Online child abuse images 'becoming more extreme, sadistic and violent'

Online child abuse images are becoming "more extreme, sadistic and violent", with the vast number of images and pressure on resources making identifying new victims increasingly difficult, according to a study from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP).

"The children in these images are getting younger and the offences committed against them are getting more serious and extreme," said Andy Baker, deputy chief executive of the CEOP Centre. "Not only has a child been abused when these images were taken but they are being abused again each time that image is viewed."

There was a correlation between viewing child abuse images and committing child sexual abuse - with 55% of those who had viewed images likely to go on to physically abuse, he added. He urged police forces to make a risk assessment of every offender not only on the content and number of images they possessed but also their potential contact with children.

The report indicates the volume of images coupled with budget cuts is putting unprecedented pressure on already stretched specialist units tackling online child abuse images, leading to the risk that identifiable child victims of sexual abuse were not being rescued.

"Not all images found on storage media are reviewed and classified due to a lack of time and resource to process the large collections of images [...] consequently the chances of identifying new images and their victims are reduced," the report says. In a perfect world all cases would be investigated as soon as police became aware of the offence, but "in a time where resource is sparse and priorities continually modified, this has become increasingly unachievable" it adds.

Baker said: "We must recognise that the professionals dealing with these cases have a passion for child protection but if there is a small unit and many cases to look at that is a real challenge."

The report also says people working with children - in schools or in care - were among the most dangerous offenders. Analysis of 97 case studies, from 34 UK police forces, showed that dual offenders - those harbouring indecent images and also sexually abusing children - were most likely to be between the ages of 19 and 45 and out of work, with people working with children the second most likely group to dual offend.

Offenders looking at child abuse images were also likely to have contact with children, in the majority of cases studied offenders were living with a spouse or partner, and of them more than half were living with children.

Child victims found in online pictures and videos were getting younger, with the offences committed against them more brutal, said the report. According to the study, A Picture of Abuse, images depicting penetrative abuse had risen by 7.6% between 2008 and 2010. But despite evidence that offenders possessing the worst types of sexual images, in many cases perpetrators are avoiding jail terms. In one police force only 18% of people convicted of possessing indecent images of children had been sent to prison over a three year period.

The report warned that although a caution for possessing child abuse images was regarded as unsuitable, the number of cautions were increasing,probably owing to the low number of jail sentences resulting from prosecutions for possession.

In the past year 26 forces reported a total of 2,625 reports of indecent images from January to December 2011, with 246 victims of sexual abuse identified, but the report suggested that as the problem was often difficult to detect and not all forces had been counted the true figure was likely to be higher. In this study data received from 17 forces identified 3% of offenders who had indecent images had also committed a physical offence.

Advances in technology were also putting increasing numbers of teenagers as risk, as they were persuaded to share indecent images of themselves. "Once that image has been sent it is out of your control, and can easily be passed from offender to offender," said Baker.

In one of the most harrowing examples of cases that CEOP have tackled in the report detailed the abuse of two children in care by their foster father and his son. After arrest the father, who had been a foster carer for a number of years, admitted to a range of offences including rape, inciting a child to engage in sexual activity and making indecent images of children, while his son pleaded guilty to sexual activity with a child, sexual assault and making indecent images.

The father told police that the abuse had begun after he took an indecent image of one of the children, while the son said he had begun to abuse the children after discovering the images that his father had taken. The father was sentenced to ten years in prison while the son was given an indeterminate public protection sentence.

The report quoted one child who had appeared in explicit images related to a different case as saying: "I feel like I had my childhood taken away from me, I wasn't allowed a childhood."

Donald Findlater, of the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a charity dedicated to preventing child sexual abuse, said: "There is no doubt that the possession of indecent images of children is a growing problem. But our responses need to include prevention of this behaviour and we need to distinguish those at low risk of contact abuse - probably the majority - from the minority who are high risk. Children and families deserve a full and balanced analysis of this problem and of the effective responses to it."

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