Media Releases
Child Pornography creates child abusers
Child Wise, Australia's leading international child protection charity has escalated its call for Australian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to urgently filter child pornography. This call follows in the wake of Operation Centurion, the world's largest child pornography bust which has implicated close to 3000 Australians. Also in recent days ISPs in both USA and France have agreed to filter child pornography to help reduce this hideous trade in child abuse.
Bernadette McMenamin AO, CEO of Child Wise says that "Australian ISP's have been dragging their feet on the ISP filtering issue. They have been throwing up smoke screens such as filters would increase the cost to the consumer or that that filters would slow down the Internet. Based on international experiences this is untrue. Australia is out of step with the rest of the world as now ISPs in Sweden, Denmark, UK, Norway, Canada, France and the USA have agreed to filter child pornography".
Reports show that these filters are very effective, with the UK system operated by British Telecom blocking over 35,000 attempts per day. During 2006, the Norwegian system blocked 1.7million attempts to access child pornography. The Swedish system blocked 15,000 attempts during its first few weeks of operation and resulted in a 40% drop in reports of child pornographic sites to ECPAT Sweden's Internet hotline. Telenor, a large European mobile phone operator, has been filtering child pornography on their 3G phones since June 2005. Each country uses their local authorities such as the police to determine what sites are blocked.
Child Wise has been calling on Australian ISPs to install child pornography filters for several years now and has been heartened by the Australian Federal Government's election pledge to introduce mandatory filtering of child pornography and illegal sites. Ms McMenamin states that "ISP filtering would be a victory for common sense. It would be a way to prevent the rape and exploitation of the world's most vulnerable children and it would also reduce the numbers of Australians engaging in criminal activity".
Ms McMenamin believes that a significant number of Australians that view child pornography are not necessarily child sex abusers but do so because it is available and by doing so fuel the demand. "There is not doubt in my mind that the mind-blowing growth in the number of viewers of child pornography is simply because child pornography is easily available. If it was not so readily available less people would become child abusers and child pornographers" Ms McMenamin stressed.
Many people are viewing child pornography out of curiosity, voyeurism, engaging in risk-taking behaviour and because they believe they won't get caught or that they are not harming anyone. "This whole issue is very complex" states Ms McMenamin, and "we need to understand who the child pornographers are and their reasons for viewing child pornography. There are multiple reasons, but clearly something is going wrong in their lives. Even more concerning is that many viewers of child pornography become addicted to these images and their activities can escalate into collecting thousands upon thousands of images and amongst this group some will go onto actually sexually offend against children".
Child Wise calls on Australian ISPs to urgently help to protect the world's children and Australians who view child pornography from becoming child abusers. This can be done by child pornography filters.
For comments contact Bernadette McMenamin CEO, Child Wise on 03 9645 8911 or 0419 397 689