A Surge In Video Child Abuse Viewing Online: Irish, UK Panel

A panel of Irish and British child abuse experts have said they believe more people are seeing online video footage of children being sexually assaulted and raped " and they think cheaper and faster Net connections are one big reason why.

Still images may account for the bulk of child abuse images seen online, but the panel said video images with actual sound are getting wider audiences among perverts with sexual interests in children, the panel said during a recent two-day conference as reported by the Irish Examiner.

"There has definitely been an increase in the number of video clips available on the Internet," panel technical support officer Eoin Kelly told the newspaper. "This is due to increased bandwidth and greater accessibility to digital cameras and camcorders in terms of both price and ease of use. Video clips need a lot of computer memory to download and it is often a question of space and patience. Video clips might be facilitated by increased bandwidth, but it doesn't change the fact that these are images of children being abused or how we tackle the problem."

The conference was called the COPINE Project (Combating Pedophile Information Networks in Europe), aiming to identify children in the abusive videos and fight Internet child porn and abuse. The conference participants included Operation Ore director Jon Hesketh, a detective superintendent of the British West Midlands Police, who backed the panel's finding. He said there was "a notable increase" in the volume of video clips seized during Operation Ore investigations, the Examiner said.