For years, carefully trained volunteers with wired kids Inc., a nonprofit organi- zation devoted to online consumer safety, scoured the Web in search of child pornography. They frequently found the illicit images and videos, and passed tips to law-enforcement personnel about the Web sites and chat rooms where they're exchanged. All too often, however, nothing happened. Frustrated that the group's efforts were wasted, Wired Kids' executive director and founder, Parry Aftab, has decided to pull back from the gumshoe work of proactively seeking child pornography and concentrate instead on public education and awareness. "The magnitude of the problem is so big that law enforcement can no longer even put a dent in it," Aftab says. "I'm tired of having people work and. nothing happen." The statistics bear out Aftab's concern. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's cyberTipline logged a 39% increase in reports of possession, creation, or distribution of child pornography in 2004, the seventh consecutive year child-pornography incidents have trended upward since the federally funded group set up its 24-hour hot line in 1998. "The problem is'getting bigger," says staca urie, a supervisor with the center.
展开▼
