A NEW REPORT out today shows the scale of child pornography reports in Ireland.

The Hotline.ie report shows that from almost 3,000 reports received in 2012, 96 were assessed as illegal child pornography under Irish law.
Hotline.ie takes complaints from the public about suspected illegal content on the Internet. Its annual report is published today and shows that of the 96 cases, four were traced to servers here in Ireland.

That is the highest number recorded in one year since the Hotline was established in 1999.

The number of reports received by Hotline.ie confirmed to be child pornography has plummeted from a high of 684 reports in 2007 to 96 in 2012.

Paedophile rings
Hotline.ie said that while this number is extremely low by international standards, it shows that Ireland’s internet infrastructure “is not immune to the activities of paedophile rings and organised criminals distributing child pornography around the world”.

Paul Durrant, CEO of the Internet Service Providers Association that runs the hotline, said that while four cases were four too many, by international standards Ireland’s internet hosting services are viewed by these criminals “as an environment hostile to storing of child pornography”.

When notified by Hotline.ie, ISPAI members act swiftly to take down such content and work closely with An Garda Síochána to uncover the evidence left by the criminals on our servers.

In most previous years, Ireland’s hosting servers have apparently been child pornography free. Hotline.ie said this was a claim backed by the fact that no other INHOPE Hotline around the world had reports in those years that they traced to an ISP in Ireland. However, from 1999 through 2011 there were three verified incidents where illegal content reported through the INHOPE network was traced to Ireland.

Report

According to the 2012 report, the source of the illegal child sexual abuse content in 78 of the reports was traced by them to countries having an INHOPE hotline. It was forwarded swiftly to them for action with their police and deletion from the servers.

In 2012, INHOPE said that 90 per cent of all illegal content hosted in Europe and reported through its hotlines is removed within 72 hours.

Its hotlines, which span 37 countries worldwide, exchanged 37,400 cases of confirmed illegal child abuse content uncovered by members of the public.

Durrant said that the popularity of social networking may be a factor in the Irish public not discovering child sexual abuse material on the web as frequently as in the past.

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