Mick Moran has a clear, strong message: “People need to realise, these are kids being abused to produce this material. These are children, real children in these images.”
As assistant director of Interpol’s vulnerable communities unit, Moran is at the frontline of tackling child sexual abuse online. A member of An Garda Síochána, Ireland’s national police service, Moran is currently on secondment. Interpol officers do not carry out investigations themselves; the organisation’s role is in coordination, database-holding, training and support across international boundaries to identify criminals and crimes. “We are putting the child first,” he says. “This issue has been made demonstrably better by the role we play.”
Another point Moran is very clear about is that this is not “pornography”. “Pornography is deemed to be benign, seen to be socially acceptable, and the people in pornography are consenting to the actions that are being carried out on them or by them. None of those are applicable to child “pornography”. We use the terms child abuse or child sexual exploitation or child sexual abuse material to be quite descriptive of what we look at.”
This stark division is underlined by the age of the victims. “The vast majority of the images we deal with are of children under 10,” he says. “Some are pre-speech.”
In the mid-1990s, when the general public started to get internet access, there was a lot of child abuse material online, he says, and people started coming across it by accident. The Interpol specialist group on crimes against children started to look at victim identification as a key issue, and that involved the exchange of intelligence between police forces facilitated by Interpol.
This led to the setting up of the International Child Sexual Exploitation Database (ICSE) in 2001. One of its main focuses is on victim identification using image comparison software and, to date, the ICSE has helped identify more than 8,300 victims around the world and more than 4,000 offenders.
“We introduced the concept of ‘finding the child’. This is a real child [being abused],” he reiterates. “And if you can identify the child you have the opportunity to disclose on behalf of the child because we know the child has been abused. Offline sexual abuse is by nature secretive, and rarely disclosed by the victim, but with this material we knew the abuse had taken place.”
The database also means that they can avoid duplication of effort. “We don’t want two officers in two parts of the world trying to identify the same child without knowing [they are doing so].”
Targeting the victim also has another advantage. “If you target the victim in your investigation you will find the abuser because the vast majority of child sexual abuse takes place within the immediate family circle. So statistically, if you find the child you are going to find the perpetrator.”
Partnerships – particularly with industry – are key to Interpol’s work. “The internet is a network of networks,” Moran says. “We could go a long way to reducing online exploitation of children if everyone who owned a network ensured that there were proper child sexual exploitation prevention mechanisms in place. Systems administrators will scan their networks for spam and malware so why not child abuse material?”
The bigger organisations, such as Google and Facebook, do this already, as do some of the private networks. Ericsson, for instance, scans their corporate network for child abuse material. They make their employees aware they are doing it, and tell their employees that if they are caught with this material on their computers or devices they will be reported to the police. “This is corporate best practice and I encourage all companies to do the same,” says Moran.
However, smaller networks and developers do not always do so. “Your network will be abused by people with a sexual interest in children and children will take risks on your platform. Surely it makes sense for you to mitigate those risks using whatever methods you can,” Moran continues. “Unfortunately the rush to market by start-ups leaves security as an afterthought. I would argue they should build safety and security into their products from the start.”
The commercial sexual exploitation of children online has become less prominent in recent years. INHOPE hotlines, which enable the reporting of sites and images showing child abuse, law enforcement activity against organised crime, and a general reduction in spam have meant that many sites have been removed.
Credit card companies have also helped by refusing to allow their cards to be used on child sexual abuse sites. But new ways to pay, such as crypto currency and mobile payments, still present challenges.
Children having access to the internet gives them access to the world. It also gives the world access to children. “We as a society take a zero tolerance approach [to child sexual abuse] so there’s no reason companies can’t do the same,” he concludes.
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