Sexualised violence against children: EU plans tougher action

The EU Commission has presented plans to better protect children from sexualized violence online. In this way, children should be better protected against attempts by pedophiles to contact them – data protection could suffer as a result.

The EU Commission has presented plans on how to combat sexualized violence against children on the Internet. The proposal contains “clear obligations for companies to detect and report child abuse,” said EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson. “We will find you,” Johansson said to criminals.

Online platform could be mandatory

Online platforms such as Facebook and messenger services such as WhatsApp could be obliged to report content involving sexualised violence against children. To help online companies identify and report this illegal content, an EU center dedicated to combating child sexual abuse is to be set up. In addition, according to the Commission’s proposals, children and young people should be better protected against attempts by pedophiles to contact them online.

In order to prevent such contact attempts, website providers should know better whether a child or an adult is using their service. The Commission made these proposals because it considers the current voluntary system for content reporting by online companies to be insufficient. The draft now goes to the Council of the EU and the European Parliament.

According to the EU Commission, 85 million images and videos showing sexual abuse of children were reported worldwide in 2021. The number of unreported cases is significantly higher. The Internet Watch Foundation has found a 64 percent increase in reports of confirmed sexual violence against children in 2021 compared to the previous year.

FDP MP speaks of “Stasi 2.0”

The first reactions were mixed. “The fact that we will oblige companies to recognize and report the sexual abuse of children in the future is an important and long overdue step in the fight against child abuse,” said Lena Düpont, spokeswoman for domestic policy for the CDU/CSU group in the European Parliament. The FDP MP Moritz Körner, on the other hand, spoke of a “Stasi 2.0”. He fears invasions of the private sphere of citizens.

MEP Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party, Greens Group) had already warned of the plan in advance. It was an “espionage attack on our private messages and photos using error-prone algorithms,” explained the lawyer, who also doubted the hoped-for effect: “Organized child porn rings don’t use e-mails or messenger services, but forums on the dark web.”