Protecting vulnerable young people in cyberspace from sexual abuse: raising awareness and responding globally

Abstract

This paper explores the danger that young people may be exposed to when using the Internet. The first part sets out the context by considering new developments in UK and international legislation and then explores educational moves to protect children. Focus is upon findings from research undertaken on behalf of the London Metropolitan Police Service in evaluating the Safer Surfing programme designed to enable young people’s safe Internet use. In the final part of this paper it is argued that more must however be done internationally both to protect children online and to curb the growing trade in indecent child images.

Keywords:

• Internet safety
• online grooming
• child abuse
• Internet policing
• cyber abuse
• knowledge management

Notes

1. The Sexual Offences Act 2003 (England and Wales) is currently under review in Northern Ireland. Some concerns have been raised regarding a lack of clarity around the age of consent and informed consent. Currently the age of consent is 17 in Northern Ireland (it was raised from 16 to 17 under the Children and Young Persons Act 1950). NI Office, July 2006.

2. The G8 countries are the seven most developed economies in the world (plus Russia), including: America, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Russia.

3. Recent statistics produced by the IWF suggest that 615 reports of Internet abuse were received during their first year of operation (1996), compared to 27,750 reports in 2006 (85% of which related to suspected child abuse websites). During the 10‐year period, 31,000 websites have been found to contain potentially illegal child abuse images. It is claimed that the number of reported websites containing illegal child abuse images, has fallen in the UK from 18% in 1996 to 0.2% in 2006. A breakdown of countries where websites containing child abuse images appear to have been hosted during the period 1996–2006 is provided by the IWF who suggest that: 51% of sites were hosted in the USA, 20% in Russia, 5% in Japan, 7% in Spain, and 1.6% in the UK (Internet Watch Foundation, October 2006).

4. The programme was however used with children aged 10 plus.

5. The programme was delivered by Police Safer Schools Officers as part of their routine work and was not therefore labour intensive.

6. None of the children interviewed disclosed sexual abuse; this would have given rise to difficulty with the notion of absolute confidentiality, due to concerns over child protection. In past work with adult offenders, respondents have been informed at the outset of any research interview that such disclosure would be reported, which is good research practice. But it was decided here that such a statement would alarm the children. Had any such disclosures been made they would have been reported to the head teacher and this would have been discussed with the child in private at the end of the focus group.

7. Children in the post‐programme group were less likely to believe this, with 50% (51) agreeing that girls are more at risk compared to 91% (89) in the pre‐programme group.

8. A study of 60,991 sexual assault victims conducted in the USA suggests that male sex offenders were the perpetrators in 96% of cases (Snyder, 2000, p. 8).

9. Rennison (2002) suggests in her analysis of US crime statistics that females were the victims of 89% of all reported sexual assaults between 1992 and 2000.

10. The respondents’ reference to ‘Jessica & Holly’ refers to a widely publicized case in the UK involving the abduction and murder of two children in Soham in August 2002 by a known sex offender working as a school caretaker.