THE chief constable of Fife has warned of the risk to children from paedophiles using Internet chatlines to access their prey, writes Lynne Robertson.
Fife's most senior police officer John Hamilton believes youngsters should be banned from using the chatlines unless supervised by an adult because of the risk from the growing numbers of child abusers attracted to the Internet following an unprecedented growth in pornography.
The lack of control and restriction on the Internet has made detection of offenders difficult and Mr Hamilton believes the growth in computer use across the world is the biggest single challenge facing police in the millennium, when it is anticipated 200 million PCs will be linked up to the Internet.
Speaking ahead of an address to the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference at Aberdeen on Monday, Mr Hamilton expressed concern about the lack of regulation of the Internet.
The highly-regarded police chief, who first became involved in the war against Internet pornography while working for the Greater Manchester force in the early 1990s claimed the information superhighway had prompted an alarming growth in the trade.
Warning that innocent youngsters could be pulled in via 3000 discussion groups, which open up to chatlines the chief constable explained: ''The chatlines I think probably at the minute are the most alarming because there is no control over that. You log on and you're able to carry on typewritten conversations with other people and a lot of that can be legitimate again, but a lot of it is illegitimate in the sense that people will log on and they will use anonymous names and addresses and they will also do what is called spoofing.
''Spoofing is where an individual will log on with a totally false name, create a totally false line of his or her background, a totally false age and they will then inveigle the sometimes quite innocent person to get in to what I can only describe as salacious conversations about their private sex life and they will then start exchanging photographs and or sending photographs.
''Now a lot of kids access the Internet through PCs in their parents' home. The parents I don't think realise that if kids get on to chatlines, they really don't know who they're talking to.''
Detection of such crime on the Internet also presented difficulties, he explained, reinforcing the need for authorities around the world to co-operate. ''The Internet has no political boundaries and legal boundaries. It really is a truly worldwide system. Hence the reason there needs to be not only integrated activity on police and customs activity in the UK, but it needs to be integrated and co-ordinated worldwide.''
Internet crime represented one of the biggest challenges to future policing, warned Mr Hamilton. ''I think probably in terms of computer crime generally it's probably the biggest single challenge to law enforcement in the millennium.''
It will demand, I think, increasing computer training expertise on behalf of police investigators which we may have to buy in because apart from discovering the problem, we need then to instigate the lines of inquiry and that's a very complex business and one which requires a fair degree of technical expertise to get through to an arrest. We have got to be at least on a par and probably a step ahead.''
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