Fr. Shay Cullen » The Internet: Danger to Children

By Fr. Shay Cullen

Thousands of children are abducted, trafficked, sold to criminals and used as subjects for child sex pornography in many developing countries around the world. In Chad, the attempted trafficking of children by French traffickers using charity workers as cover were arrested, charged and convicted in a matter of weeks.Hundreds of thousands of children are sexually abused and the acts are recorded and sold over the internet. This feeds the appetites of child sex offenders putting many more children in danger of being abused. It is an insidious and evil abuse of the internet.

The travelling sex abusers prey on these vulnerable children using the internet as a sex tourist guide to the Philippine sex industry that government seems to tolerate and encourage.

The travelling sex tourists develop their evil appetites while abusing Filipino children and then go back to their own countries and abuse children all the more there. Governments of wealthy tourist sending countries ought to realise that their children are at greater risk from the Asian sex business, the more they ignore it. This is their problem too. However, business investment is apparently more important than children.

In the Philippines, the proposed anti-child pornography law ought to be declared urgent and passed swiftly. Technology makes pornography easily available. Minors and children have the ability and opportunity to access pornography and to be exposed to it. They are vulnerable and unprotected. Every time they use a computer with an unfiltered internet connection. By failing to control the Internet Server Providers (ISPs), governments are exposing children to grave abuse.

Young people are the prime targets for sexual abusers who contact and groom them over the internet and eventually try to meet, exploit and sexually abuse your child or grandchild. Every photo of a child being abused is evidence of abuse and there are millions of such photographs available on the internet. The child is violated over and over as the images are shared.

Cyber sex shops are secret dens and are connected live to paying customers through the internet. With a camera attached, they beam images of children being sexually abused. Paedophiles, thousands of miles away, can order acts of abuse of their choice. Other child sex offenders can join secret internet clubs if they submit a certain number of child pornography images to the controller. This is an incentive for them to abuse children to make such images. Police cannot infiltrate the networks and clubs because it is forbidden for them to submit such images.

Young people who access adult or child pornography on the internet can be profoundly shocked and damaged by what they see. Parents should be shocked too. Their children are being corrupted and alienated from them. Young people may imitate what they see believing it is reality. When in fact, it is contrived and artificial.

These entice young women to act out like a depraved individual in a seductive and promiscuous manner. Other advertisers sexualise children and promote dress and behaviour where the young girls are displayed as sexually provocative, docile, enslaved or submissive.

Many advertisers use women to entice men to buy their products and use sexualised minors to condition the public to accept teenage sex as acceptable. That perverse idea sells more than it seems. Models are getting younger and younger and their sexualised images sell even more products. The brandy advertisement that had the message “Did you ever taste a 15 year old?” was widely condemned and eventually removed from Philippine bill boards.

The industry group with the greatest responsibility for curbing the proliferation of child pornography over the internet are the Internet Server Providers (ISPs). Many ISPs around the world have installed filters to block these sites and a warning is sent to the people trying to access them. In Sweden, the number of people trying to get child porn over the internet dropped from 8000 to 300 a month when they were blocked by a filter and got a warning that their illegal act was being monitored. Customers should only subscribe to an ISP that has filters blocking child porn. Protecting children is their first obligation of responsible corporation not making money and our responsibility is to see every ISP has a blocking filter to protect children. END

Online version link: http://www.preda.org/archives/2008/r08021301.html

~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~
Contact Fr. Shay Cullen at the Preda Center, Upper Kalaklan, Olongapo City, Philippines.
e-mail: preda@info.com.ph
~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~
PREDA Information Office
PREDA Foundation, Inc.
~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~
www.preda.org