Ex-Cop Unpacks Alarming Surge Of Child Abuse Material

Reports of online child abuse material have increased by 45 per cent in the last financial year, which is an average of 160 a day.

The Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation (ACCCE) recorded 58,503 reports of online child abuse in the 2023-24 financial year.

Jon Rouse is a retired Queensland detective who worked in Task Force Argos. Rouse implemented Australia’s first operation proactively targeting internet child sex offenders.

Former detective Jon Rouse explains where he thinks the child abuse material increase is coming from on this episode of The Briefing:

“It’s been the wild, wild web for too long,” Rouse said. “Our children are suffering horrendously as a result of it from a range of things, not just online grooming and sexual abuse.”

Rouse said accountability needs to be turned to industry, especially large technology companies.

“Apple, the biggest organisation in the world providing the most number of handsets in the world, do not self-manage or self-report or self-scan for child sexual abuse material and they keep ducking under the radar while we do attack people like Mark Zuckerberg,” he said.

To hear more about Jon Rouses’ work with Task Force Argos, listen to Disclosed: The Children In The Pictures.

“There needs to be a very big global pushback to these tech companies that have really had free range.”

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