cannot be sold on, says John Carr.

Much of the abuse is carried out not by paedophiles, but by organised gangs who know there is money to be made, he says.

They need only look at the case of the Landslide child abuse websites in Texas, which were said to have 75,000 international subscribers paying £21 a month each when the FBI shut them down and prosecuted the organisers.

The arrests led to the creation of Operation Ore in the UK, when the US authorities passed on the names of more than 7,000 British subscribers.