Child protection group survey finds abuse begins early, parent often involved

WINNIPEG — A survey of child pornography victims has revealed some recurring and disturbing themes: abuse begins early — often at the hands of a parent — and leads to a lifetime of anxiety over how far images spread on the Internet.

The Winnipeg-based Canadian Centre for Child Protection, which operates in partnership with police forces across Canada, recently posed questions to 128 adults who had been sexually exploited as children and whose abuse had been recorded on camera.

“For the victims of these crimes … the idea of knowing that their worst moments of their lives are on the Internet for anyone to see is absolutely debilitating,” Lianna McDonald, the centre’s executive director, said Tuesday.

More than half of the respondents said the abuse started when they were under five years of age. Six in 10 said their abuser was a parent. More than half said they were abused by multiple offenders as part of an organized group or network.

Almost three-quarters of respondents said they were worried about being recognized years later, because the images continue to spread online.

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“Every time I see someone looking at me, I wonder if they know, if they’ve seen the pictures,” one unidentified victim said in a video provided by the centre.

“Sometimes it feels like I’m being abused over and over again.”

Also on Tuesday, the centre unveiled a new tool in the fight against child pornography — a web crawler dubbed Project Arachnid. It’s not the first automatic program to scour the web, but it is touted as being faster than previous ones with scanning speeds of up to 150 web pages a second. Soon, officials hope, it will be able to reach beyond web pages and into peer-to-peer sharing programs.

What has quickly become apparent is how vast the problem is.

Officials say that in six weeks, the program has processed 230 million web pages and found 40,000 different images of child sexual abuse. Millions more pages with potentially offensive material are in the queue and are being detected faster than they can be scanned. The backlog is growing as images continue to be shared.

The new web crawler starts with websites previously reported to contain child pornography and follows all links from those pages to other sites. It seeks out matches for previously reported images by comparing appearances or by analyzing digital information that is tied to each image.

When an offending image is found, authorities may be notified and the Internet service provider hosting the site is told to take the page down.

The program is limited to previously reported images, but officials at the centre say it is a significant start in a very large battle.

“Is this the silver bullet to the problem of child abuse material on the Internet? Absolutely not,” McDonald said.

“But are we doing something about it? Yes.”

Steve Lambert, The Canadian Press