"The amount of content in circulation today is massive and growing. This is a truly global problem…Abusers are cheered on in chat rooms dedicated to the abuse of children, where they gain rank and notoriety with more abuse and more victims."
Social entrepreneur Julie Cordua, who has dedicated herself to the elimination of sexual abuse, recently opened up about the menace, during a Ted Talk.
Talking about access to internet is also leading to its misuse in criminal activities, Cordua said, “The amount of content in circulation today is massive and growing. This is a truly global problem…Abusers are cheered on in chat rooms dedicated to the abuse of children, where they gain rank and notoriety with more abuse and more victims. In this market, the currency has become the content itself.”
She went on to explain the process of managing child sexual abuse material online. “So our first, most basic premise is that all of this data must be connected. There are two ways where this data, combined with software on a global scale, can have transformative impact in this space. The first is with law enforcement: helping them identify new victims faster, stopping abuse and stopping those producing this content. The second is with companies: using it as clues to identify the hundreds of millions of files in circulation today, pulling it down and then stopping the upload of new material before it ever goes viral,” she said.
To put an end to child sexual abuse material, she said, “We have to activate thousands of officers, hundreds of companies around the world if technology will allow us to outrun the perpetrators and dismantle the communities that are normalising child sexual abuse around the world today.”
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Society should also actively play a part in tackling the issue. “Now it’s going to take the will, the will of our society to look at something that is really hard to look at, to take something out of the darkness so these kids have a voice; the will of companies to take action and make sure that their platforms are not complicit in the abuse of a child; the will of governments to invest with their law enforcement for the tools they need to investigate a digital first crime, even when the victims cannot speak for themselves.”
Watch the talk here:
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