CEOP Centre claims productive first year

83 child sex offenders arrested

Ian Williams, vnunet.com 12 Jun 2007

The Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre has published a report on its first year of operation.

Since its launch in April 2006 the organisation has made 1,000 disseminations, many with multiple suspects, to local and international police forces.

As a result of this activity 76 children from across the UK have been rescued from 'sexual abuse environments' by officers working with the CEOP Centre.

The organisation has helped to facilitate the arrests of 83 child sex offenders and the dismantlement of three major international paedophile rings, all with UK connections.

The CEOP Centre has also delivered its ThinkUKnow education programme to over 750,000 UK schoolchildren with sessions looking at online internet safety. One million children will have attended by the end of the academic year.

"When we launched the CEOP Centre in April 2006 I said that we would change the internet from the anonymous place that some offenders thought it would be," said Jim Gamble, chief executive of the CEOP Centre.

"I outlined how we would provide young people with a direct and dedicated Report Abuse function where they could report deviant activities within a few clicks of a mouse.

"And I said that we would publish details of registered offenders on a website if they failed to fulfil the consequences of their convictions."

Along with specialist training for 1,500 child protection professionals, the centre has helped with initiatives such the Report Abuse button within MSN Messenger and ultimately the investigation and arrest of offenders with 36 major operational deployments during the year.

"These figures speak for themselves: any offender looking to groom a child today online stands a good chance of grooming an undercover officer instead," said Gamble.

"If not, then that offender may be speaking online to one of the 750,000 children we have now educated through ThinkuKnow and who know how to spot deviant behaviour and how to report it to us."

The CEOP Centre also represents the UK on the Virtual Global Taskforce, an international alliance of law enforcement agencies dedicated to tackling child sex abuse.

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