Last September, Gabrielle Hazan, then national referent in the fight against intra-family, sexual and gender-based violence (IVF), took the helm of the brand new Office for Minors (Ofmin), whose mission is to fight against all violence against youth. But which, in fact, is mainly devoted to the fight against online child crime, as the work on the subject is gigantic.
What are the missions of the Minors’ Office?
It is a judicial police service and a central office. This is the first time that an office has been created with a competence which is not defined by the quality of the perpetrator (like the anti-narcotics office) but by the quality of the victim. It is a theoretically very broad competence which includes the exploitation of minors online (we also speak of online child crime) and sexual violence against minors, including that committed in a family context. There simply must be added value in the cases in involving an office with national competence, with specific investigation techniques. For example if we discover that a teacher, a priest, etc. caused several victims and that he may have caused other victims throughout his career throughout France, we will be able to coordinate the investigations. We are also an international point of contact: we receive reports from European partners. And we are piloting a “minors” sector, following the observation that there were fewer and fewer investigators in France specializing in the treatment of violence against minors, and that it was necessary to retrain staff .
Why were there fewer and fewer investigators on the subject?
This is due to a pendulum movement. At one point, we gave priority again for a time to victims of domestic violence, except that in the groups, it is often the same people who deal with both domestic violence and violence against minors. So when you give priority to one of the disputes, de facto, there is less time spent on the other. So the idea is to respecialize in violence against minors and to have a service that includes a sector. Namely that tomorrow we will have branches in the territories, that is to say groups of investigators dedicated to the fight against minors.
Reports of child criminal content have apparently exploded. How many do you receive?
In 2022, the office received 227,000 reports of child criminal content exchanged online, or around 700 reports per day. In 2023, the overall figure is 318,000 reports, or an average of 870 per day. And we are talking about 318,000 serious offenses. Because the reports we receive are not reports from individuals. They come from National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), it is an American foundation which has a delegation from the American Congress and which receives content from Internet service providers (ISPs) which has been detected by the Internet giants. This foundation is then responsible for distributing them according to the IP address [le numéro d’identification de chaque ordinateur, smartphone ou tout objet connecté]. France is the 4th country in the world to host the most child criminal content, behind the United States, Russia and the Netherlands. And it’s increasing, in 2013 we received “only” 3,200 per year. Or 12,000% increase.
How do you explain this increase?
Today there is widespread access to the Internet. Pedocriminal content is an image or video of sexual assault on a minor, but it is also all obscene material sent to a minor: an adult who sends a photo of his genitals to a minor knowing that he is minor, this falls into this category. It may also involve images, videos or audio produced by minors and sent under duress, threat or manipulation to adults. These are what we call self-produced content [ou sextorsion]. There is no sexual act, the child thinks of sending it to another child, very often then there is blackmail put in place to receive other content. And then this increase can also be explained, I think, because there is also a feeling of impunity on the part of the perpetrators, who feel relieved of guilt. Particularly in livestreaming, where the author will give live instructions to someone who will rape a child. He will then say: “I was behind my screen and did nothing. » A standalone offense for this remote control of online rape was created in 2018.
There is a new phenomenon, it is content generated by artificial intelligence…
More and more child criminal content is generated by AI and the big difficulty is being able to distinguish those which show real sexual abuse of children from those generated by AI.
You don’t have software to detect them?
No, today there is no software that can distinguish them. And we are not able to say how much of the content that is reported to us contains artificial images. But we believe that this share is increasing, and that the explosion of reported content in 2023 is partly linked to AI. And since we have a lot of prioritization and analysis work to do, that’s time we waste and don’t use to investigate. Of the 318,000 pieces of content we receive, each time we see a child who is raped or a child who sends naked photos of themselves under duress, but we do not have the means to open an investigation each time. . Less than 1% of reports are processed. On AI, we need legislative developments, we would like the person who generates these images to be punished more than the simple fact of exchanging child criminal content. Our legislative arsenal already penalizes the fact of disseminating an image that represents a minor, that is to say that to sanction, we do not need it to be a real minor. The law is well made on this. But what we would like is a specific sanction, because we believe that it is more serious to generate an image by AI than to distribute it.
How many people are dedicated to this fight in your country today, and is that also enough?
Today, there are around forty people in the office, the final objective set by the minister is to be 85. The British who are very invested in this fight are more than 300. We only work on certain most sensitive files, but all child crime files are not handled exclusively by the minor office. And that is why we are waiting for reinforcements in the territorial services. When we see the scale of sexual violence committed against minors, we see clearly that it is not with our 85 people that we will be able to change the curve of facts reported and the rate of dismissals. We need to be able to mobilize well beyond the office. But we must also remember that last year there were only 18 of us in the minors group, before the creation of the office. So we can see the glass half full.
You have said in the past that “online child abuse and incest are the same phenomenon”. Could you be more precise ?
What we see is that we are dealing with the same authors. It’s a continuum. In December, for example, we carried out a major arrest. In 40% of these cases, we realized that these people had committed the act on minors close to them, generally their children. Viewing child criminal content is not trivial, it is part of the same child criminal behavior. And what we have, what we would like, is that in incest cases, when children speak, there would be a reflex to go and seize the computer equipment to search for possible child criminal content. Because the big difficulty we face today is that often, when it’s committed in a family setting, people don’t talk, there are no witnesses, and we’re going to stop. on one side the words of the author and on the other that of the victim. And that doesn’t provide any probative value. We can’t just hear the child and the author.
Today, when a child denounces incest, there is no home investigation and seizure of computers?
Today, in 80% of cases, this is not done. Doubt always benefits the accused. We need to gather more clues.
Why don’t we do it? Is it a question of culture or means?
It’s a question of means. When you have 180 files in your portfolio you do not systematically have the time or means to carry out a search. And it’s also a question of training, of knowing that we can do it, and that’s our role.
There are citizen volunteers who intercept child criminals. Are you considering a partnership with these people?
We are subject to the principles of the Code of Criminal Procedure, for example the principle of fairness of evidence. When you carry out an infiltration, you cannot transmit child criminal content if you have not been encouraged to do so by the accused. And on the other hand, each time we do it, we have the authorization of a magistrate. An average citizen does not have the authorization to do this at all. When these citizens do it – and most do – they are committing a crime. Despite the sympathy we have for them, we will never be able to work like that.