Child sex offenders are some of Australia's earliest adopters of technology, according to the nation's top child protection cop.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
And the Australian Federal Police child protection chief has warned against the ''selfies'' craze, saying many revealing selfies posted innocently on social media by minors find their way into the hands of paedophiles.
Detective Superintendent Todd Hunter, head of the Australian Federal Police child protection unit, says online crime is the growth area while the hunt for Australians who travel overseas to abuse children is showing static growth.
Superintendent Hunter said his detectives had made 92 arrests in the 2012-13 financial year and laid 204 charges, a figure that was ''up slightly'' on the previous 12 months.
''The majority of those are from Australia and the majority of those are online offenders,'' he said.
Police had seen patterns of offending change from commercial sites offering images of child abuse to peer-to-peer distribution networks.
''In the child sex offender realm, we see that these offenders are some of the first to take up new technologies and adapt them to their behaviours,'' Superintendent Hunter said.
''We went from pay-per-view websites where people used their credit cards and downloaded imagery right through a spectrum of exploitation of the internet to where we are today where, there's very little of that commercialisation. Now the image itself is the commodity, that's the exchangeable item.
''So for you to get a new image in your collection, you must provide a new image to whoever is providing it.
''So there's a whole platform being developed in the darknet, if you like, or in the underground … for the enabling of the exchange of that imagery.
''Earlier this year, we conducted Operation Conqueror here in Australia and we executed more than 40 warrants from that investigation, with 26 arrests, and that was all around that peer-to-peer environment.''
The officer said this week's Child Protection Week events should act as a warning to parents and children that certain patterns of behaviour made them more vulnerable when using social media. ''We've seen a spate of extortion-type cases where young people have been encouraged to take imagery of themselves,'' Superintendent Hunter said.
''There's been a lot of commentary around selfies and up to 88 per cent of images self-generated by children that are compromising end up on other websites and distributed around the world,'' he said.
''There's a clear message there for our youth that they need to be aware of their behaviour, making sure they're not taking selfies, distributing them in what they think is a friendly way.
''But the end result is that these images can end up all over the world or on a whole lot of websites that contain a host of child exploitation material.''