Let’s block child porn online

It is indeed staggering that despite the consensus against child abuse, so little is done by all those involved in the internet industry to block this abuse, sometimes called child porn, online.

We all know that some governments can block information through the internet when they want to. I am not for one moment condoning this but why can’t the free and less free world block child porn altogether unilaterally, once and for ever? I don’t think we should listen to any arguments about protecting freedoms in this area, or that one can’t control the internet. One can find ways to achieve this, if there is the will and once this is understood as the worst crime, which demeans us all as human beings.

The very witnessing of such abuse must be the most contaminating and degrading human experience of all

This is an area that transcends all cultural and other boundaries. Everyone worth considering agrees child abuse packaged into child porn is reprehensible in the extreme. Yet it continues to be easily accessible online all over the world, even in the most evolved democracies where the rights of children are meant to be elevated to a higher level.

Child abuse online has recently catapulted into the public eye because so many child killers, abusers and more have been found to have been watching child porn before committing their horrific crimes. The killings of April Jones and other vulnerable children like her in the UK are the latest in a series of high profile events that have galvanised public opinion about this huge threat.

Estimates suggest that one in six who watch child abuse online go on to commit other crimes but these kinds of statistics really don’t hold water. Nobody fully knows how much child abuse goes unreported, and it is likely that those men and women who watch this form of abuse will be abusers in some form or other. Watching this is horrifically abusive in any case.

Indeed, watching this criminal activity must obviously distort the mind. The many police officers who try to curb this online activity say it is one of the hardest tasks as the volume of so-called child porn is seemingly endless. I also think that those who have to scan the internet for it must have the most damaging jobs in the world. The very witnessing of such abuse must be the most contaminating and degrading human experience of all. I salute them for doing this job but they shouldn’t have to do it. All child abuse masquerading as child porn should be blocked.

The world argues about everything as people always do. Every world threat has an argument and a counter argument or more. Take climate change. We continually question how serious it is. Is it really happening? Or we debate the best ways to broker peace in any given conflict. The debates are endless. Yet despite the intractability of all the challenges faced by the human race, and although we often have limited success, we do, as a people of this world, go on trying to broker peace, go on talking about and trying to stop the effects of climate change. We don’t give up just because problems are difficult and indeed perennial.

Yet in the area of child abuse we are as yet not one world. And we should be one world willing to block all child abuse or so-called porn online.

I don’t want to hear another argument about people’s freedom and how difficult it is to achieve. If we can create a space station society, if we can so accurately detect and measure asteroids skimming our orbit and all the other amazing achievements of the human race, we can block most of this online if we are determined to.

The trouble is the pressure to do this is not coming from anywhere bar the powerless general public. There is no industry which sees an immediate benefit in it being stopped. The victims are silent and most people haven’t even seen it. It’s only when you hear that it prompts sick crimes that you start to understand there is this awful subterranean world that the otherwise brilliant internet is cultivating and fertilising every moment of the day.

Does it really have to take a horrific murder for governments all over the world to decide that all child abuse/porn will be blocked in future? The Mail online has recently been campaigning for Google to stop and block child porn but Google is by no means the only involved party. Governments all over the world can put pressure on internet providers to block most of it if there is the will, the motivation and the determination to do it. It is unfortunate though that this subject is so ugly that it’s almost a taboo subject to discuss.

Of course the children who get used for abuse online don’t campaign against it. They are either dead or so damaged it doesn’t even bear thinking about. And most of us who don’t access child abuse online can’t even begin to imagine what it involves so we just bury our heads in the sand hoping it will never taint anyone we know.

There can be no peace in this world while we, or the internet, apparently legitimise this sickening, barbaric and reprehensible activity. As a leading criminologist once said, the best way to reduce crime is to first of all reduce the opportunity for it to happen.

Right now it is too easy to access child abuse online, and so we are inadvertently cultivating more of this crime. It is a challenge to our planet and only this planet can stop it. The world is waiting for leaders who will take the lead and force internet providers to invest in finding ways to block it.

Might there be a small price to pay? Yes, maybe, but it is a price worth paying.

Can we find better ways to block child abuse/porn online? Yes if the world wants to.

Yes it can.