AT the start of a global conference on child sexual exploitation in Rio de Janeiro, UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman said a main goal of the meeting was to increase cooperation between companies and governments to tackle the growing problem of Internet child pornography. “We've seen continued progress in terms of countries getting the proper laws in place, but do they have the enforcement mechanisms?” Veneman said in an interview during the conference, which is being attended by 3,000 delegates from more than 125 countries. “I think that's really one of the questions that has to be answered. How do you get the right kinds of enforcement mechanisms, how do you train police, social workers, teachers to deal with victims? How do you get the judges and the legal structures themselves to prosecute cases in a timely way?” Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva opened the conference on Tuesday by signing a measure that toughens penalties against those convicted of child pornography offenses. Brazil has been known as a sex-tourism destination. Gang control, local customs Veneman, a former US agriculture secretary, said Brazil was one of the countries that sometimes had difficulty enforcing such laws because of the control held by criminal gangs in big cities like Rio. In other countries such as Yemen, she said laws against child marriage were often ignored because of ingrained local customs. “Where you have sexual violence against young girls, where you have child marriage, all these things contribute to maternal mortality, to the spread of HIV and AIDS,” she said, singling out India as another country where child marriages were a concern. The International Labor Organization estimated in 2000 that there were 1.8 million children exploited through pornography and prostitution in the multibillion-dollar global sex industry. Veneman said that better international cooperation and forums such as the Rio meeting had made the task of identifying trouble spots easier. “We're getting a better idea of what the problem is, where the patterns of trafficking are and how it takes place,” she said. Impunity Internet pornography and the soliciting of children online is one area of exploitation that appears to be have grown rapidly in recent years, partly due to the rise of online social networking sites, she said. The British-based Internet Watch Foundation said in its 2007 annual report that there were about 3,000 child sexual abuse websites worldwide, and that 80 percent of the children being abused were under 10 years old. Technology that enables users to hide their identity online and weak laws in many countries have helped offenders avoid prosecution. The US-based International Center for Missing and Exploited Children released a study two years ago showing that the possession of child pornography was not a crime in 138 countries, and 95 had no laws addressing the issue. “Legal structure alone will not solve the problem, but you do need the right laws in place,” Veneman told a news conference later. “It's important that we address the impunity that surrounds these issues in so many countries. Too often these crimes go unpunished.” The Rio conference is the first World Congress Against Sexual Exploitation of Children and Adolescents since 2001 in Japan. The first conference was held in Stockholm in 1996.
