Address to International Association of Women Judges
Hon Judith Collins
Minister of Justice
11 May 2013
Speech
Address to International Association of
Women Judges (IAWJ) Regional Conference Asia Pacific Region,
Auckland
Good afternoon.
Thank
you for the invitation to speak to you today. It’s great
to be here.
The International Association of Women
Judges is an association of great ability, accomplishment
and potential.
It’s a great privilege to be a
part of your conference for the Asia Pacific
Region.
Building on what today’s keynote speakers have
covered in terms of pornography and child exploitation I
will talk specifically about the sexual abuse of children
online and New Zealand’s commitment to combatting this
abhorrent crime through our membership to the Global
Alliance against Child Sexual Abuse Online.
It’s
a sad fact that the majority of sexual abuse goes by
unreported.
Last year alone, Child Youth and
Family found 1355 children under the age of 17 were sexually
abused in New Zealand.
The United Nations
Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates there are more than 4
million websites featuring victims who are children – some
even including children younger than 2 years old.
While accurate statistics for this problem are
hard to come by, one thing is certain – the digital age
has drastically increased ways offenders access, disseminate
and sell this criminal material.
The advancements
of the 21st century mean people are living longer,
healthier, more secure and productive lives. Individuals
and communities also have more opportunities than ever
before to engage, communicate and share information.
With these benefits comes responsibility –
responsibility to use modern technology appropriately.
Unfortunately these benefits are all too frequently misused
and abused.
Offending is no longer confined to a
small, local, face-to-face community. Offenders are
operating across communities, across cities, and across
borders.
The internet age has seen the gross
proliferation of child pornography published online or
streamed live for online viewers – some is, chillingly
even ‘personalised’ or ‘made-to-order’ for serial
consumers.
Best estimates by the United Nations are that
thousands of new photographs and videos are uploaded on to
the Internet every week, and hundreds of thousands of
searches for images of sexual exploitation of children are
carried out every day.
Offenders can now possess
and easily distribute collections of more than a million
images of sexually exploited children. The sending,
retrieval and storage of an almost infinite quantity of data
operate at speeds and costs unimaginable only a decade
ago.
But, thanks to the commitment and efforts of
skilled and caring professionals in the public and private
sectors, measures to combat child pornography have been put
in place – through legislative reform, by dismantling
child pornography networks, blocking internet sites, seizing
harmful material and awareness-raising
campaigns.
However despite these many and varied
initiatives, child pornography remains an ever increasing
global phenomenon.
It has become a very profitable
business with a worldwide market value estimated at up to
$20 billion dollars. Evidence shows the content of the
publications is getting worse and that the children are
getting younger.
In 2007, the UK’s Internet
Watch Foundation identified a rise in the number of websites
depicting the most extreme and brutal forms of abuse.
Observations made by the New Zealand Chief Censor, Deputy
Chief Censor and New Zealand enforcement agencies support
this trend.
The UN Special Rapporteur has reported
that images of child sexual exploitation and the sharing of
those images compound the consequences of child abuse and
affect victims’ recovery.
Images are often
replicated and further distributed across the internet,
ensuring the images endure in the cyber-sphere for the
lifetime of the victim and beyond.
Victims can feel
re-victimised by the knowledge that an image of them remains
available to be viewed and shared.
Many abusers
manipulate and force their victim to pretend that they are
enjoying the experience.
Networks for the
exchange of child pornography display photographs in which
the children have been forced to smile in order to prove
that they “are having fun” and to make being sexually
attracted to children seem legitimate and
normal.
Victims might fear that authorities will
believe they welcomed the abuse.
One of the key
challenges for law enforcement authorities is identifying
and locating victims and offenders.
In order to
coordinate efforts to identify children and manage large
quantities of evidence, authorities around the world are
preparing databases of known images of sexually exploited
children.
For example the International Child
Sexual Exploitation image database, managed by Interpol,
allows certified users in member countries to access the
database directly and in real time. This allows immediate
responses to queries related to child sexual exploitation
investigations.
Police in nearly 40 countries are
currently connected to the database and cooperate in
identifying victims and offenders.
At the beginning
of 2013, the database included data on 3,000 identified
victims from more than 40 countries, as well as data related
to numerous unidentified victims, whose cases are yet to be
investigated.
Despite the efforts made and
successes achieved, the relatively small number of victims
identified shows much remains to be done.
As there
are effectively no borders when it comes to the Internet,
international cooperation in combating this offending would
benefit from broader, more effective and more efficient
efforts, and from consistency of practices and
procedures.
The very need for greater international
cooperation brings me to the Global Alliance against Child
Sexual Abuse Online.
The New Zealand Government is
a founding participant in the Global Alliance. The
Alliance was launched with a Declaration in Brussels last
December, at which I represented New Zealand and addressed
Alliance members.
The Declaration recognises that
child abuse online is a growing problem worldwide and
combatting such crime requires a global effort to prosecute
offenders, protect victims and prevent new crimes.
These efforts also require specific commitments
from national authorities and must support existing
international initiatives.
In Brussels, 48
Ministers from around the world committed to boosting their
country’s current efforts and intended actions to further
the Alliance’s goals.
I’m pleased to say that
New Zealand has reported on our efforts to the European
Commission, which is organising the first reporting session.
Alliance policy target #1
The Alliance
aims to enhance efforts to identify victims and ensure they
receive necessary support and protection.
