Massive leap in sharing of child sexual exploitation material

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September 6 - 12 is National Child Protection Week. This year’s theme is ‘Putting children first’.

To mark this important week, the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation (ACCCE) hosted its annual child protection stakeholder workshop, online this time due to COVID-19.

Our Movement Director Melinda Tankard Reist was invited to represent Collective Shout at the event which put a spotlight on the magnitude of the global child exploitation problem, and the need for joint efforts to combat it.

The core principle that sits at the heart of what we do at the @AusFedPolice-led ACCCE is #Partnership. Yesterday we had the pleasure of hosting a workshop to collaborate with key prevention stakeholders in #ChildProtection. We are working together to keep children safe. #NCPW20 pic.twitter.com/8lDle5N6Jn

— Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation (@ACCCE_AUS) September 8, 2020

Thanks for the invitation- while child sexual exploitation is a mammoth problem, it was encouraging to learn more of combined efforts to counter it.

— Collective Shout (@CollectiveShout) September 9, 2020

Collective Shout quoted in two articles for The Examiner

*Content warning- this post contains content that may be distressing*

Article reprinted from The Conversation

*Content warning* This post may be distressing. 

Earlier this month Rose Kalemba, who had previously exposed Pornhub for hosting footage of her rape as a fourteen-year-old and their unwillingness to remove the footage for six months, exposed Pornhub hosting videos of her friend being raped as a toddler. Despite being flagged, Pornhub allowed the child rape videos to remain for hours, during which time they accumulated hundreds of views. We wrote about it here.

*Content warning- this content may be distressing*

Child sexual exploitation material, or child sexual abuse material, refers to sexually abusive images of children. It may include photographic or video evidence of the rape, sexual abuse and torture of children and infants.

Virtual or computer-generated child sexual exploitation material is produced without the use of living children, depicting fictional children. Under Australian law, this content constitutes illegal child sexual exploitation material. The Commonwealth Criminal Code prohibits the sale, production, possession and distribution of offensive and abusive material that depicts a person, or is a representation of a person, who is or appears to be under 18. This includes virtual or animated representations of children, as well as child sex dolls.

After almost half a million people have signed a petition to shut down Pornhub over cases of sex trafficking, rape and child sexual abuse, new reports of the porn site hosting videos of a toddler being abused have emerged.

Rose Kalemba, who had previously exposed Pornhub for hosting footage of her rape as a fourteen-year-old followed by a period of six months where she begged the site to remove the videos, has appealed to Pornhub again to remove videos documenting the abuse of her friend, who was a toddler at the time. 

*Content warning- this article mentions child sexual abuse which may be distressing for some readers*