MONITORING PEDOPHILIA ON THE INTERNET

ANNUAL REPORT 2007

Milan, January 31th, 2008 - 2007, with 39.418 reports of internet websites with child-pornography content compared to 7.540 in 2006, 13.315 in 2005, 19.246 in 2004 and 17.016 in 2003, is the record breaking year for online pedophilia, its numbers practically doubling since 2003 to today.

In the past year, the Rainbow Phone has reported 3.285 websites per month, 758 websites per week, 108 sites per day, but with peaks of over 330 websites reported in a single day.

This and more emerges from the 2007 report on online pedophilia published by the Rainbow Phone. In geographical terms, the Germany, the Netherlands, the United States, the Russian Federation, the Cyprus, the Canada, the Japan, the Slovakia, the Panama and the Korea are at the ten chart positions of the countries that host the reported sites, of which over ten thousand are linked to pedo-business, confirming the unquestionable commercial root of the greater part of online pedophilia activities. The promotion of pay-per-view websites was especially aggressive in 2007, operating by repeatedly contaminating with appropriate messages the "little-monitored" electric notice boards, universities, research institutes, businesses.

The Rainbow Phone report contains also precise reporting on a persistent number of legislative shortcomings and inertias in contrasting the phenomenon, which in many countries still aid the further expansion of online pedophilia. Even from the point of view of the techniques used, 2007 presents a new figure and that is the hyperbolic growth in the use of the so called "masked files" (files with special formats, denomination and password series that are not entirely transparent about their contents) published especially in Japanese and South Korean internet areas, in particular exploiting the lesser controls implemented by providers during the weekend.

"A further worrying data and which should deserve the greatest attention is the number of pedophile website visitors" - they say at the Rainbow Phone - "They are figures with so many zeros that they are really alarming" Pedophile websites visitors and users are prevalently American, German, Russian, English, Italian, French, Canadian: a veritable army that moves daily on the internet hunting for pictures, videos, contacts".

The Rainbow Phone report concerns exclusively websites with explicit pedophile and child-pornography materials reported to the FBI, to the Interpol, national polices according to their jurisdiction and, in Italy, to the Judicial Authority and the Telecom Investigation Unit multiforce, made up by Postal police, carabinieri and customs police.

Download the Annual Report 2007.