Alun led a UK delegation to the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis in 2005. He has a keen interest in internet governance and crime reduction. In 2007 he was a delegate to the US Congressional Internet Caucus, and is Currently Chair of EURIM’s e-Crime Working Group and Chair of the UK Internet Governance Forum. He also participated in the 2008 Internet Governance Forum in Hyderabad, India.
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Nobody expected the internet to achieve the kind of universal reach which it now enjoys. The internet was developed for use by the world of academia and the scientific research community. Few imagined it would end up in the bedrooms of the overwhelming majority of children aged 5-18 in the UK.
New technologies create new ways of working for all of us…. including criminals. Unfortunately, there are few spheres of criminality which have adapted to the internet as rapidly as Online Child Abuse.
Please mark my careful choice of words, Online Child Abuse – not child pornography. Behind each visible image and website there are often multiple incidences of real children being abused.
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) issued a report last week claiming that Child Abuse on the internet can be eradicated world wide if other countries follow the UK’s lead.
I agree. The proportion of child abuse websites hosted in the UK has been cut from 16.0% to less than 0.1%. That is the result of an intelligent and adaptable partnership which includes children’s charities, Government and Industry.
The fact is that partnership works - whereas laws rarely prevent what they forbid.
There is already a law against child abuse. That has not stopped child abuse. Unfortunately, legislation is often a blunt and retrospective tool – and online criminal activity is a relentlessly moving target whose velocity is too great for it to be hit with the proverbial legislative slingshot.
If we are to tackle online child abuse then we need to export the working partnership models already in operation in the UK. The IWF has identified the scale of the problem– just under 3000 websites out of 5 billion websites worldwide. It is a manageable target.
Furthermore, we need to expand this UK co-operative approach to cover all areas of online crime – not just child abuse. I believe that without the formation of a cohesive partnership - which spans across government, the police and industry - we will always be confined to playing an interminable game of ‘catch-up’ when it comes to online crime. In the words of Edmund Burke: “when bad men combine the good must associate…”.