Monday 12 November 2007

UK’s Dedicated Centre For Tackling Child Sexual Abuse Joins Forces With Southeast Europe At Bucharest Seminar

The Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre has joined forces with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to deliver a training programme alongside law enforcement and child protection counterparts from fourteen different southeast and central European countries.

The five-day ‘Combating Child Sexual Exploitation’ seminar has been developed to strengthen and support the countries’ capacity to combat child sex abuse and related threats to children. Equally, it will enable sharing of regional best practices and promote UK understanding of child protection issues in the region.

It will be held at the Southeast European Cooperative Initiative Centre (SECI) in Bucharest and will be delivered by specialist officers from CEOP in partnership with regional speakers.

The programme aims to develop an understanding of the nature and extent of child sexual abuse, looking at how perpetrators target and manipulate children and those who would protect them. Additionally, it will provide a regional perspective on child trafficking and offer information on offender management.

Elements of the course will also help participants to engage with child victims and achieve stronger evidence from interviews to secure more convictions for offenders.

There will be 80 participants from various backgrounds in the field, including police officers, NGO staff and members of the judiciary.

Jim Gamble, Chief Executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre said:

The CEOP Centre is committed to improving investigations surrounding the sexual abuse of children both nationally and internationally. We are very pleased to be working so closely with our colleagues in southeastern Europe and look forward to understanding better the environment in which they operate.

We continually share the very latest techniques and best practice with professionals in the field with a view to learning from our experiences and developing methods which are both effective and realistic for the environment in which they are applied.

Notes to Editors

1) Participating countries in the seminar are: Romania, Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Hungary, Macedonia, Moldova, Serbia, Slovenia, Turkey, Georgia and Ukraine.

2) The Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre works in both online and offline environments to protect children from sexual exploitation. Full information on all areas of work, as well as online safety messages and access to online reporting, can be found at www.ceop.gov.uk.

The CEOP Centre is affiliated to the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) and powers are derived from the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. It is based in Pimlico, London with developing outreach channels to all areas of both domestic and international policing. Specialist faculties are dedicated to operations, intelligence, education and victim identification.

The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre is a member of the Virtual Global Taskforce. Other members include the Australian Federal Police, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Interpol. Further information is available at www.virtualglobaltaskforce.com.

For further information please contact the Communications Team at the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre on 0870 000 3434.

CHILD ABUSE IMAGES, NOT ‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’

Use of the phrase ‘child pornography’ actually benefits child sex abusers:

  • It indicates legitimacy and compliance on the part of the victim and therefore legality on the part of the abuser
  • It conjures up images of children posing in ‘provocative’ positions, rather than suffering horrific abuse

Every photograph captures an actual situation where a child has been abused. This is not pornography.

TRAVELLING CHILD SEX OFFENDER, NOT ‘SEX TOURIST’

Travelling child sex offenders seek to offend against the world’s most vulnerable children in the hope that they will evade detection and prosecution.

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.