Though police may work hard to catch child pornographers, they can only do so much — a tip from the public could lead to the arrest of a predator sooner than police might have caught him otherwise.<br /><br />So what are the telltale signs of a child pornography offender? Metro asked Michael Seto, director of forensic rehabilitation research at the Royal Ottawa Health Care Group. Seto is an expert on pedophilia and child pornography, and offered some tips on how offenders are likely to give themselves away.<br /><br />Child pornography offenders are often pedophiles or hebephiles — adults attracted to prepubescent children or pubescent children.
The Council of the European Union agreed on Friday to create a Global Alliance against Child Sexual Abuse Online that envisages blocking websites "where appropriate."
"In May 2011, Lincolnshire Police announced that it had broken up a web-based news group that sold and distributed images of child sex abuse.
A four-year investigation named Operation Alpine led to the closure of the site and resulted in 132 UK children being identified and safeguarded. In addition, 55 arrests have been made of people who ran and used the site. More arrests are expected.
The vast majority of the 200 UK suspects who accessed the illegal images were not previously known to the police.
It is a feature that crops up time and again during investigations of sites that peddle child sex abuse images, said Mick Moran, Interpol's co-ordinator on child abuse."
Too often, in the UK, consumers of online child abuse are treated leniently by the courts and given probation or suspended sentences. While help needs to be available for those who say they may become consumers of such material, long jail sentences are also required to send out a message that watching child abuse is unacceptable. Whether or not viewing disgusting images leads to active paedophilia, the act of becoming a spectator is a horrendously damaging crime and should be treated as such.