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LONDON - Images of child abuse posted and sold online are rapidly becoming more graphic and more sadistic and involving younger children, a British-based Internet monitoring group says.
The Internet Watch Foundation said that in the past year there had been a four-fold rise in the number of images involving severe abuse such as penetrative and sadistic sex.
The group said nearly 60 per cent of all commercial child abuse websites now sold images of child rape. "Sadly we have to report new trends regarding the young age of the child victims in the images we assess and the dreadful severity of abuse they are suffering," said chief executive Peter Robbins.
The foundation, the official British organisation for the public and IT professionals to log suspicious content, said the number of reports of child pornography it had received in 2006 had risen by 34 per cent compared to the previous year. It found that 80 per cent of those in the abusive images were female and 91 per cent appeared to be under 12.
The vast majority of websites were linked to the US or Russia, where they are often run by organised criminal gangs.
- REUTERS