New
Zealand has three law enforcement agencies working
collaboratively to investigate offences involving the sexual
abuse of children and young persons – the New Zealand
Police, the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) and the New
Zealand Customs Service (Customs).
These agencies
have signed specific protocol dedicated to enhanced efforts
around victim identification.
In New Zealand,
identifying and rescuing victims is a priority, not only for
children abused here but also for children abused overseas.
Our officials have established working
relationships with organisations such as the Interpol
Working Group and the United States Department of Homeland
Security to proactively investigate cases.
Our key
agencies regularly contribute images to the Interpol
database and liaise with other government and non-government
organisations dedicated to the protection of children.
Currently a national database is being implemented
which all three agencies can access. This will improve
communication and exchange of information and make it easier
to investigate offending.
Police are working
closely with Justice and support agencies (including Social
Development, Education, and Health) to develop policies and
processes to better protect children.
Two of our
key initiatives are to introduce Child Harm Prevention
Orders to protect children from high-risk abusive adults and
a mandatory regime for the screening of adults who are
working with children.
Police are also working with
other justice sector partners to develop a Sex Offender
Register and Management System for adults who pose a risk of
sexual offending against children. Legislation is expected
to be introduced later this year.
Alliance policy
target #2
The second policy target of the Global
Alliance is to enhance efforts to investigate cases of child
sexual abuse online and to identify and prosecute
offenders.
To this end, New Zealand Police, Customs
and DIA proactively investigate offences involving grooming
and child sexual exploitation, as well as the production and
trading of abuse images. The three agencies freely share
information and intelligence and undertake joint
investigations.
Customs has formed a Child
Exploitation Operations Team, which consists of two officers
who predominantly work on child sexual abuse cases and
Internal Affairs has covert investigators who are active in
social networks. These investigations have resulted in a
number of national and international successes.
The Police Online Child Exploitation New Zealand
team (OCEANZ) is a specialist group that investigates and
prosecute perpetrators of child exploitation images. This
team works with overseas Internet Service Providers (ISPs)
who host the child exploitation material, to track and trace
users and distributors.
Police are active members
of the Virtual Global Taskforce, as are Internal Affairs and
other international law enforcement agencies such as the
FBI. Police and Internal Affairs are also members of the
Innocent Images International Taskforce.
Finally, I
will soon introduce a Bill to Parliament to increase the
penalties for objectionable publications offences – which
include child sexual abuse online – and create a new
offence of indecent communication with a child.
We are increasing the maximum penalty for
possession of an objectionable publication from 5 years’
imprisonment to 10 years’ imprisonment and increasing the
maximum penalty for distributing or making an objectionable
publication from 10 years’ to 14 years’.
The
Bill will also remove the requirement to obtain the leave of
the Attorney-General for prosecution of certain offences in
the Films, Videos and Publications Classification Act 1993
to make this process quicker and less
complicated.
Alliance policy target #3
The
third policy target of the Global Alliance is to enhance
efforts to increase public awareness of the risks posed by
children’s activities online.
All three
enforcement agencies in New Zealand actively support and
promote the work of a non-governmental agency called
Netsafe. Netsafe provides advice and assistance to parents
on the protection of children while they are online.
To educate the public that the sexual abuse of
children online is a reality – and happening here in New
Zealand, not just other countries – Customs issues regular
media releases about investigations undertaken and the
sentence imposed by the Courts.
Internal Affairs
is an active member of Interpol’s networks. They have also
built relationships with online service providers such as
Facebook, and work with NGOs such as ECPAT Child ALERT,
which works to end child prostitution, pornography and
trafficking for sexual purposes.
The Police OCEANZ
group has an agreement with the School Principals Network to
improve victim identification, and presents to the School
Principals Network on risks and issues with children
online.
Alliance policy target #4
The
fourth and final policy target of the Alliance is to reduce,
as much as possible, the availability of child pornography
online and the re-victimisation of children whose sexual
abuse is published.
Internal Affairs operates a
voluntary website filtering system for New Zealand. The
Digital Child Exploitation Filtering System, works to block
websites that host child sexual abuse images, and is made
available voluntarily to New Zealand Internet Service
Providers (ISPs). The system is strongly supported by ISPs
and telecommunications companies.
Netsafe also
provides an online mechanism to enable members of the public
to report instances of inappropriate online activity
involving child sexual abuse.
In partnership with
the Department of Corrections, Internal Affairs is trialing
a scheme to monitor the Internet access of persons subject
to supervision orders.
The Police OCEANZ group
contributes to prosecutions of offenders through the use of
victim impact statements. Police go back to the country of
origin of victims to obtain statements to strengthen the
prosecution, empower victims and prevent
re-victimisation.
I will conclude by saying the
offices you hold provide a real opportunity to give effect
to the goals of the Alliance; an opportunity to protect our
children and hold the perpetrators, peddlers, consumers and
financial profit seekers to account.
I invite you
all to seize that opportunity.
While the problem
at hand is appalling, immense and growing, initiatives like
the Global Alliance give us an opportunity renew our resolve
and enhance our efforts to protect all children.
We must take every possible action to seek out
every instance of this abhorrent crime, bring our children
back to safety, and bring the full force of the law to bear
on all who use, profit from, or promote this cruel
destruction of innocence.
Let us not understate the
importance of the task at hand.
Let us welcome
that responsibility – our children are counting on us.
Thank
you.
ENDS