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RIGHTS-ASIA: ‘Internet Pushing Real Time Porn’

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Dec 19 2006 (IPS) - In the lengthening vocabulary that describes child abuse, ‘streaming’ now defines the formidable challenge faced by child rights activists campaigning to stop children from being trapped into the sex trade over the Internet.

Revelations by the Philippines police offer a glimpse at what such activists face regards streaming, where children are lured into cybersex dens and filmed for instant distribution on the Internet to an online audience of paedophiles in places near and far.

‘’A senior police officer in the Philippines estimated that there are 50 to 75 cybersex dens in the country where webcams are used to film sexual images, and that children are being sold by their parents in this ‘new market’.” states a report on the South-east Asian country released Tuesday by End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes (ECPAT).

‘’The growth of new communication technology has given rise to access children easily,” Amihan Abueva, a Philippines national who heads the global child rights lobby ECPAT’s international board, told IPS. ‘’The Internet has helped to build a new community of offenders as seen with streaming.”

In many cases, such abuse of children in the cybersex dens are ‘’done on demand, where the abusers would pay in advance for what kind of sex abuse they want to view and between whom,” she added. ‘’The Philippines has become particularly vulnerable to this.”

A police raid of cybersex dens in Angeles City in the Philippines late last year exposed a glimpse as to who some of the abusers are. One was run by a couple from the United States and another by a Canadian man. These dens were catering to expatriates from the West as well as affluent men from Japan and South Korea.

The concern about streaming is one of many troubling realities that groups like ECPAT are confronting 10 years after the problem of commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) was acknowledged as a global issue crying for a solution. The campaign to end such violations was launched at the First World Congress against CSEC held in 1996 in the Stockholm.

The ‘’Stockholm Agenda for Action” called on countries to strengthen laws as one of the measures that governments and activists felt were needed to end this scourge. Yet as ECPAT reviews progress since that ground-breaking meeting in the Swedish city, it concedes that ‘’legal measures alone are not enough to stop the (adult) demand (for sex with children).”

What the past decade has also thrown up are the problems posed by the growth of information technology, which has advanced exponentially during the same period. That, says child rights activists, has introduced new ways to communicate, such as chat-sites and message boards on the Internet in addition to mobile phones with cameras, which have helped the spread of child pornography.

‘’Developments in information technology are seeing multi-billion dollar growth in child pornography materials and the number of adults accessing images of child abuse,” ECAPT added this week as it released reports of 52 countries surveyed on action taken since the Stockholm meeting a decade ago. ‘’The children they seek to entrap can now be victimised from anywhere in the world with very few countries putting sufficient protection measures in place.”

What prevails in Sweden, despite it being praised as one of the countries cracking down on child pornography in cyberspace, is instructive about the demand for such images. ‘’In Sweden they block 30,000 daily attempts to access child pornography websites,” said Jaap Doek, chairperson of the U.N. committee on the rights of the child, during the launch of the country reports in the Thai capital.

Yet most countries ‘’do not have specific criminal laws to reduce child pornography on the Internet,” he added. ‘’There is not enough protection of children being exploited.”

According to a British-based group monitoring the sexual exploitation of children in cyberspace, the violators have evolved sophisticated methods to overcome checks placed in their way. ‘’Offenders are making greater use of message boards to share child abuse images,” states the independent Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) in a 2005 report on global trends. ‘’The images are generally posted on free hosting services or other message boards in Asia (including Japan, South Korea, Thailand, China and others).”

IWF has also traced most ‘’free-to-view” sites to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Russia, the U.S., Spain, Thailand, Japan and South Korea. In October 2006, it ranked Thailand as the fifth country on the list of ‘’Top Five Hosts” of websites that contained child pornography.

What is available on such sites are among the ‘’more than one million images of tens of thousands of children subjected to sexual abuse and exploitation,” states ECPAT in a report released last year on ‘Violence Against Children in Cyberspace.’ ‘’The production and distribution of abuse images of children is big businessàEstimates of annual business volume range widely from three billion U.S. dollars to 20 billion U.S. dollars.”

Yet legal experts say that the children in South-east Asia will not be safe until there is a sea change among government agencies, including the police, about how child pornography on the Internet is regarded.

‘’The police here have not assigned a special division to deal with it. It is treated as a general crime,” says Wanchai Roujanavong, director general of the department of juvenile observation and protection at Thailand’s ministry of justice. ‘’The weakest point of addressing CSEC in Thailand is child pornography, especially using Internet.”