NEW DELHI: New research has placed India at the top of the list of countries from where the maximum number of reports (38.8 lakh) related to suspected online child sexual abuse imagery (CSAI) originated. Of the over 2.3 crore reports available with the United States-based National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) from 1998 to 2017, India, Indonesia and Thailand account for 37%.

In terms of volume of reports per 1,000 estimated internet users for each country, however, the top three countries involved in CSAI are Iraq, Thailand and Somalia . While the volume of reports in Thailand is 63.8 per 1,000, the number for India at 11.9 per 1,000 is much lower.

The results illustrate that CSAI has grown exponentially globally — to nearly 1 million detected events per month — exceeding the capabilities of independent clearing houses and law enforcement agencies to take action. Of the over 2.3 crore reports of suspected incidents of CSAI, almost a crore or 40% occurred in 2017 alone. That’s an exponential rise from the 5.7 lakh reports NCMEC received in its first ten years of operation.

The research carried by Google and "Thorn" - an international anti-human trafficking organisation in collaboration with (NCMEC)—the United States clearing house for all CSAI content detected by the public and online sharing platforms - puts out data on the top 10 countries flagged in reports as locations of IP addresses of victims and abusive entities. NCMEC is also seen as the largest clearing house in the world the research underlines to justify the reliance on this database.

In the list of the top 10 countries in terms of absolute numbers of reported events, Indonesia is at second place with 17.4 lakh followed by Thailand, Mexico, Bangladesh, the United States, Brazil, Vietnam , Algeria and Pakistan . However, the volume of reports per 1,000 estimated internet users vary widely within these ten from 63.8 for Thailand, 41.8 for Algeria and 40.5 for Bangladesh to 11.9 for India, 6.0 for Brazil and 3.3 for the US.

The researchers cautioned that as information is often based on the IP address for abusive entities, it may include VPNs or proxies that skew geographic distributions and hence not too much should be read into the rankings.

“The data shows that ten years ago, 70% of CSAI reports reflected abuse in the Americas. Today, 68% of reports relate to abuse in Asia, 19% the Americas, 6% Europe, and 7% Africa. Also new CSAI content is constantly emerging. 84% of detected CSAI images and 91% of videos are reported only once,” the study observed.

It concludes that “the internet has outpaced the capabilities of independent clearing house analysts and law enforcement to respond. It is suggested that this exponential growth and the frequency of unique images requires re-imagining CSAI defences away from fingerprint-based detection and manual review. Instead, we argued that researchers need to develop algorithms that automatically detect CSAI content, cluster images and videos of victims, and ultimately surface identifying features to help law enforcement”.

