Australian survivors of child sex attacks are being forced to personally scour the web for images of their abuse — and ask big tech to delete them.
Technology companies don’t have an obligation to search for the material — only to remove it — leaving victims in a horrifying quandary.
Associate Professor Michael Salter of UNSW has helped Australian abuse survivors carry out the grim searches.
“What it means is the victims and survivors whose content is circulating online are in a position where the only way to try and slow the spread of their material is to go looking for it,” Prof Salter said.
“We have a cohort of victims and survivors, both children and adults in Australia and overseas, who will spend time every day trying to find their own illegal content, to report it to the webmaster or the administrator and to see removal of it. If they don’t do that, nobody does it for them – that’s happening in Australia 100 per cent.”
Prof Salter said tech companies should take ownership of the issue and proactively detect and remove known Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSEM), using newly available software.
He said it was “not uncommon” for abuse survivors to be sent sex toys in the mail by paedophiles – one woman in the US was forced to move home three times as paedophiles continued to locate her.
Prof Salter told News Corp there had been a tolerance by governments and the private sector for increasing levels of child sex abuse material online, which has resulted in few Australians making it through the teenage years without some form of harm online.
