Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps the Government is taking in co-operation with the Netherlands Government to ensure the prosecution of people posting online child sexual abuse material that is held in, and distributed from, the Netherlands and available in the UK.

The Government is committed to tackling child sexual exploitation and abuse wherever and however it occurs. There can be no safe space for paedophiles to operate either here or abroad and we will do all we can to keep children safe. We continue to work closely with law enforcement in the UK and international partners to close down online networks and bring offenders to justice. We announced in the 2019 Spending Round an investment of an £30 million to support UK law enforcement to bear down on child sexual exploitation and abuse.

The Government is working closely with the Netherlands to tackle online child sexual abuse material that is held in, and distributed from, the Netherlands and available in the UK. The Dutch approach to addressing the threat of online child sexual exploitation and abuse was outlined in a letter from their Ministry of Justice and Security to the European Union. This provided a useful platform for our engagement on how we can work together on this issue, identify areas of common interest, best practice and ways to coordinate our efforts to tackle the threat.

The Dutch hotline, EOKM, will also be working with the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation to combat the issue of child sexual abuse material. In 1996 when the Internet Watch Foundation was founded, the UK hosted 18% of the global total of online child sexual abuse content; in 2019 this figure was just 0.1%.

UK police have existing powers under section 72 and Schedule 2 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 which provides for extra-territorial jurisdiction in relation to certain offences under the 2003 Act where the victim is under the age of 18 years old. We continue to look at what more we can do with our international partners giving due consideration to the findings of the “Children Outside the UK report’ published by the Independent Inquiry on Child Sexual Abuse in January 2020.