Children sex slaves saved in police raid
The Metro reports that English and Scottish police have rescued five children from abuse, after their images were discovered on the internet. Police described the case as “harrowing and disturbing.”
The children were aged between 7 and 13 and were found by Scotland’s National Sexual Crimes Unit.
The Child Exploitation Online Protection Centre (CEOPC) is the police database, “Childbase” that holds images of children used for pornographic purposes. The database can map a face, make measurements and give the closest match to an image on its database. The computer database cannot say categorically that there is match.
In practice, the computer comes up with a match on very limited occasions. In cases that date back to the 1980’s and before that time, the database is unlikely to come up with a match. Apparently in the 1980’s child pornography was quite legal in certain parts of Scandinavia and Asia and there is a great deal of material from these parts of the world. The police report that generally if they get a match, it is a child whom they know is being abused already. Child pornography flourishes over the internet, but it appears that those who use pornography rarely do it to make a profit. There is a great deal of “swapping” of images between paedophiles although given the large number of successful prosecution arising out of the discovery on images of child abuse, it will be interesting to see whether child abusers switch to some other means of swapping images.
See The Metro 2 September 2009 Five child sex slaves saved in police raid
