Forty Irish children have been identified as victims of online child sexual exploitation this year, gardai revealed yesterday.
Supt Ian Lackey of the Garda National Protective Service Bureau said they were mostly female and aged under the 16 but some were “very young”. The victims were identified by a portal managed by Interpol called the International Child Sexual Exploitation image and video database.
It holds more than 4.3 million images and videos and has helped identify 30,000 victims and more than 13,000 offenders with 68 countries connected to the database. On average seven victims are uncovered every day.
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The images are understood to be predominantly “self-generated” and shared from “peer to peer”. Gardai have contacted all the victim’s families and TULSA will get involved when required but Supt Lackey stressed a lot of the suspects were also underage.
He said: “We have recovered a number of devices that we will now take and have them further analysed which will lead to further searches and hopefully will lead to arrests for possession and distribution.”
He added the Online Child Exploitation Unit has referred more than 700 files to local units for investigation from the National Centre of Missing and Exploited Children – which is different than the Interpol portal.
Supt Lackey said: “To date in 2022, the Online Child Exploitation Unit has referred in excess of 700 investigation files to local divisional protective service units.
“They’re known as NCMEC referrals, they come from the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in the US, they refer them to us, the people in my unit then have to view those images and determine whether they meet the threshold of child sexual abuse material.
“They then have to do further investigations… obviously because there are children involved our focus is on the child and the welfare of the child that would include child victims but also child suspects as well and that’s our primary concern.”
Supt Lackey urged the public to remember that behind each image and video is a young person suffering abuse.
He said: “Persons accessing, viewing, and distributing Child Sexual Abuse Material need to recognise that this is not a victimless crime, in fact, the young victims of this criminal activity are amongst the most vulnerable victims in our society in Ireland and internationally.
“An Garda Siochana is working and will continue to work closely with all our international partners to target, disrupt and bring to justice anyone involved in the accessing, distribution, and production of this criminal sexual abuse material.”
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