Renewed Hope II has rescued 8 children from active abuse so far; 19 more identified
Portugal’s PJ police were among law enforcement agencies that recently took part in a “significant crackdown on the darkest corners of the web” to find and rescue child victims of sexual abuse.
Renewed Hope II (following on from last year’s Renewed Hope) ran in the US State of Virgina from February 26 to March 8. It involved various countries’ police forces working together on hundreds of cold cases involving previously unknown victims of online child sexual exploitation and abuse.
Coordinated by the Child Sexual Exploitation Unit of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the main investigative service of the US Department of Homeland Security, it combined the efforts of “the world’s leading experts in the investigation of online child sexual exploitation and abuse” with ‘child victim identification’.
Over the course of two weeks, more than 95,000 files were analysed, totalling 121 gigabytes of data, which translated, according to Portugal’s criminal investigation police agency, into approximately 64 hours of transmitted images and videos.
The investigation identified 414 clues using techniques for detecting offenders on the Internet, namely through the use of forums, websites, e-mail, chat rooms and file-sharing applications.
Amongst these 414 clues, the location and probable identities of child victims of sexual abuse or exploitation were achieved, to that point that eight were physically rescued from situations of abuse, and a further 19 identified.
According to HSI’s official press release “the operation generated 285 foreign and 129 domestic leads containing the location and probable identities of children were generated through sophisticated investigative techniques targeting offenders who operate via the internet (…). Leads are compared against images of unidentified children and offenders in Interpol’s International Child Sexual Exploitation Database and then disseminated globally to HSI field offices and 18 partnering countries”.
Apart from Portugal, other countries who took part in the initiative were Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Estonia, France, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, and United Kingdom, representing the following agencies:
Interpol, Europol, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, National Crime Agency, Australian Federal Police, Gendarmerie Nationale, An Garda Siochana, Belgium Federal Judicial Police, Bundeskriminalamt, Dutch National Police, Police and Border Guard of Estonia, Royal Thai Police, Swedish National Police, Spanish National Police, Guardia Civil, State Police of Latvia, Metropolitan Police Service, Victoria Police, Federal Police of Brazil, French National Department for the Protection of Children/National Directorate of the Judicial Police and the Polish National Police.
Source: LUSA/ HSI
