Boys account for nearly a third of online
child sex abuse images and often suffer the worst horrors, a new
study revealed Tuesday, suggesting a greater problem than first
thought.
Interpol and Ecpat, a Bangkok-based
international organisation fighting child sexual abuse, produced
the findings after reviewing more than one million online images
and videos.
"There is sort of a higher number than we
would have maybe thought of males portrayed on the images," Ecpat's
Marie-Laure Lemineur told a press conference in Brussels.
The report said 64.8 percent of the
unidentified victims were girls and 31.1 percent were boys while
both sexes were depicted together in 4.1 percent of images and
videos.
"When boys were depicted in the abuse, it was
more likely to be severe," the report said.
The report added that the younger the child,
whether a boy or a girl, the "abuse was more likely to be
severe."
The findings are important and require further
study because it is often assumed that girls and older children are
far more likely to be abused than boys and young children, Ecpat
and Interpol officials said.
Some of the victims were infants and
toddlers.
The study rated levels of victimisation from
cases of nudity, erotic posing, explicit sexual activity, assault,
gross assault as well as sadism and bestiality.
Bjorn Sellstrom, Interpol's coordinator for
crimes against children, urged the public to be careful about the
terms used to describe the abuses.
"This is not child pornography. This is
evidence of crimes," the Swedish police officer told the press
conference.
The images were contained in the International
Child Sexual Exploitation database that Interpol set up nearly a
decade ago, leading to the identification of 12,000 victims.
But Sellstrom said many more could be
identified as less than half of the world's countries are connected
to the data base, with none in Africa and only a few in Asia.
The system's sophisticated software compares
photos and videos, allowing investigators to also identify abusers
and locations across the participating member states.
Nearly 47 percent of the files in the database
portray child victims that have been identified by the authorities
while the remainder depict unidentified children.
Interpol and Ecpat called for a coordinated
global response involving civil society, media, academia and
various layers of government.
"This is not a law enforcement problem. This
is a societal problem," Sellstrom said.
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