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U.S. group to combat child porn
By Reuters
Staff, CNET News.com
June 15, 1999, 4:55 p.m. PT
UNITED NATIONS--With children becoming prime users of the Internet, a U.S. organization was formed today to coordinate watchdog groups trying to keep up with a growing number of pedophiles and child pornographers.
The U.S. National Action Committee for "Innocence in Danger," announced by the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), is to be an umbrella group in the United States that will link to similar organizations abroad to advise parents where to get help.
Parry Aftab, executive director of CyberAngels, a cybersafety group that combats pedophilia and child pornography, has organized the American group that will include educational experts, law enforcement officials, and industry executives.
She expects America Online, Microsoft, the American Library Association, the Justice Department, and the New Jersey State police--where its cyberspace expert Robert O'Leary helped uncover the Melissa virus--to join the group.
"We intend to contribute on a worldwide basis what we learn and to make sure the entire world has the benefit of our mistakes. We are putting the best brains I know together in a giant virtual think tank," Aftab, a cyberspace lawyer, said.
"We are very free-speech oriented," Aftab told a news conference. But she said much of the pornography showing child sex on 23,000 Internet sites is illegal in many nations and needs to be traced and reported.
In the United States about 17 million children younger than 18 years old use the Web.
Often isolated and lonely, child abusers communicate freely on the Internet, post sex acts by young children, and sometimes lure them to a meeting, Aftab said.
Pedophiles often use the Internet to keep databases on children and write to them in open chat groups, pretending to be a child. They then set up appointments with an "uncle," for example, who gives away computer games to lure the child into a car.
"They don't wear a black beard and hang out on street corners and look slimy," Aftab said.
According to FBI figures, about 40 percent of pedophiles are homosexuals trying to lure young boys. The other 60 percent are attempting to make contact with young girls.
In Japan, Aftab said, child pornography laws were just revised and enacted after many pornographers used gaps in the law to set up Web sites in Tokyo. She said she was asked to go to Japan in the autumn to advise a 33-member task force.
Committees have been established in France, Belgium, Argentina, Colombia, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Colombia, Panama, and Thailand, as well as Switzerland, UNESCO said.
"North America and several European countries play a key role in the production and distribution of child pornography in all parts of the world," said Homayra Sellier, who works in Switzerland and was chosen to head an action group arising out of a January UNESCO conference on child abuse.
No international Web site for "Innocence in Danger" has been set up yet, but Sellier says she expects one to be established within a year.
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