Child pornography is now reaching epidemic proportions in Australia, as paedophiles increasingly record themselves molesting children and swap the images with other abusers, federal police have warned.
With the rise of file-swapping, the images and videos are used as ''currency'' by abusers to buy their way into transnational groups, which trade the files. In some cases, police have found terrabytes of material, too much to store on a personal computer.
The head of the Australian Federal Police's serious organised crime unit, Assistant Commissioner Kevin Zuccato, described child pornography as an epidemic.
He told Fairfax that where federal police would once have been overwhelmed by finding hundreds of images on a suspect's computer, they were now finding hundreds of thousands and even millions.
He underlined the importance of working with international partners to tackle child pornography, citing the AFP's overseas network of officers as a central plank of this co-operative effort.
''We've had an instance where my undercover officers have been talking to the offender overseas, who thinks he's talking to a 15-year-old girl, and our partners in Malaysia have actually burst through the door and arrested him as he's talking to the undercover officer,'' Mr Zuccato said.
The head of the AFP cyber crime unit, Assistant Commissioner Neil Gaughan, told Fairfax that although there might not have been an increase in the number of adults sexually assaulting children, ''we are seeing those sexual assaults being recorded, and those sexual assaults being uploaded on to the internet''. ''There's no empirical evidence of an increase in child abuse, but we're seeing an increase in the number of violent images that clearly have not been commercially made,'' he said.
There was a 30per cent jump in the number of Australians arrested for child pornography offences in 2010-11, from 136 to 180.
There has also been a huge increase in the number of referrals to the AFP from sources in Australia and overseas, mainly the US-based National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. The centre is a non-profit organisation that records the details of missing and exploited children and passes information to law enforcement agencies.
Although the number of referrals from law-enforcement bodies such as Interpol is smaller, they can cover far more alleged offenders than those from the NCMEC.
Mr Gaughan said: ''I think there are two schools of thought here, one that there's been a proliferation of the image-making and the image dissemination. There's also a school of thought that the reason why we're getting so many more referrals is that law enforcement and industry are working better together and we're discovering a lot more.
''My view is that we're somewhere in the middle of that. It's really important to note that our detection ability is significantly enhanced from what it was three or four years ago. The reason is that we've got a lot better at working with industry.''
Both the senior federal police officers admit that because of the nature of cyber crime, law enforcement bodies are usually behind the eight ball on new technology, particularly as the traders and creators of child pornography are usually highly computer literate.
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