Child Abuse

Many people know about the work in Customs and Excise to safeguard the UK against smuggling, but far fewer will be aware that they also play a major role in protecting children from sexual and physical abuse.

UK Customs can draw on over 120 years' experience of preventing indecent or obscene material from entering the UK. But officers aren't just looking to seize this material when people attempt to bring it into the country. They use detections of child-related material to help identify potential and active child abusers, as well as children at risk and any activity related to international sex tourism. It's a complex challenge. Child sex abuse is a global problem.

Adults sexually attracted to children are known as paedophiles. They:

• are driven by an obsession
• come from all over the world and from varied social backgrounds
• often act alone rather than in groups
• when they do band together, don't organise in hierarchies like crime gangs, but tend to be networks of equals

Indecent and obscene - what's the difference?
Sexual attraction to children is not a crime in itself. It only becomes a crime when abuse happens. But child pornography is illegal - it is a permanent record of abuse.

It is against the law to import, possess or create images that:

• are indecent - showing, for example, the genitals of children below the age of 16
• are obscene - showing, for example, children under 16 involved in sexual acts

The obsessive nature of paedophiles leads them to acquire sometimes vast stores of indecent or obscene images. The movement of illegal material across international borders makes paedophiles vulnerable to discovery. It gives customs organisations a vital chance to identify individual sex offenders and help destroy the child sex abuse rings to which some of them belong.

Specialists at work
To make it increasingly difficult for sex offenders to bring child pornography into Britain, UK Customs has developed sophisticated search techniques to check for illegal material stored electronically on computers and disks. These checks are done by specialist anti-smuggling officers and are often sparked by information from Customs' internal network of paedophile intelligence co-ordinators.

Working with others
But Customs and Excise doesn't operate alone. They work very closely with the police to identify potential and active child abusers, convict them and put them on the national Sex Offender's Register. The register is one way enforcement agencies can keep tabs on criminals who are dangerous to children. It's not a public list of sex offenders, and access to it is limited to specified authorities.

Other government authorities including the Prison Service, Immigration, local authorities, the Department of Education and health services also work with Customs to reduce the risk to children. Valuable help also comes from children's organisations such as the Scouts and the campaign to End Child Prostitution and Pornography Trafficking (ECPAT).

Sex tourism
It's not just British children who are at risk from child sex abusers living in the UK. These abusers often travel the world targeting vulnerable children. They systematically exploit the cultural and economic differences of countries, as well as differences in international legislation - not least in the definitions of indecency and obscenity. Countries such as Thailand, Morocco, Sri Lanka, the
Dominican Republic, the Czech Republic and the Philippines are well-documented destinations for paedophiles. And while these so-called "sex tourists" might not always traffic pornography, they continue to commit offences, abusing boys and girls. Their links with other law enforcement agencies overseas enable customs to carry the fight against sex tourism to target destinations. By passing intelligence to overseas authorities, Customs and Excise helps block global child sex crime.

New technology - new threat
Polaroid cameras used to be one of the few ways paedophiles could produce and move illegal images of children. But the availability of home video and digital cameras and the rise of the internet have changed all that. Internet technology in particular has been snatched up for use by paedophile rings. It lets them contact each other, order material from suppliers and swap illegal images and words. Customs forensic computing and investigation specialists are targeting the technology to root out sex offenders and their connections.