Last year, Ecpat took down over 2,000 child pornography images and videos from the web by contacting the police or the site owner.
– It could be children who have reported to the police on several occasions but that the cases have been closed and the material continues to spread, says Sophie Josephson, program manager at Ecpat.
The organization has been contacted by children as young as 10-11 years old who want help deleting videos or images. Sometimes the children’s names are included in videos.
– What we do then is that we make a report to the police and to social services.
And what happens then?
– Not so much, says Sophie Josephson.
Registrations are increasing sharply
Graphics reported child pornography offences. Graphics: Roland Larsson.
Graphics reported child pornography offences. Graphics: Roland Larsson. Photo: Petter Åkerman
The number of child pornography crimes reported to the police has increased from 915 to 2,884 between 2018 and 2022, almost a threefold increase.
But the police’s investigative capacity is not enough. In September last year, there were 1,859 open preliminary investigations with the police.
– There will always be a risk that you miss something that you should perhaps have investigated, that is absolutely the case, says Björn Sellberg, commissioner of the police’s national operational department.
He says that the Police Agency has long requested better tools for infiltrating pedophile networks, for example using abuse material as a “ticket” into forums. Alternatively, using AI-generated material for that purpose. But they have been refused on the grounds that children can get hurt.
The police have also proposed facial recognition to find perpetrators, but that technology is not approved for use.
More websites are blocked
Another way is to block access to certain pages on the net. According to statistics from the broadband provider Tele2, roughly 4 million attempts to access websites with material containing sexual abuse of children were stopped last year, far more than the year before.
Tele2 assesses that there is an increased number of searches – but also that they have become better at blocking websites.