Six victims of child abuse have been identified and removed from harm as a result of the 9th Victim Identification Taskforce organised by Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3).
Between 14 and 25 June 2021, 41 victim identification specialists from across the world joined forces to identify as many victims of child sexual abuse as possible.
Europol is managing more than 59 million unique images and video files in its dedicated repository. To prepare for the action, Europol specialists selected footage of victims whose location and identity had not yet been established.
The participants combined their efforts to assess over 300 series. For 47 of these, the likely country of production was identified. The concerned EU Member States were immediately notified so that they could launch their own investigation at the national level. Europol is now providing support to these countries to help safeguard the children as quickly as possible and apprehend the offenders.
The following countries and agencies took part in this edition of the Victim Identification Taskforce: Australia, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, France, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, INTERPOL, Latvia, Moldova, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine, US ICE and US FBI.
HOW YOU CAN HELP STOP CHILD ABUSE
In June 2017, Europol launched its crowdsourcing Stop Child Abuse – Trace An Object initiative, which stemmed from the work of this Taskforce.
As part of this initiative, non-confrontational details of images extracted from child sexual abuse cold cases are regularly made public in the hope that someone might recognise a detail which could help narrow down the location of the victim.
So far, this initiative has yielded the following results:
- Over 26 800 tips have been sent in via the general public;
- Investigators were able to narrow down a country in 105 instances;
- 12 children victim of child sexual abuse have been identified and removed from harm;
- 4 offenders have been identified and prosecuted.
Every piece of information helps. The images can be viewed at: https://www.europol.europa.eu/stopchildabuse
Please have a look and see if you can help us identify a detail which could lead investigators to a child victim of abuse.