India tops list on reported child sexual abuse imagery

New research has placed India at the top of the list of countries from where the maximum number of reports (38.8 lakh) related to suspected online child sexual abuse imagery (CSAI) originated. Of the over 2.3 crore reports available with the United States-based National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) from 1998 to 2017, India, Indonesia and Thailand account for 37%. In terms of volume of reports per 1,000 estimated internet users for each country, however, the top three countries involved in CSAI are Iraq, Thailand and Somalia. While the volume of reports in Thailand is 63.8 per 1,000, the number for India at 11.9 per 1,000 is much lower. The results illustrate that CSAI has grown exponentially globally, to nearly 1 million detected events per month. Of the over 2.3 crore reports of suspected incidents of CSAI, almost a crore or 40% occurred in 2017 alone. That’s an exponential rise from the 5.7 lakh reports NCMEC received in its first ten years of operation. In the list of top 10 countries in terms of number of reported events, Indonesia is at second place with 17.4 lakh, followed by Thailand, Mexico, Bangladesh, the United States, Brazil, Vietnam, Algeria and Pakistan.

Source: Times of India, 1/10/2019