Austrian police crush vast child porn ring

13 March 2009 at 17h01

Vienna - Austrian police said on Friday they have smashed a vast Internet child porn ring involving nearly 1 000 people, some of them teachers.

With the help of their European colleagues, Austrian police were able to identify 935 suspects, of whom 189 were proved to have exchanged pornographic material involving minors, they said in a statement.

Investigations against a further 97 were still underway. Among the suspects were a number of teachers. And some were already known to police. In raids of the suspects' houses, police had also found other illicit material, drugs and illegal weapons.

Investigators had been able to identify 16 of the children in the films and photographs. They were aged between nine and 12 and came from the United States and Paraguay, police said. - Sapa-AFP

So you think child sexual abuse is not a big problem? Thousands of man hours go into global investigations that lead up to arrests such as the recent bust of 22 men in Australia. But it doesn't end there - this was part of a global initiative involving much larger numbers.

From this bust over 500,000 images of child abuse and 15,000 videos of children being abused were seized. This alone tells us something of the size of paedophile collections of which behind every picture is a child being abused. 

More shocking is the increasing appetite of paedophiles to sexually abuse children as young as one year old and record these abuses lasting in some cases as long as two hours.

Australia was able to arrest 22 men due to its strong legislation making the sexual abuse of children illegal and the possession, production, sharing, distribution and sale of imagery a very serious criminal offense with a maximum sentence of 10 years.

This bust was part of a global operation which has led to the identification of over 200 offenders in 70 countries.

The Australian Federal Police have arrested over 300 people in Australia over the last 12 months. 

The AFP are part of the Virtual Global Taskforce who's mandate is to create a safe Internet, identify, locate and help at risk children, and make perpetrators accountable.