Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 16 October 2019
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality
Online Harassment and Harmful Communications: Discussion (Resumed)
Dr. Mary Aiken:
The only way we will modify human behaviour online, in this domain we have created, is by putting in place laws that create consequences for criminal behaviour such as accessing child pornography, or what we call online child abuse material. Ten years ago, the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the body charged with dealing with such content, dealt with a couple of hundred thousand images per year. Last year, it reported that it had dealt with 45 million images in that year. The problems are spiralling out of control because we as a society are failing to tackle the basic human drivers that manifest in cyber contexts.
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