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The Protection of Children Act 1978 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that criminalized indecent photographs of children. The Act applies in England and Wales. Similar provision for Scotland is contained in the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982 and for Northern Ireland in the Protection of Children Order 1978.
Operation Cathedral was a police operation that broke up a major international child pornography ring called The Wonderland Club operating over the Internet. It was led by the British National Crime Squad in cooperation with 1,500 officers from 13 other police forces around the world, who simultaneously arrested 104 suspects in 13 countries on 2 September 1998. The case received widespread international attention due to the highly organised nature of the ring, leading to public concerns of online child sexual abuse and legislative changes in the UK.
Thomas Victor O'Carroll is a British writer and pro-paedophile advocate. O'Carroll is a former chairman of the now disbanded Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) and was at one time a prominent member of the International Paedophile and Child Emancipation.
Ian David Karslake Watkins is a Welsh convicted child sex offender, former singer-songwriter and musician. He was the lead vocalist, and lyricist of the rock band Lostprophets. In 2013, he was sentenced to 29 years imprisonment for multiple sexual offences, including the sexual assault of young children and babies, a sentence later augmented by ten months for having a mobile phone in prison. His bandmates disbanded Lostprophets shortly after his imprisonment and formed the band No Devotion, with American singer Geoff Rickly.
Pedophilia is a psychiatric disorder in which an adult or older adolescent experiences a primary or exclusive sexual attraction to prepubescent children. Although girls typically begin the process of puberty at age 10 or 11, and boys at age 11 or 12, psychiatric diagnostic criteria for pedophilia extend the cut-off point for prepubescence to age 13.
Child erotica is non-pornographic material relating to children that is used by any individuals for sexual purposes. It is a broader term than child pornography, incorporating material that may cause sexual arousal such as nonsexual images, books or magazines on children or pedophilia, toys, diaries, or clothes. Law enforcement investigators have found that child erotica is often collected by pedophiles and child sexual abuse offenders. It may be collected as a form of compulsive behavior and as a substitute for illegal underage pornography and is often a form of evidence for criminal behavior.
The Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) was a British pro-paedophile activist group, founded in October 1974 and officially disbanded in 1984. The group campaigned for the abolition of the age of consent. It was described by the BBC in 2007 as "an international organisation of people who trade obscene material".
Internet censorship in the United Kingdom is conducted under a variety of laws, judicial processes, administrative regulations and voluntary arrangements. It is achieved by blocking access to sites as well as the use of laws that criminalise publication or possession of certain types of material. These include English defamation law, the Copyright law of the United Kingdom, regulations against incitement to terrorism and child pornography.
Christopher Paul Neil, also known as Mr. Swirl, Swirl Face, or Vico, is a Canadian child molester. He was the subject of a highly publicized Interpol investigation of the sexual abuse of at least 12 young boys in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand, primarily owing to the Internet release of pornographic images depicting the abuse. He was arrested by Thai police in October 2007.
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) is a registered charity based in Cambridge, England. It states that its remit is "to minimise the availability of online sexual abuse content, specifically child sexual abuse images and videos hosted anywhere in the world and non-photographic child sexual abuse images hosted in the UK." Content inciting racial hatred was removed from the IWF's remit after a police website was set up for the purpose in April 2011. The IWF used to also take reports of criminally obscene adult content hosted in the UK. This was removed from the IWF's remit in 2017. As part of its function, the IWF says that it will "supply partners with an accurate and current URL list to enable blocking of child sexual abuse content". It has "an excellent and responsive national Hotline reporting service" for receiving reports from the public. In addition to receiving referrals from the public, its agents also proactively search the open web and deep web to identify child sexual abuse images and videos. It can then ask service providers to take down the websites containing the images or to block them if they fall outside UK jurisdiction.
On 5 December 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a British watchdog group, blacklisted content on the English Wikipedia related to Scorpions' 1976 studio album Virgin Killer, due to the presence of its controversial cover artwork, depicting a young girl posing nude, with a faux shattered-glass effect obscuring her genitalia. The image was deemed to be "potentially illegal content" under English law which forbids the possession or creation of indecent photographs of children. The IWF's blacklist are used in web filtering systems such as Cleanfeed.
