A NORWEGIAN children's organisation has offered to act as an "international cybercop" watching for child pornography on the Internet. Redd Barna, the Norwegian branch of Save the Children, wants the UN to then take the baton and establish a permanent world monitoring service.
The Norwegian Commissioner for Children, Mr Trond Waage, said Redd Barna had started to perform the role because of the startling growth in the amount and change in the nature of pornography being distributed.
Redd Barna has said that when it detects child pornography it will try to trace its source and inform police in the relevant country.
"We are prepared to establish this, we have the resources to do it for some time, but we want it put on the UN agenda for international action," Mr Waage said. He was reporting on a session on pornography at the Congress Against the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in Stockholm.
Perverted Internet users can now make online requests for sexual acts to be performed on children as they watch, Mr Waage said. Techniques being developed permit paedophile users to ask for their fantasies to be carried out as they watch from remote locations, a computer survey carried out for Redd Barna over the past few months found.
The programming adviser to Redd Barna, Mr Markus Aksland said the lack of police was the one big difference between the real world and life on the Internet.
The US has also just had its first instance of a real time act of child sexual exploitation being broadcast live on the Internet said Mr Toby Tyler, who is based at the San Bernardino county sheriff's department in California. He says there are enormous difficulties in prosecuting Internet purveyors of child porn because they can hide via anonymous mail boxes or remailers, such as the man in Finland, Mr Johan Helsingius, whose company redirects vast amounts of material, including, it has been alleged, child pornography.
But a court decision in Finland last week, believed to be the first of its kind, has shown that it is legally feasible to pierce the cloak of anonymity used by many Internet paedophiles.
The Helsinki District Court ruled that Mr Helsingius's Euronet company had to reveal the identity of the person who had disseminated more than 300 pages of Church of Scientology text, without permission from the Scientologists' publishers. Although this material had nothing to do with pornography, the principle, if established, can be used to force revelation of the identities of those sending material via Mr Helsingius's Penetic subsidiary to make e mail anonymous.
Senator Mary Henry, a member of the official Irish delegation to the Stockholm congress, said she was delighted by the Helsinki court's decision. Dr Henry visited Helsinki on her way to Stockholm to learn more about remailing activities. Most of the pornography channelled through Helsinki to confuse the trail appears to emanate from the US, she said.
Child pornography on the Internet includes transmission of images which can be stored for repeated use by subscribers.