Child Pornography

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Combating Child Pornography - Elisavet (age 21, Greece)

Child pornography is pornography involving children. Minors under the age of 18 are forced to have sex with adults, or take part in videos or pictures where they wear very little or no clothing, or take part in sex acts. Several of these pictures or videos are shared online. In the European Union, “Sexual​ abuse and sexual exploitation of children, including child pornography, constitute serious violations of fundamental rights, in particular of the rights of children to the protection and care necessary for their well-being, as provided for by the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union​” (Directive 2011/93/EU).

It is widely known that child pornography activities, especially on the internet, are constantly increasing; so it is crucial to raise awareness on what to do to stop child pornography. Raising awareness can include dedicated seminars especially targeting parents and children, explaining the issue of child pornography, the harm caused to child victims, and how important it is to immediately report to the national hotlines, or law enforcement authorities.

Apart from reporting, we as users, need to play our part: it is of vital importance for parents to teach their children from very young age, and for minors to understand, how important it is never to talk to strangers online or befriend online people they don’t know in the real world, not to upload any personal information online, and especially not to publish any pictures of oneself online; child offenders approach children online and make friends with them with canning tricks, misusing any information they can find for a child for their sake!

The internet industry should play its role too: companies operating social media networks should be extremely careful concerning sharing of nude content involving children. Special filters should be installed to detect such nude content, immediately delete it, and report the user who did the uploading. In this way, the distribution of those kinds of images will be significantly reduced.