Simulated child pornography is child pornography depicting what appear to be minors but which is produced without their direct involvement.
Child pornography laws in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are covered by the Protection of Children Act 1978, which made it illegal to take, make, distribute, show, or possess for the intent of showing or distributing an indecent photograph of someone under the age of 18. The maximum penalty is 10 years in prison. In the context of digital media, saving an indecent image to a computer's hard drive is considered to be "making" the image, as it causes a copy to exist which did not exist before. Indecency is to be interpreted by a jury, who should apply the recognised standards of propriety.
There are a number of sexual offences under the law of England and Wales, the law of Scotland, and the law of Northern Ireland.
Child pornography is unlawful pornography in most jurisdictions that exploits minors for sexual stimulation. It may be produced with the direct involvement or sexual assault of a child or it may be simulated child pornography. Abuse of the child occurs during the sexual acts or lascivious exhibitions of genitals or pubic areas which are recorded in the production of child pornography. Child pornography may use a variety of mediums, including writings, magazines, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, video, virtual reality and video games. Child pornography may be created for profit or other reasons.
The 2009 Plymouth child abuse case was a child abuse and paedophile ring involving at least five adults from different parts of England. The case centred on photographs taken of up to 64 children by Vanessa George, a nursery worker in Plymouth. It highlighted the issue of child molestation by women, as all but one of the members of the ring were female.
Maxwell "Max" Taylor is a Criminal and Legal psychologist. His early work specialised in the study of terrorism but he also became involved in the study of sex offenders, and in the development of capacity building activities for disadvantaged children in conflict zones, returning later to the study of terrorism.
Child sexual abuse in the United Kingdom has been reported in the country throughout its history. In about 90% of cases the abuser is a person known to the child. However, cases during the second half of the twentieth century, involving religious institutions, schools, popular entertainers, politicians, military personnel, and other officials, have been revealed and widely publicised since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Child sexual abuse rings in numerous towns and cities across the UK have also drawn considerable attention.
Paul Pelham Righton, known as Peter Righton, was a child protection expert and social care worker, and a convicted child molester. In 2013, the Metropolitan Police launched Operation Cayacos to investigate claims that Righton was part of an establishment paedophile network.
Ethel Quayle is British clinical psychologist. She is Personal Chair of Forensic Clinical Psychology at the University of Edinburgh. She researches sexual crimes against children, particularly sexual offenses involving the internet.
References
- ↑ "Family Law Reform Act 1969". /www.legislation.gov.uk. Retrieved July 6, 2023.
- ↑ "COPINE Project Homepage". November 29, 2007. Archived from the original on 2007-11-29. Retrieved June 13, 2023.
- ↑ Taylor, Max; Holland, G; Quayle, E. (2001). "Typology of Paedophile Picture Collections" (PDF). The Police Journal. 74 (2): 97–107. doi:10.1177/0032258X0107400202. S2CID 148756344. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-08-17. Retrieved 2012-09-10.
- ↑ Quayle, Ethel (September 2008). "The COPINE Project". Irish Probation Journal. Probation Board for Northern Ireland. 5. ISSN 1649-6396.
- ↑ Taylor, M.; Quayle, E.; Holland, G. (2001). "Child Pornography, the Internet and Offending". The Canadian Journal of Policy Research. ISUMA. 2: 94–100.
- ↑ Archived 2015-12-15 at the Wayback Machine case summary
- 1 2 Vella, Paul, "Understanding Computer Evidence" (PDF), Evidence Matters, archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-09-02, retrieved 2011-02-21
- ↑ "Sentencing Council - Sexual Offences Definitive Guideline" (PDF). SentencingCouncil.org.uk. Sentencing Council. April 1, 2014. Retrieved November 23, 2022.
- ↑ "Assessment Levels". IWF. Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). Retrieved 2014-08-18.