SOLUTION - New legislation coming to crack down on paedophiles

Attack on child porn - New legislation coming to crack down on paedophiles
Published: Saturday April 11, 2009
Arthur Hall, Senior Staff Reporter
The Government is getting tough on paedophiles with new laws aimed at cracking down on child pornography.
The Cabinet has approved a bill titled 'The Child Pornography (Prevention) Act 2009', which is to be debated by Parliament shortly.
"There is no law in Jamaica that deals specifically with child pornography and the trend globally is to treat child pornography as a separate crime," Attorney General and Minister of Justice Dorothy Lightbourne announced recently.
"The bill will criminalise the production, possession, importation, export and distribution of child pornography," Lightbourne added.
She noted that though 16 was the age of sexual consent, for the bill, a child would be described as anyone under 18 years old.
According to Lightbourne, when the bill is passed later this year Jamaica will have its first definition of child pornography.
"It encompasses any visual representation of a child or any person depicted as a child engaged in real or stimulated sexual activity, any representation in picture or words for sexual purpose showing the sexual organs of a child," Lightbourne said.
She pointed out that any representation of a child being subject to torture, beatings or physical abuse would also be punishable under the bill, even if it is not in a sexual context.
"Also covered by the bill is just accessing child pornography. So going on the Internet and coming up on it accidentally you will be protected if you take steps to do something about it. So persons are caught if you are surfing the Internet and you come up on it and you don't report it," warned Lightbourne.
Major problem
Child pornography has been a major problem worldwide, with its reproduction and dissemination changing radically since the introduction of the Internet and cellular phones with recording devices.
In Jamaica, several cases have surfaced recently of video recordings on cellular phones. Perhaps the most infamous was the seeming attack on a teenage girl by a group of boys in a vehicle being driven by a then church deacon.
That case is still before the courts.
It was estimated that in 2003, 20 per cent of all pornography traded over the Internet was child pornography, and that since 1997 the number of child pornography images available on the Internet had increased by 1,500 per cent.
In 2007, the British-based Internet Watch Foundation reported that child pornography on the Internet was becoming more brutal and graphic, and the number of images depicting violent abuse had risen fourfold since 2003.
About 80 per cent of the children in the abusive images on the Internet are female, and 91 per cent appear to be children under the age of 12.
It has been estimated that there are between 50,000 and 100,000 paedophiles involved in organised pornography rings around the world, and that one-third of these operate from the United States.
arthur.hall@gleanerjm.com http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20090411/lead/lead5.html