Child porn reaching epidemic proportions in Oz

Herald Globe (ANI) Wednesday 8th February, 2012

Child pornography in Australia has risen exponentially as paedophiles are increasingly exchanging images of themselves molesting a child with other abusers.

With the rise of file swapping, the images and videos are used as "currency" by abusers to buy their way into transnational groups that trade the material. In some cases, police have found terabytes of material, too much to store on most personal computers.

There was a 30 per cent jump, from 136 to 180, in the number of Australians arrested by federal police for child pornography offences last year compared with 2010.

According to The Age, the head of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) serious organised crime unit, Assistant Commissioner Kevin Zuccato, said that where federal police would once have been overwhelmed by finding hundreds of images on a suspect's computer, they were now finding hundreds of thousands and even millions, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

He underlined the importance of co-operation with international partners to tackle child pornography, citing the AFP's overseas network of officers as a central plank of this effort.

The head of the AFP cyber-crime unit, Assistant Commissioner Neil Gaughan said that although there might have been no increase in the number of adults sexually assaulting children, "we are seeing those sexual assaults being recorded, and those sexual assaults being uploaded onto the Internet".

"There's no empirical evidence of an increase in child abuse, but we're seeing an increase in the number of violent images that clearly have not been commercially made," he said. (ANI)