A major success for international cooperation: investigative authorities from around 30 countries have dismantled a huge paedophile network with almost two million users. The scale of the case is shocking – the Kidflix platform worked in a similar way to well-known streaming services, but with horrific content. It offered videos on the dark web that showed sexual abuse of children and other violent crimes. At the beginning of April, the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office announced that the platform had been tracked down and shut down after years of intensive investigation. In addition, numerous suspects were identified and arrested.
The scale of it
According to media reports, 79 suspects were arrested. Across 30 countries around 1.400 suspects were tracked down by the international agency Europol, and some of them were also arrested.
The scale of the crime is shocking: an average of three and a half new abuse videos were uploaded to the darknet platform ‘Kidflix’ every hour. When German and Dutch authorities shut down the servers in early March, 70,000 videos were stored there.
39 children were identified during the international investigation and have now been brought to safety, according to Europol in The Hague. The agency, which coordinated the operation, also emphasised the enormous scale of the case: Kidflix was considered one of the largest paedophile platforms in the world. The operation was the largest crackdown on child sexual abuse in Europe to date and marks a significant success in the fight against these crimes.
However, the problem extends far beyond this platform – it is reported that thousands of new cases of possession or distribution of such recordings are registered worldwide every day. In 2022, the police in Germany counted over 42.000 cases of child pornography, a worrying increase of 7.5% compared to 2021. Behind each of these figures is a real victim, because every image is a document of child sexual abuse.
This makes effective social and legal measures all the more important in order to prevent further assaults and avoid recidivism – a central goal of so-called tertiary prevention.
Tertiary prevention
The question of what should happen to people who consume child pornography is an obvious one. In Germany, Austria and Switzerland, a combination of different approaches is used to prevent offenders from continuing to commit crimes. Tertiary prevention combines criminal sanctions, therapeutic interventions and monitoring measures. In addition, there are already complementary programmes in place, and new ones are being developed that go beyond the prison system.
But what can be done?
The answer can only be: be vigilant. Abuse, violence and exploitation – in all their dimensions – often happen right before our eyes. Some blog posts on our website point out how ‘easily’ injustice happens without being recognised.
In my personal opinion, the following motto should apply to this topic: it is better to take a closer look and ask questions than to do too little!
Translated by Anna Smith
#Europol #Kidflix #Missbrauch #AgainstHumanTrafficking #GegenMenschenhandel #EndExploitation #EndTrafficking #HopeForTheFuture #Österreich