Offenders leveraging the “perfect storm” of time online and lack of moderation to abuse children
The NSPCC stated that “the impact of the coronavirus lockdown has increased online risks and brewed a perfect storm for offenders to abuse children.”[1] The reason one of the UK’s biggest child protection groups is so worried about child abuse increasing during the pandemic is twofold.
Firstly, the need for everyone to spend significantly more time online in order to stay connected, working, or in school allows paedophiles to share abuse content more widely, and even take advantage of children in isolation who may be enticed and groomed to send indecent images. Secondly, companies have had to rapidly shift their content moderation to cope with working from home, and much of the content they would normally moderate cannot be looked at outside an office due to data protection laws.
The risk to children from the first aspect of the ‘storm’ can be clearly demonstrated by a statement made by the executive director of Europol, who said they had already detected an increase in paedophile activity by the start of April.[2]
Narrowing the focus to the UK, the NCA estimates that over 300,000 individuals in the UK are a sexual risk to children, and may take the opportunity to capitalize the number of children online to drastically increase the amount of child abuse online by sharing and uploading more.[3] Additionally, child safety experts are saying distributors of this content are able to use coded language to openly share links on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and other major sites without being flagged by detection tools.[4] These frightening facts all directly feed into the narrative that the Covid-19 pandemic is helping paedophiles to get closer to children online, and take advantage of the increased online activity to spread this content.
“This is a terrifying escalation of the threat to our children.” — Susie Hargreaves, IWF[5]
Facebook and Twitter have openly admitted that they are struggling to effectively incorporate AI technology to match the need for moderation during the lockdown,[6] but possibly more frightening is that, according to the IWF, 90% fewer suspicious web addresses have been deleted through the coronavirus outbreak.[7] This shocking statistic is compounded and made even worse when considering Europe is ‘hub’ for child abuse content, with 89% of global URL’s hosting this content being housed on servers in Europe.[8]
While the UK may not host the majority of child abuse content, this does not diminish the fact that a large number of individuals who may pose a risk to children are in the UK, and can take advantage of the moderation slowdown and increased amount of child abuse imagery on the internet to view and share this horrific content.
The thought that people will take advantage of a global pandemic to more easily abuse children online, and share this content while moderation can’t cope is disturbing to say the least. Although somewhat understandable that implementing new moderation procedures in such short notice may not lead to fully coping with the demands and heightened use, the “perfect storm” for people to abuse children during this pandemic highlights how moderation needs to shift to more effectively stop this content from ever making it online, which is what DragonflAI is aiming to do, in conjunction with other safety organizations in OSTIA.
Sources
[1] https://www.itv.com/news/2020-04-02/lockdown-brewing-perfect-storm-for-offenders-to-abuse-children-online-nspcc/
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/02/coronavirus-lockdown-raises-risk-of-online-child-abuse-charity-says
[3] https://metro.co.uk/2020/04/03/300000-paedophiles-will-exploit-coronavirus-lockdown-12502094/
[4] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/child-sexual-abuse-images-online-exploitation-surge-during-pandemic-n1190506
[5] https://metro.co.uk/2020/04/03/300000-paedophiles-will-exploit-coronavirus-lockdown-12502094/
[6] https://www.itv.com/news/2020-04-02/lockdown-brewing-perfect-storm-for-offenders-to-abuse-children-online-nspcc/
