However the advent and exponential use of the internet has made child sexual abuse images more accessible and available to collectors and distributors Jenkins, Various expert bodies have agreed that the availability and production child sex abuse images is a global menace.
The IWF found that websites containing child sex abuse images had risen from 6, in to over 17, by IWF, The legislation in Scotland the Protection of Children and Prevention of Sexual Offences Scotland Act , s 16 attempts to curb the production, distribution and possession of child sex abuse images in Scotland.
However the majority of websites are hosted outside the UK and are therefore difficult to control, and a multi-faceted response to preventing child sex abuse images via the internet has not yet emerged IWF, One issue for legal practitioners is how to decipher the manner in which images are classified by the courts.
The scale was developed in Ireland at the COPINE project, in collaboration with other professions, for psychological therapeutic purposes to categorise child sex abuse images for research and law enforcement.
The COPINE scale is a descriptive classification comprising 10 levels of typology, based on analysis of images available on websites and internet newsgroups. Although the perception is of a scale to determine the gravity of images, the COPINE scale was not intended to be a scale of severity.
