CANBERRA, Dec. 23 (Xinhua) -- The Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) has warned that the dark web has led to widespread violent child abuse.
Reece Kershaw, who was named the head of the AFP in July, on Monday told News Corp Australia that Australia has not uncovered the full extent of online child pornography.
His comments came days after police officers arrested Ron Brierley, a prominent Sydney businessman, on his way out of the country and charged him with multiple counts of possessing child pornography.
Kershaw said that law enforcement was concerned about the link between possessing child pornography and "contact offending" against real children.
"I don't think the public have fully understood that link. These people aren't just downloading images; they're wired that way," he said.
Child pornography is often spread via the dark web, the part of the internet that requires specific software of authorization to access, making it difficult for police to check.
Kershaw said that the spread of child abuse material online suggested to police that such incidents in the real-world are under-reported and misunderstood.
"We uncovered the extent of domestic violence. I'm still not convinced we've uncovered the scale of child sexual abuse." he said.
Peter Dutton, the Minister for Home Affairs, introduced new laws to better protect children from sexual abuse in September.
Under the new laws, any marriage of a child under the age of 16 is now defined as "forced" and is thus void. They also gave law enforcement greater powers to fight child abuse.
"This government will take no backward steps to combat these heinous crimes, which have a serious and long-lasting effect on victims, survivors and the community," Dutton said.
"We have listened to the experiences of survivors. We have listened to the views of frontline officers about the challenges they are facing. We will keep working to ensure these crimes have no place in our society," he added.
