Internet child abuse rampant?

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 24 Jan 2008

A Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) "desk review" of online child abuse has found "the extent of the problem in SA is not known and may never be known".

The report adds that mobile phone, Internet and wireless applications service providers must do more to fight so-called child pornography.

The Film and Publications Board commissioned the report, by the HSRC's professor Andy Dawes and intern Advaita Govender. This followed increasing concern regarding the spread and availability of child abuse images on the Internet and the potential for abuse of - and by - children through this medium and via cellphones.

The report is not yet in the public domain, but Dawes has presented a paper on the subject and Govender has written about it in an online HSRC publication. The reporting on the study suggests that much about the problem - including its scale - is unknowable. It is also difficult to police, or prosecute - even under the beefed-up Film and Publications Act that imposes severe penalties for creating, possessing or distributing "child porn".

Dawes' presentation also hints that the state may rope in service providers to do that policing. "Internet service providers and cellphone distributors should be required to take more active responsibility in combating child sexual abuse images in cyberspace.

"Internet service providers and cellphone distributors should make it best practice to refer clients who download and/or distribute child abuse images to the authorities for investigation [and] consideration should be given to making it a legal responsibility for ISPs to report sites that contain child abuse images and those who access them," he adds.

They should also "establish an Internet monitoring system (similar to the Internet Watch Foundation in the UK) to monitor and remove child abuse image content, close sites, suspend services to the customer, and report to the authorities". Providers should also "develop tools to identify and prevent the distribution of child abuse images" (such as the initiative in the US under the leadership of the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children).

What is child porn?

Alan Levin, immediate past chairman of the Internet Society of SA, recently told the Sunday Times service providers were concerned about becoming censors. "What is child pornography and what isn't? It's not something service providers feel they are qualified to determine," he told the paper.

Dawes adds the buyers of computers and mobile phones should be supplied with information packs on the risks of exposure to child abuse through such media at the point and time of sale. They should also be provided "simple guidance on filtering software".

Govender says the number of reported child pornography cases in SA is "unknown" because sexual offence data is not disaggregated by type of crime. "The study estimated that fewer than 20 cases... have been investigated in SA over the past five years."

It is also not known to what extent child abuse is filmed or photographed in SA. Govender says "sources are most likely to be foreign" although mobile phones now allow teenagers and younger children to photograph and film themselves and distribute such content to their peers, which in itself amounts to a contravention of the law. These images could easily land in the hands of predators.

Govender says previous research abroad has 'guestimated' "there are more than one million child sexual abuse images available on the Internet and this figure is escalating". Various sources last year estimated the total number of images on the Internet as ranging from 1.7 billion to four billion.

She says the "Internet has made it much easier to distribute these images and for 'communities' of users to form".

Legislation

Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) management committee member Ant Brooks says he is "somewhat surprised" at some of the suggested recommendations as some are already law and others are against the law.

"There's already a legal obligation on service providers to report child pornography, to disable access to such images and to preserve them as evidence for the police," he says.

Other suggestions would violate the Regulation of Interception of Communication and Provision of Communication-related Information Act Amendment and expose snooping service providers to massive fines.

"It would be unhelpful for us to monitor every site customers go to just to catch one or two people. There are much smarter ways to use technology," he says. Other difficulties are peer-to-peer networks and encrypted e-mail - which state agencies may decrypt, but not service providers.

"It is not technologically possible to look at individual packets and say 'oooh that's an illegal image'," Brooks adds. "From an ISPA point-of-view, we are committed to helping fight child abuse, but we are nervous about being obliged to do the impossible."