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BRAZIL: War Against Child Pornography on the Internet

Fabiana Frayssinet

RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 28 2008 (IPS) - The Brazilian government has announced the creation of a web site to centralise the reception of complaints about child pornography on the Internet, as a further step towards fighting the phenomenon which is growing globally, alongside child trafficking and sex tourism.

The so-called “direct line between citizens,” accessible from the web site www.denunciar.org.br, was created by the government in conjunction with the Federal Police and the non-governmental organisation Safernet.

The Under-Secretary for the Promotion of the Rights of Children and Adolescents, Carmen Oliveira, told IPS that although there are other means of reporting these crimes, like a free hot-line, an instrument was needed on the Internet itself, a medium regarded as one of the “new scenarios of child sexual exploitation.”

Oliveira is also the coordinator of the World Congress III Against Sexual Exploitation of Children and Adolescents, which ended Friday in Rio de Janeiro.

“In the last decade we were very busy fighting child sexual exploitation in hotels, along highways and in other zones of prostitution, and we neglected the growth of the Internet, which brought about new forms of violating human rights,” Oliveira said.

In addition, she said, fighting these crimes on the Internet is more difficult, due to the absence of regulations and because they are “typically transnational crimes.”

Brazil ranks as the fourth country in the world for paedophilia, according to the Federal Police, which have a complaints databank that has received over one million reports in the last three years. In addition, the Federal Police have catalogued 200,000 pornography sites on the Internet, Thiago Tavares, the Safernet coordinator, told IPS.

As well as the complaints site, there will be other initiatives, such as training courses for the police and the production and dissemination of a booklet with guidance for children and adolescents, he said.

During the Congress, which sought to harmonise international policies for fighting on-line pornography, it was also announced that Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had promulgated a law to increase, from six to eight years, the maximum prison sentence for sexual exploitation of children and adolescents on the Internet, crimes the president called “beastly”.

The greatest novelty, according to Tavares, is that purchase and possession of pornographic materials and advertising them for sale will also be punished, “filling the gaps that made it difficult to get convictions.”

“It is no exaggeration to say that this law is one of the most advanced in the world in terms of combating different forms of sexual abuse of children,” he said.

Tavares and Oliveira both say that for the law to be effective, the active cooperation of Internet service providers is required.

Tavares mentioned legal action taken against Google, the company whose most popular product is the Internet search engine of the same name.

Among Google’s other services is a social networking site called Orkut, which defines itself as “an online community designed to make your social life more active and stimulating.” On its web page, accessed with a username and password, it invites people to “share your videos, pictures and passions all in one place.”

In court, Google agreed to cooperate with the authorities by identifying individuals involved in sexual exploitation of children and adolescents, in response to a warrant.

Furthermore, said Tavares, as a result of the trial Orkut – so called because it was the idea of Google employee Orkut Buyukkokten – installed a filter to prevent users from downloading child pornography.

Out of 636,350 complaints received by Safernet between January and July, nearly 95 percent referred to Orkut user profiles. Just under half of the total were specifically about child pornography.

Oliveira called attention to other “new scenarios” that, in her view, are “extremely important” for child pornography issues, like media companies.

“The premature eroticisation that exists in the media and advertising is a big concern,” she said. “It’s what we call a ‘shortening’ of childhood. We are seeing nine-year-old girls with their bodies eroticised as though they were teenagers, which has the effect of creating more temptation for adults, as they see them not as girls but as women.”

Lula warned of another hindrance in the fight against sexual exploitation of children.

He blamed “religious hypocrisy for preventing this issue from being discussed in the light of day,” and drew attention to the role of the family, in which sex education “is as important as giving children food.”