Garda child sex abuse unit needed - charity

A DEDICATED paedophile investigation unit should be established within the Garda, and legislation should be enacted to ban all child-abuse sites from the internet in Ireland, children’s charity Barnardos has said.

The calls were among a series of recommendations in a report published yesterday examining the internet and child safety. Titled Three Hazards: Child Protection in the Electronic Age, it focuses on three primary areas of concern – children's personal privacy, children's data protection and child sex abuse imagery.

Children’s privacy is at issue in the area of social networking on such sites as Bebo and MySpace. The information and imagery children and young people volunteer on the sites must be addressed, says the report. On data protection, the report points out anyone can join social networking sites. “A 50-year-old can pose as a teenager and a nine-year-old can equally pose as a teenager too.”

Bebo is the largest such site used by young people and children in the State. “In the course of this study, research demonstrated that it is extremely easy to find children on Bebo – where they live, their age, their likes and dislikes, the school they attend, etc,” says the report. It says consideration should be given to development of a “commercially viable age verification and identity management programme for children”.

It calls for amendments to the Data Protection Act to make it a criminal offence for anyone to misrepresent themselves as a child when contacting children via electronic media.

The report calls for legislation to enable gardaí to block internet content involving sexual abuse of children. “The system would operate by internet service providers being advised of the existence of web-sites carrying such material and being ordered to take them down. This would not stop child abuse but it would disrupt the market from an Irish point of view,” said Barnardos CEO Fergus Finlay.