EXCLUSIVE WE JOIN THE TASK FORCE HUNTING ONLINE PAEDOPHILES By Ros Wynne-Jones

DEEP inside the anonymous offices of the new Child Exploitation And Online Protection Centre, dozens of detectives, child protection experts and IT professionals are at work. Screens flicker with chatroom logos, inboxes register new messages and thousands of web pages are scoured for clues. At the building's heart is a secure room containing the unit's chief weapon against internet paedophilia. It looks like any other computer room - a series of terminals on nondescript office furniture - but this is home to a horrific database which holds up to a million images of child sexual abuse. "These aren't photos of kids playing innocently in paddling pools," says online detective Paul Griffiths. "They are pictures of terrible, brutal child abuse and rape that have been circulated on the internet." Launched last month, CEOP is the world's first 24-hour online police station - where patrolling cyberspace is the new beat. Using Childbase, officers can cross-reference hundreds of thousands of images using facial recognition software powerful enough to identify even close relatives from a single photo. Paul cuts and pastes a man's face into a window and immediately the database turns up matches. Then he asks for a location match and the same house and garden turn up from completely different angles. "Childbase is already helping us not just to catch child sex offenders but also to rescue abused children," explains Paul, who is on loan to CEOP from the Abusive Images Unit at Greater Manchester Police. "It tells us if the image is one that has been traded before on the net, has been found on a computer previously, or is a new image. "It helps us to trace children across different incidents of abuse and can even tell us if the same location has been used before by an abuser." Bringing together specialists from firms and agencies as diverse as Microsoft and the NSPCC, AOL and internet charities, the London headquarters is linked to counterparts in Australia and America, and dedicated to making the net a safer place for children. Officers from CEOP were recently called to examine 2,311 images on Gary Glitter's computer in Cambodia, in an attempt to trace victims. "Sometimes, people try to say that viewing abusive images is a victim-less crime because the actual abuse or rape may have happened a long time ago," Paul says. "But try imagining that an image of you being abused is out there on the net on thousands of computers and may never be erased. "I've spoken to victims who have destroyed every photo they have of themselves as a child but they still know pictures are out there and they find that sometimes almost impossible to live with." He is dismissive of offenders' claims that they looked at images "by accident". "You don't get on these sites by accident," he says. "You don't click on 'watch this child being raped' by accident." Collecting images of child sex abuse - CEOP refuses to call the images pornography as officers believe that hides the true extent of abuse - is an obsession among some paedophiles, Paul explains. "Some computers might have up to a million images," Paul says. "The abuser may never have looked at lots of them but they get a kick out of their collection." With so many images to confront, there is an inevitable psychological toll on officers. "Of course, it's difficult work," says Tom Symmons, a father of three and a former child protection officer brought over to CEOP. "The lengths that people will go to - the things they'll do - are very, very hard to understand. You are looking at things you just can't get your head around. "For a while, when I was viewing lots of images - particularly of kids being abused in the bath - I found it hard to go home to my kids. I felt as if I didn't want to bathe them or be involved with it. "My children are older now and my job involves looking at fewer images. But now you're just glad to go home to a normal family, to be with good people you can trust." I DENTIFYING victims, offenders and crime scenes from abusive photos is just one element of CEOP's operation. Working undercover as chat-room users, officers also join dialogues between children and wait for an online paedophile to betray themselves. And officers are even creating dummy paedophile sites so that when an offender pays for images, he - and it's nearly always "he" - gives his details straight to the police. Now Jim Gamble, formerly head of the National Crime Squad and now in charge of CEOP, has issued child sex abusers with the following warning... "If you are a paedophile and you are online talking to children tonight, the chances are increasing that you are grooming a police officer and it is going to end in tears for you." In tears maybe, but certainly behind bars if CEOP has its way. Meanwhile, the unit is also working in countries such as Cambodia and the Dominican Republic, where "child sex tourists" prey on vulnerable youngsters from poor countries. CEOP wants language to change in this area, too. "Travelling