CEOP Lead New Coalition to Track Child Sex Abuse

Our friends at CEOP (the Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre in the UK) are leading a new European Financial Coalition to tackle the commercial side of child abuse images.

Financial, internet and technology corporations have come together with specialist child protection non-governmental organisations, international policing agencies, and the European Commission to track and disrupt child sex offenders through the money they make.

"It is a reality that the rapid growth of the Internet has opened up a serious criminal market for images of child sex abuse," said EU Justice Commissioner Jacques Barrot."The European Financial Coalition will help identify and protect victims, and, above all, confiscate the profits from these criminal activities," he added.

The European Commission will provide up to 427,000 euros in funding for the new coalition which was officially launched on Tuesday. However the EU's executive arm is still seeking more partners, including European nations, to join the coalition.

"By applying the individual lessons learnt and by coming together with our combined skills, focusing on collective objectives, we plan to eradicate the remnants of that industry once and for all," CEOP chief executive Jim Gamble said on the organisation's website.

The purpose of the coalition is to bring together the stakeholders engaged in fighting the commercial distribution of child abuse images to support pan-European police operations targeting the electronic payment systems use to purchase child abuse images online. It is hoped that the coalition will help to identify and locate victims as well as perpetrators.

Read more about the new coalition in CEOP's media centre. Yahoo! Tech are also covering the story, but they lose points by calling the issue "child pornography" in the url - a term which does not appropriately express the gravity of the crimes involved.