Sydney: If Australia’s new Children’s eSafety Commissioner is to be believed, half of the material found on certain paedophilia websites has been sourced or stolen from parents innocently posting images of their families online.
Alastair MacGibbon said that a team of investigators looking into complaints of child abuse material had discovered tens of millions of photos of children doing everyday activities such as swimming, sports or homework.
He told the Sydney Morning Herald that while the images themselves were not exploitative, comments attached to them by strangers sexualised them and said that parents who had no idea how easily they could be downloaded by strangers were thoughtlessly cataloguing every aspect of their children’s lives, “with no security against these obsessive efforts to obtain content”.
You have to got to understand that that photo is worth something to someone else and it may not be for a purpose you like, Cyber-safety expert Susan McLean said.
Mr MacGibbon pointed out that within 10 days of being uploaded, some of the content from popular social media sharing sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Kik had been appropriated and viewed 1.7 million times.
Images were often catalogued in ‘themes’ such as “kids at beach”, “nice boys play in river” or “gymnasts”, alongside comments that explicitly sexualised the material.
“Many users clearly identify that they have obtained the content through trawling social media accounts,” he said.
“The images are almost always accompanied by highly explicit and very disturbing user comments,” Mr MacGibbon pointed out.
