Computer and psychology experts at UCC are playing a key role in monitoring and assessing the activities of Internet paedophiles, and providing evidence against them.
Since the Combating Paedophile Information Networks in Europe (Copine) project was established by the Child Studies Unit at the university four years ago, it has recorded a number of successes.
In 1989 the Department of Applied Psychology at UCC established a Child Studies Unit (CSU) under Prof Max Taylor. Its mission was: "To improve the quality of life for children at risk and their families through the education and training of those who work with and for them, while developing current knowledge through child-centred action research."
Funded by Interpol, police forces in Britain and the Netherlands as well as the Department of Justice, the project seeks to maintain a searchable reference database on child pornography.
Copine is involved in three main projects: the maintenance of a reference database on child pornography; the nature and incidence of child-sex tourism and trafficking in Europe; and the tracking of paedophiles through their collections of child pornography. The project also maintains very close links with the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in Washington DC.
Prof Taylor said: "This is an important research tool, allowing the assessment and characterisation of offenders' collections. It also enables new material, and therefore an urgent child protection problem, to be identified from old. It is probably one of the most complete structured reference databases of child pornography in the world and has been consulted by police forces in several countries to identify current child protection problems."
The UCC team has been having successes. Prof Taylor cites the case of the filming of the molestation of a young girl, which the unit came across. The pornographer, a relative of the victim, left clues from which the online detectives were able to trace him. The case is due before the courts in that jurisdiction and he may serve a lengthy sentence.
As we were talking about this issue and looking at a computer screen, a code-named individual logged on. He began talking on screen. His area of interest was pre-teen sex. He was somewhere in the US, but it didn't take Prof Taylor long to find out where, using his skill on the Internet.
Since its foundation, the unit has become involved in helping vulnerable children in Ethiopia, Rwanda, and in central and east Europe. It has targeted issues such as displacement, migration, war and famine.
Its initiatives in policy, training and research, though not widely known, have helped to make a difference through the introduction of street educators as well as the introduction of effective and culturally appropriate programmes, now being implemented in those countries by trained local staff and other professionals.