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<strong>Child</strong> PornograPhy First report oF the Dutch NatioNal rapporteur
Internet users may (unwillingly) encounter child abuse material on the Internet and they can report
this content that they have identified to the privately-run Hotline Combating <strong>Child</strong> <strong>Pornography</strong> on
the Internet and/or the Cyber Crime Reporting Website run by the police. It is important that material
that has been reported is removed by ISPs as soon as possible. In order to ensure that this happens, the
agreements between the Hotline Combating <strong>Child</strong> <strong>Pornography</strong> on the Internet and the police must be
revised. The British counterpart hotline, the Internet Watch Foundation, may serve as an example in this
regard. It may be possible to consider expanding the remit of the Hotline Combating <strong>Child</strong> <strong>Pornography</strong>
on the Internet, for example to extend to monitoring and/or shutting down forums and networks – possibly
within the scope of the Stop it Now! project.
4.2.3.4 Detection
<strong>Child</strong> abuse material in the hands of the police forms the evidence that sexual abuse has taken place. The
focus in the criminal investigation must still be upon victim identification, however. That is also the case
in theory, but practice has shown that this approach is successful in only a few cases. The police have little
information a priori in relation to a potential perpetrator, and it is often nothing more than an internet
identity. The information that they obtain is only an IP address at which activities connected with child
pornography take place. It is not known whether (a) victim(s) is/are involved at this point. However,
the police are confronted with hundreds of proposals for investigation every year, and consequently it
is difficult to achieve the shift in focus from tackling possessors to actually tackling the producers. As a
result of this, searching for victims of sexual violence via the Internet is not very effective. Conversely,
every victim who is found means that the effort expended is justified. It is hoped that the new police
structure may perhaps offer a solution.
The new structure should certainly combine sex offence specialisms with digital and tactical expertise.
The use of additional capacity is essential in this regard. The Minister for Security and Justice has announced
that additional capacity will be made available to tackle child pornography. The way in which
this capacity is to be divided up must be taken into account. The pooling of expertise and competencies
could also improve efficacy. The multi-disciplinary team of the KLPD under the management of the
team leader from the Team High Tech Crime uses a perpetrator-oriented approach (analysis of e-mail
and chatroom traffic of perpetrators), which has added an additional dimension to the working process.
The Team Beeld en Internet [Images and Internet Team] employs a primarily victim-orientated policy (mostly
analysis of the images). Perpetrator and victim-orientated detection activities should be combined at a
single site, in which the competences in the digital domain should be merged with sex offence specialisms.
Perpetrator networks must be fully investigated, as part of which the children appearing in images
of sexual abuse must also be taken into account. Lessons learnt from the successful collaboration in the
Amsterdam sexual abuse case can be applied in this regard.
A solution will also need to be found to two important challenges to the new police structure. The
first challenge involves prioritisation. In general, we can conclude that the majority of the regional
police forces and the BRTs focus their activities on the processing of investigations without carrying
out a more detailed investigation into the abuse. The TBI prioritises its work in conjunction with the
national coordinating public prosecutor in child pornography cases, but this prioritisation has been
neither standardised nor described. The second challenge is the number of pending cases which forms
a burden for the police and the judicial authorities. The proposed new structure does not (yet) offer any
insight into the way in which those cases could be worked through, other than adopting the alternative
means of settling cases. No analysis of the nature of the pending cases is available, and consequently