Standard Chartered Bank is to encourage financial institutions to
commit themselves to combating internet child pornography by sharing
information about websites selling the material and stopping payments
passing to them.
The London-based bank, which does most of its business in Asia, Africa
and the Middle East, has said it will ‘take the lead’ by recruiting
financial institutions for the Financial Coalition against Child
Pornography. The initiative was started this year to ‘eliminate the
commercial viability’ of child pornography by stopping the money flow
through internet sites.
The coalition, which is run in conjunction with the International
Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, has support from 21 mainly
US-based banks, credit card companies, third party payment companies
and internet services businesses.
However, Standard Chartered group executive director Mike Denoma, who
is heading the bank’s drive for more members, said the problem could be
tackled only if many more companies signed up. The bank has begun
recruiting in the 56 countries in which it operates and aims to have
made presentations to banks and other ‘key actors’ in 75 per cent of
those countries by the end of March 2007. It piloted the presentations
for six months in Singapore, where senior executives also made efforts
at the recent IMF-World Bank meetings to raise awareness of the
coalition and enlist more members. So far the response has been slow.
Some estimates suggest that child porn websites have global revenues of
between $5billion and $20billion (£2.7bn and £10.8bn) – potentially
eight times that of the vitamin industry.
Denoma said the coalition, if it grows, can make bigger inroads than
other policing methods. ‘You can certainly go after the individual
paedophiles and websites, but the faster way would be to try to cut off
the payment link,’ he said.
