UK: ‘Low-risk’ child porn offenders shouldn’t be prosecuted, say police
Major report says conditional cautions should instead be given, while children who share naked images should be exempt
Low-risk offenders who view child sexual abuse images online should be spared prosecution and instead given conditional cautions, says the police foundation.
Agreed
not for anyone breaking the law but separating the ones that view child porn with the ones that rape young children is just common sense. I know of cases here in Florida where a man got 6 years prison time and 6 years probation for 1 piece of child pornography(girl was 15)on his cell phone. That’s just plain insanity
I know of someone 11 years incarcerated for 4 images. I have heard of a lot of guys get 10 years for various amounts. They could stop it if they want to.
Try one count charge ld by the feds with no evidence that the person depicted was actually a real child and still get 6 years with probation for LIFE!
Can you imagine how many prisons would need to be built if they uniformly enforced the law that way?
I believe it would be easier to just wall off the U.S. and kick all of the so called “good people” out.
There is a guy who got 100 years for CP. This was in the US of course. No other nation has less common sense when it comes to nudity or sex.
Low-risk offenders who view child sexual abuse images online should be spared prosecution and instead given conditional cautions, says the police foundation.
In a major report on child abuse online, it also proposes a legal change to exempt children who share naked images from prosecution under obscenity laws, provided there is no evidence of exploitation.
The two measures would enable police who are overwhelmed by “industrial scale” child abuse imagery online to focus investigations on those offences where there is a genuine risk of children being physically abused or groomed by paedophiles.
The report has been welcomed by police chiefs, who have warned of a “huge” increase in children self-generating and sharing indecent images, of which there are 18 million alone reported by Facebook in a single year.
Children need to be ‘supported and educated’
Deputy chief constable Ian Critchley, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) lead for child abuse, said: “This is a crime type where, largely, children need be supported and educated, not criminalised.
“There is a clear need through the work we are doing with the National Crime Agency (NCA) to prioritise and differentiate between these cases, and cases where children are exploited, blackmailed, groomed, threatened, and abused.”
The foundation said the internet had enabled the production and consumption of child sexual abuse material on “an industrial scale,” leading to a “monumental surge” in demand on police and child protection services. Some forces had faced a five-fold rise in cases in just five years.
It cited police showing a 450 per cent increase in sexual grooming offences from 7,500 to 42,000 since 2016-17 and 800 per cent rise in prosecutions under obscene publication laws from below 5,000 in 2013-14 to 31,712 in 2020-21.
Charging rates plummet to nine per cent
Two-thirds of police teams said they did not have the forensic resource they needed to investigate crimes, with charging rates plummeting from 51 per cent to nine per cent.
Rick Muir, the foundation’s director, said police forces were “totally overwhelmed” by referrals of millions of child abuse images from social media firms viewed by people who were not a risk to children even though they had committed an offence by doing so.
He urged a review to ensure more of a balance between investigating suspects viewing images online and “proactively identifying the harder to find offenders who are perpetrating the most serious abuse.”
Most (72 per cent) of those prosecuted over online images were not jailed but handed suspended or community sentences which left them in their homes often without proper supervision.
The report recommended the Government pilot a scheme of conditional cautions for offenders where police established there was no risk of more serious sexual abuse.
Most imagery comes from teenagers consensually sharing selfies
Each offender would have to attend and pay for an educational course and face prosecution if they breached the conditions. Each would be logged on police systems and their risk to the community monitored. They would be subject to advanced DBS checks barring them from working with children.
“It would be a more robust way of managing people but would save police some time in the court process that they could then redirect to go after the very serious offenders,” said Mr Muir.
Children below the age of 13 accounted for most of the images found by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), the body that searches the internet to remove them. Of these, a third were generated by the children themselves.
The foundation said some youth-produced sexual imagery could be due to grooming but the majority came from teenagers consensually sharing naked selfies – an action that was still a criminal offence under the Obscene Publications Act.
“There should be clearly defined exemptions to the Act based on age and consent. This would move the emphasis away from law enforcement and towards education and awareness-raising in cases where children are sharing pictures of themselves with other children,” said the report.
This seems like a common sense proposition. Clearly, the laws have not kept up with the technology.
Thank you for posting this.
I agree wholeheartedly. A person’s life and that of his/her family can be ruined by even viewing a few photos. Landing on the registry and being charged as a felon along with those who have actually molested children is too big a punishment.
This article was posted for information. FAC IS OPPOSED TO ANY REGISTRY. We need to be very careful about “othering” because it has been very easy for other criminal justice groups to say, “it’s OK for the murderers and the sex offenders, but not for us.” We should not do the same, especially not to those who have our same stigma. What the take away here is that SOME law enforcement in SOME places is questioning the utility of SOME offenders, and anytime we get SOME relief or it appears that SOME common sense is going into policy decisions, it’s cause for mention. PLEASE lets not throw others among us under the bus.
😳 OMGosh, someone whacked then in the head with a big, ol’ “Common Sense” stick!! 😲
(Who knows, maybe our legislators will take note. 🤔. Yeah no – I can already hear the hysterical cacophony “soft on sex offenders” driving them out of office!)
I wonder how many or what percentage on each state’s SOR are for CP possession.
But..But..But then how could you pad your registry numbers to continue the manipulation,fear mongering and propaganda? Police might have to go out and get a job if they reduce the inflated prosecutions and registry’s.. The Chinese States of America would never go for that.. Can you imagine what they would do? They aren’t allowed to burn witches, hang minority’s, or drag homosexuals behind vehicles any more, the Americans would be lost…. If you took away their newest toys the Elizabethan era sex criminals they might never get over having noone to torment.. Might go after some deserving group like politician’s?
Hah, I wish. This would require Too much common sense.
This couldn’t ever prevail…
Although it is Europe and they generally have more common sense, so let’s hope for the best.