Postal Police: Pedophilia and Child Pornography Data

In the last year and a half, the pandemic has affected the lives of all of us, changing habits, rhythms and ways of working in a very short time, imposing limits and rules on socialization and conditioning the development of all aspects of our daily life.

The little ones have undergone a disruption of their world: they have all been forced to approach new technologies in order to follow school activities, to maintain relationships with their classmates, to be able to feel grandparents close to them.

From kindergarten to university, each student has intensified the relationship between smartphones, tablets and PCs in order to regain some normality and the long isolated days at home have also made the parents of the little ones more indulgent in limiting and control the use of consoles, social networks, apps and video games.

The balance of this acceleration of the integration processes between childhood, adolescence and the internet also presents very worrying profiles.

In 2020, the Postal and Communications Police was able to detect an overall increase of 77% of cases in which online crimes were committed to the detriment of children and young people: child pornography, online solicitation and cyberbullying but surprisingly also sexual extortion, revenge porn and scams are among the types of attacks aimed at children on the net. 

The National Center for the Fight against Online Child Pornography was able to detect that it is the crimes of sexual exploitation of minors carried out through social networks, file sharing circuits, darknets to know the most serious increases: for young people to socialize, fall in love, argue, participate in lessons pass, for a long year, especially through smartphones, tablets and PCs. This attracts the attention of adults interested in online sexual interactions with children and adolescents and increases the circulation of child pornography images: in the year of the covid (2020) the cases treated increased by 132% and the abusers investigated by 90%.

In 2021, the growing trend shows no signs of giving respite and overwhelms children who are increasingly fragile by age: only in the first four months of 2021, there are increases equal to 70% of cases treated for crimes connected with child pornography and solicitation online compared at the same period of the previous year. Very young children between the ages of 0 and 9 are hooked up on social media, on game apps and conducted in abusive tech-mediated relationships by unscrupulous adults; only in the first 4 months of this year 52 cases compared to 41 in the entire previous year.

Boredom, lack of perspectives, social isolation, monotony find on the net a way to explode in cases of defamation and teasing on the net between peers. Cyberbullying is also affected by the triggering effect of the pandemic and records an increase in cases of complaints equal to 96%.

And the involvement of increasingly young children is reconfirmed, even for cases of cyberbullying. Also in the first 4 months of the year there are already 77 complaints concerning children under 13 against 34 cases in the first quarter of 2020.

But the disturbing data does not end there. The influence exerted by an increasingly precocious and massive approach to new technologies, social media, messaging reveals its dark side also in reference to the risk that minors themselves are perpetrators of serious and harmful conduct. In the last 5 years, the total number of minors reported for committing crimes online has grown at a dizzying pace, with an increase of 213%. Younger and younger boys who are accused of increasingly infamous crimes: teenagers who circulate sexual images of ex-girlfriends, exchange pornographic files and images of sexual abuse of minors, insult and denigrate companions and acquaintances. In the last 5 years, the average age of young people accused of serious crimes such as child pornography has dropped by one point, from 16 to 15 in 2020 and the interest of young people even not yet attributable is growing. In 91% of cases they are males who contribute to circulating child pornography material and who enter the juvenile criminal circuit with a serious label but difficult to classify with respect to levels of awareness that are often unstable and conditioned by the impulsiveness of the cybernetic gesture.

The awareness-raising activities carried out by the Postal and Communications Police have never stopped, the traveling campaign Una vita da Social has continued its stages albeit in virtual form. The online platforms offered the opportunity to maintain a dialogue with children in order to keep their attention on online risk issues high: thousands of children were reached in their rooms, during their parents' smartworking and distance learning, in the red areas.

Postal Police: Pedophilia and Child Pornography Data