BRUSSELS – Towards the end of June 2020, after Europe’s first lockdown, Europol warned that the COVID-19 crisis had resulted “in a surge in online distribution of child sexual abuse material, which was already at high levels prior to the pandemic.”

 Child molesters have been early to embrace the World Wide Web: the anonymity the Internet guarantees, minimises the risk of being caught. Figures from the US Centre for Missing and Exploited Children show that child sexual abuse online is on the rise: from 1 million reports of possible instances of child sexual abuse in 2010 to almost 17 million in 2019, which included nearly 70 million images and videos. Eighty-nine per cent of this material is hosted in Europe.

 When Richard Huckle landed at Gatwick airport on Dec. 19, 2014 to celebrate Christmas with his parents, the police immediately arrested him. They seized his laptop and digital camera. Despite Huckle having encrypted his hard drives, the police still managed to uncover 20,000 explicit images of children aged between six months and 13 years.

 Surprisingly, the man whom the media would later dub “Britain’s worst-ever paedophile” did not at all match the stereotype of a paedophile: when he was arrested and charged with crimes going back almost a decade, he was only 28 years old.

 Huckle came from a middle-class family in Ashford, Kent. After grammar school, he enrolled at South Kent College for a degree in photography. In 2005, to escape from his “mundane life of solitude,” he took a gap year in Malaysia; he would be teaching English in the capital city, Kuala Lumpur. Besides tutoring English, he tried to earn money as a freelance photographer for which he had created a company: “Huckool Photography Productions.”

 According to Interpol, the world’s largest international police organisation, offenders use a variety of online tools ranging from social networking platforms and encrypted communications applications to messaging applications and peer-to-peer networks.

 At the outset of Europe’s first lockdown, the World Health Organization (WHO) opinioned technology companies and telecoms providers “must do more to detect and stop harmful activity against children online.” Yet, last month, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) blasted an EU Commission proposal which asked to allow data providers to continue using specific technologies and practices in order to detect and report child sexual abuse.

 In 2010, Huckle became the administrator of “Kid’s Asylum,” a Flickr group which – as Huckle conceived – was “a hostel and refugee to the poorest, most needy children of this world.” Half of the 24 public groups he administrated on Flickr carry the word “children” or “kids.” More than 200 Flickr users are member of “Kid’s Asylum.” Member names include “girlchaser4u” or “bboss.” Many of them are Westerners who, like Huckle, share eerie pictures they shot in remote locations of poor children in exotic settings.

 The pictures as well as the comments Huckle had been posting on the Internet for almost a decade carry the trademark of a paedophile. In 2005, on a picture on TrekEarth showing a boy who is only wearing an oversized shirt he commented, “I did wonder about his ‘private parts.’” In 2008 he plainly admitted on a forum: “I have inappropriate images of kids.” All these boasts were ignored. Though in 2012, when Huckle posted on Facebook the picture of a close friend and commented “I am glad she will soon come of age,” a former classmate of his boldly asked Huckle if he was a paedophile.

 Besides offering his services as a language teacher and photographer in Malaysia, “Britain’s worst-ever paedophile” posed as a philanthropist. He travelled to Cambodia, India and Singapore. He worshipped a Christian church and contacted priests who were running orphanages. In Kuala Lumpur, he took poor children to tourist spots. One photograph, with the Petronas towers for a background, shows a very young boy and a mature Huckle looking in the lens. Huckle’s determined look betrays the plans he has with the boy. Those deeds, Huckle would record and publish on the dark web.

 According to Europol, “criminal activities related to the production and exchange of child abuse material started to transform around 2012, when the dark web started to be used for all kinds of illegal activities.” The dark web and its end-to-end encryption, however, make it difficult to identify abusers online.

 Huckle was a prolific user of a dark web site called “The Love Zone” (TLZ): a network of 45,000 anonymous users producing and consuming child pornography. On one of his victims, he commented – “It’s not often in child porn you can compare the bodies of a 5yo and a 12yo that are the same girl. I’m sure I’ll have plenty more sex with (her) in the future.”

 After years of living abroad, Huckle apparently felt the pinch. “Would love to make a small income off of selling child porn,” he wrote. To fund his abuse, he used a crowd-funding site, PedoFunding. He regularly posted material on TLZ, material which was ever more extreme and which he even branded. He despised users who, unlike him, mostly consumed material. At the last gap year reunion he attended, his former flatmate noticed Huckle had changed. He had become more confident and cocky, more talkative.

 An EU strategy for a more effective fight against child sexual abuse will be implemented in 2020-2025. Among its eight initiatives are undercover operations. An undercover operation by the Australian police, tipped off by their Danish colleagues, resulted in the arrest of hundreds of TLZ users. The police officers had managed to identify the site’s administrator using a combination of linguistics and a new hand recognition technique. A freckle on his hand led to his conviction for having actively abused children. Then, the police officers identified Huckle by comparing metadata from his material on TLZ with that of pictures he had posted on websites such as TrekEarth and Flickr. They contacted the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA).

 What probably is the last picture of Huckle in Malaysia shows a longhaired, white man going towards his thirties amid a group of elder Indian men. A long stretch from the geeky gap year student he once was. His figure is gaunt, probably being consumed with his obsessions.

 Even when Huckle had committed his crimes abroad, the NCA could arrest him and take him to court in the UK. James Traynor (NCA) warned paedophiles who commit their crimes overseas – “Borders are no barrier - we are determined that those who go abroad to abuse children will be held to account.”

 Also in Huckle’s case, forensic anthropology – in particular hand recognition – allowed for identifying Huckle as having actively abused children.

 Unfortunately, institutions like the NCA cannot operate abroad. Yet they can prevent child molesters from travelling abroad. Because, as ECPAT, the international organisation against sexual exploitation of children resumes, transnational child sex offenders have taken up the habit of “grooming children online today – travelling tomorrow.”

 The EDPS now opposes the EU Commission proposal to derogate temporarily from certain provisions of the ePrivacy directive as regards the use of technologies by communications service providers for the processing of personal and other data for the purpose of combatting child sexual abuse online. The EDPS considers confidentiality of communications to be “a cornerstone of the fundamental rights to respect for private and family life.”

 Child molesters apparently have an urge to record and publish their abuse and/or enjoy watching their equals abusing children. They have turned to using online tools to meet their victims. If legislation allows, specific technologies and best practices can help identify these criminals online and stop them before they do more harm offline.

 On Nov. 23, inmate Paul Fitzgerald, born in Northern Ireland, was convicted for the murder of co-inmate Huckle. Fitzgerald had tortured Huckle in his cell for more than an hour. When asked for his motivation, Fitzgerald answered his act was “poetic justice.”

 md-cc