Battle against child porn far from over

Humanity still has a battle ahead in its effort to stop online child pornography, says Ernie Allen, CEO of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in a commentary in the Christian Science Monitor. "While inroads have been made in the fight against child pornography, the problem remains severe," he writes. "The Internet has become a child pornography superhighway, turning children into a commodity for sale or trade. Analysts at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) have reviewed 9.6 million images and videos of child pornography on the Internet just since 2002. There are millions more such images in cyberspace that we have yet to find. The Internet has become a child pornography superhighway, turning children into a commodity for sale or trade." One of the horrible realities of child porn is that 75% of the photos were taken by people the victim knows - 35% by a parent, 15% by another relative, and 20% by "someone close to the child or the family." Another terrible reality is that the children in the photos circulating the Net are getting younger - Allen writes that 58% haven't reached puberty. He adds that law enforcement agencies and NCMEC have identified almost 1,200 of the children depicted in these photos; NCMEC has "provided more than 12,000 evidence reports to prosecutors and law enforcement officers to assist in prosecutions"; and - thanks to a coalition of financial institutions - the use of credit cards has been "virtually eliminated" from online child-porn transactions.