The internet has sparked enormous growth in child exploitation including through prostitution, pornography, sex tourism and trafficking, and by pedophiles using it to stalk children, said Gopalan Balagopal, a senior advisor with the UN's children fund UNICEF.
"The problem is growing in several parts of the world such as Asia where the number of people using the internet is rapidly increasing," Balagopal said at the start of a three-day international meeting in Bangkok on child trafficking, prostitution and pornography.
"Over the last few years we have already seen child pornography on the internet and the abuse which results become enormous problems in countries such as the United States and Russia," he said.
Some 55 percent of the internet child porn industry is based in the United States, while Russia runs second at 23 percent, according to the UK children's charity National Children's Homes (NCH), which says such sites are directly to blame for the rise in child sex offenses.
But NCH associate director John Carr said on Monday that people from all over the world were accessing these sites.
"Before it was very hard to get hold of. You had to know a friend or be in a pedophile ring, but now anyone with mild curiosity or no awareness at all can find child pornography on the net," Carr said.
He said about 550 child pornography offenders were either cautioned or charged in Britain in 2001, compared with only 35 in 1988.
He said surveys of convicted pedophiles revealed that up to 70 percent were inspired to commit their crimes after viewing child porn on the internet.
Carr said the demand for children to work in the sex industry, caused by the dramatic rise in the number of pedophiles, was being increasingly handled by organized crime.
"Crime gangs, especially in Russia and Eastern Europe, are systematically recruiting children to be filmed having sex, whereas six to seven years ago there was no commercial market at all," he said.
"One website in Eastern Europe which was shut down by police was generating $2 million a month from child pornography," he said.
Carr said Japan and South Korea also had significant child porn industries and rapid technological growth across much of the developing world would likely see a major increase in the exploitation of children if steps were not taken to prosecute offending sites and users.
© 2004 Agence France-Presse
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