child sex offenders seek to offend against the world's most vulnerable children in the hope that they will evade detection and prosecution," its official guidelines say. "The phrase 'sex tourism' sanitises the reality of what is taking place. The 'sex' is forced, therefore it is rape. The word 'tourism' implies sun, sea and sand when, frequently, children are sought in the most deprived areas of the world. "When travelling child sex offenders return home, they are child sex abusers, not tourists returning from holiday." To defeat an online paedophile community getting faster and smarter - learning to cover its tracks using cyber "mirrors" to block addresses and to destroy computer evidence - CEOP has brought together professionals from Microsoft and AOL, as well as charities and expert detectives. But when Paul Griffiths joined Man chester's Abusive Images Unit 11 years ago, he admits he barely understood how the net worked. "We worked with photos showing abuse but we had no idea that people were already putting them on the net," he says. "Then someone alerted us to some text on the net which described sex acts with children. That led us to images. But we weren't experts - we had to ask the lads from a software company next door to come in and show us how to trawl the net for images." Initially, Paul and his team prosecuted offenders for distributing or possessing images of child abuse but _ they quickly realised that the photos often held the key to discovering actual cases of abuse. "Time and again when we got a warrant to search a house we'd find pictures of their own daughter or nephew or someone they were babysitting," Paul says. "Once we could identify the I victim we were able to step in, stop the abuse and prosecute." The officers also . realised there were around 7,000 of the same images in . circulation, many from a period in the 1960s when Denmark had briefly legalised all forms of pornography including child rape images. "Then digital cameras came in and the whole phenomenon exploded," Paul says. "Now there are camera phones, mobile internet... it keeps moving on." THE latest development is webcam abuse, where an abuser puts live images of himself abusing a child on the net. "Abusers go to great lengths to prove it is live," Paul says. "For a long while we couldn't work out why there were all these images of abused children holding up pieces of paper with names written on them. "In fact, it was so people thousands of miles away could say: 'Show us it's live, write my name on the paper.' They would even screw the paper up to show they hadn't written the name on using a computer program like Photoshop. "The currency for 'fresh' images is what it's all about. That's why perpetrators take risks." Paul says that abusers cut across every class and background. "We've had people of every job - from crown court judges to the unemployed to celebrities. zIt's in every corner of society." That's why, in the end, CEOP's experts know that the greatest weapon in the fight against online paedophilia is to give children the tools to protect themselves online. Hundreds of thousands of youngsters have already been given virtual tutorials on the dangers of the net and the unit even has a special website www.thinkyouknow.co.uk "What we want is for every parent to go home tonight and ask their child to switch on their computer and save www.thinkyouknow.co.uk to their favourites menu," Paul says. "That way, any time a child thinks that someone is acting suspiciously on the net, they can alert us immediately. "That's how we'll stop these people committing these terrible crimes." The CEOP centre is at www.ceop.gov.uk We're catching everyone from judges, celebs and the jobless. It's in all parts of our society WHAT PARENTS CAN DO Put the computer in a family room, where it will be easier to monitor, rather than in the kids' bedroom. Learn how to use it and how to surf the web. Know what your children do online. This isn't the TV - communication is two-way. Use any relevant parental controls on your computer. Tell kids never to give out their personal details. Encourage your children to tell you if they feel uncomfortable, upset or threatened by anything they see online. KNOW THE DANGER SIGNS BE wary if your child suddenly switches screens or turns off the monitor when you approach. Be very calm and ask them to show you what was on the screen. If they use a computer at odd hours, they may be chatting. If your child suddenly starts receiving phone calls from an adult you don't know, install a caller ID program and ask your child to explain. Watch out if your son or daughter suddenly has more money, new clothes or other gifts. Although many teenagers naturally withdraw from their parents, bear in mind that paedophiles work hard to drive a wedge between children and the people who support and care for them. Websites with useful information include: www.nch.org.uk/information , www.childnet-int.org , www.iwf.org.uk , www.http:kids.getnetwise.org

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