Following on from our article on point 3 of the EU strategy for a more effective fight against child sexual abuse:

4. Strengthen law enforcement efforts at national and EU level

Point four of the EU Strategy recognises that child sexual abuse requires a competent and comprehensive law enforcement response, both at national and at European level. The COVID-19 crisis has brought to light the need to improve the digital capabilities of law enforcement and judicial authorities to preserve their ability to protect citizens effectively.

Reports of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), from industry, the public and NGOs, are labour-intensive to process. To try and overcome this challenge, INHOPE is an active participant in Project AviaTor, which stands for Augmented Visual Intelligence and Targeted Online Research. AviaTor is an efficient tool that helps prioritise all aspects of reports so that law enforcement can focus on identifying perpetrators and saving victims. It is a long-term solution that can automatically crawl online sources for additional information for investigations in accordance with the national legal requirements and is already being used by the National Police in the Netherlands.

If you are an LEA representative and are interested in learning more about this project and would like to engage with AviaTor’s partners, please send an email to info@aviator.isfp.eu. The project’s technological partners will reach out to you in order to better understand the current landscape of processing CSAM reports in your LEA.

With a higher participation of LEA in describing their current and desired work process, Project AviaTor can build a more robust tool to accommodate the different nuances of national LEA processes and thus help LEA in prioritising reports, focusing on rescuing victims and capturing offenders.

Read about Point 5 of the EU strategy for a more effective fight against child sexual abuse here.

Source: EU strategy for a more effective fight against child sexual abuse