Big Firms Profit at Expense of Abused Children

AT an international conference on child protection in Sri Lanka I attended a few years ago, examples of child pornography intercepted on the Internet were shown.

I was shocked when I recognized the photographs were those confiscated from a Japanese paedophile whom we had brought to justice a year previously. He received a 42-year sentence for his depraved acts against five Filipino children. The photographs he took were used as evidence against him but he had already transmitted them over the Internet to other paedophiles.

The Internet is the main channel for transmitting child pornography throughout the world. Every image is graphic evidence that a child has been sexually abused.

For the uninitiated, the Internet is a network, or web, of host computers ‘servers’ around the world connected together via telephone lines through which words and images can be exchanged by anyone with access to a computer that can be linked up through a telephone.

Business and individuals can own web sites on the servers, addresses where customers can visit electronically and browse or buy information and images, goods and services. Some experts estimate that almost 80 per cent of the volume of world-wide transmissions over the Internet is pornography, much of it involving teenagers and children.

An international investigation coordinated by British police in 1998 identified hundreds of members of the Wonderland Club, a ring of Internet paedophiles. The membership fee was 10,000 new images of children being abused. Many members were influential and once-respected members of society.

That investigation seized 750,000 child porn images. Another investigation discovered as many as 6,000 Britons were involved in trading child pornography over the Internet. Most used their credit cards. All the major credit card brands are advertised on the child porn web sites and they could stop much of this perverse trade, but don't.

Encryption of the images and he credit card numbers of paedophiles makes it harder for police to identify them and get evidence. The internet server companies could stop the evil trade, too, but don't. they are not legally liable for the content of their customers’ web sites.

However, in Germany, they are obliged to block web sites that are deemed illegal if it is “technically possible and reasonable”. As that would hit revenues, they say they can't identify or block them. That is questionable. Child defenders report illegal sites to the server companies and some block, but most do not.

Recently when my Universe columns, critical of the Iraq war, were sent to customers of America On Line (AOL), the world’s biggest Internet service provider and a member of the Time-Warner group, the articles were falsely and maliciously reported to AOL by warmongers as “Spam”, that is, unsolicited nuisance email.

AOL, without examining the content or exercising due process, immediately censored and blocked the PREDA Web site, even though the articles never passed through that site. It was closed down for ten days until our supporters in Washington DC threatened to take legal action.

AOL still blocks all our messages to their customers. If an Internet server company can do that to us, an organization defending children, they can block child porn sites if they want to. But they don't. Whose side are they on?

Fr. Shay Cullen is a Columban missionary: PREDA Centre, Kalaklan, Olongapo City. www.preda.org