Unreported and ‘under-policed’: The fight against child abuse material
Saturday, 6 December 2025
There are millions of attempts to access illicit material in New Zealand, but very few prosecutions. As Stewart Sowman-Lund reports, quantifying the scale of the crisis is only part of the struggle.
Ian Tyler knows better than most the lengths to which some people go to access illegal material and conceal their illicit desires.
A former undercover cop in the UK, Tyler was involved in breaking online paedophile rings involving thousands of offenders. He was also a detective chief inspector with the British police’s specialist Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre.
“Everybody thinks that a paedophile is somebody in a Mackintosh [raincoat] looking extremely grubby with a pair of very thick glasses and a Harry Potter T-shirt,” he told The Post.
“That’s not the case, and that’s why it's so difficult. And most people … when they’re first caught, have no previous convictions, and this is why the true scale of people who carry those thoughts in their head is unknown.
“People can be living at home with the wife and the kids … a car on the drive, and the mortgage and a dog and everything else … and have never acted on [their urges] in an online or an offline capacity. Now, it's not a crime to have those urges. It's when they act on it.”
Former deputy police commissioner Jevon McSkimming will be sentenced on December 17 after pleading guilty to possessing child sexual exploitation and bestiality material over a four-year period: it’s a case that demonstrated that this isn’t just a crime being committed by shadowy figures on the fringes of society.
‘Nobody knows the true figure’
“This particular crime does not have any social barriers at all,” said Tyler.
“Nobody knows the true figure. Is it under-policed? Yes, it is. And one of the key reasons that it's under-policed is that most of these crimes … go unreported.”.
Tim Houston manages the Department of Internal Affairs [DIA] Digital Child Exploitation team - responsible for the detection, investigation and prosecution of offences relating to objectionable publications.
It also operates the Digital Child Exploitation Filtering System (DCEFS) which blocks online access to known illegal websites that provide access to child sexual exploitation material.
In 2023, the DCEFS blocked over 1.1 million attempts to access websites hosting child sexual exploitation and abuse. In 2024, the number of attempts dropped by 13%.
In 2025, up until September, Houston said there had been about 450,000 hits.
There is a “mixture of reasons” why somebody might end up being blocked from accessing a particular website. Some will have innocently stumbled upon illegal material, while others will have been seeking it out. Not every click represents a unique user either, meaning the actual number of people attempting to find this material online will be significantly smaller than the number of hits.
Still, said Houston, “there are a lot of attempts to try and reach that illegal content”.
Some comfort can come from knowing not all of the traffic will be from New Zealand; if people have used a New Zealand IP address via a virtual private network, or VPN, it will still be recorded.
The filter isn’t a direct pipeline to being charged, however. Instead, it prevents people from accessing the material that would constitute an offence if they succeeded. Intent alone isn’t enough.
The system is “highly dynamic”, said Houston, with the list of blocked sites refreshing twice a day to capture anywhere from “multiple hundreds of sites to many thousands”.
No information gathered during the filtering process is used to mount investigations, but the DIA does receive referrals from “a number of different sources”, including the public, police and Customs, along with international law enforcement agencies.
A lot comes from the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in America, “a clearinghouse for cyber tipline reports that have been made by US-based electronic service providers who detect child exploitation material on their systems”.
Houston continued: “They have to report that to the centre, who then assess where the action is likely to have happened from, and make a referral to that country.”
About 16,000 reports from the National Centre were received in New Zealand last year.
Investigations are then triaged, considering whether someone has displayed a “sustained” interest in illicit material, has been prosecuted before or has access to children.
“It's not safe to assume that an offender's interest is solely based online,” said Houston.
“We approach all of our investigations with that at the forefront of our minds, and obviously [consider] the severity of the content [and] the volume of the content. There's a number of indicators that we will use when we triage and ultimately determine what will become a criminal investigation.”
Despite those alarmingly high statistics, there’s a relatively small number of prosecutions. In 2024, DIA successfully prosecuted 13 offenders from 69 investigations, including search warrants and criminal investigation queries. Some investigations are handed over to overseas and domestic partners for further work.
“We have to be careful in what we prioritise, based on the resources we have available,” said Houston.
Crossing the ‘cyber border’
Customs also deals with child sexual abuse material, working in tandem with both DIA and the police.
Simon Peterson, chief customs officer of the Child Exploitation Operations Team, said his team investigates and prosecutes the importation or exportation of illicit material, which includes physical items and digital material. The latter is considered “imported” if it’s downloaded from abroad, though physical items such as childlike sex dolls are also recovered.
Those cases are significantly rarer than material found crossing the “cyber border”; in the last year just three investigations have been carried out, with one arrest.
“Thirty years ago, we would have been stopping physical goods - VHS tapes, DVDs, magazines,” Peterson explained. “Now that it's all gone digital, we're either dealing with digital files on physical devices at the border, or we're dealing with digital files that are being traded across our cyber border.”.
Again, there are various ways they detect the material entering the country, much of it relying on what social media platforms report.
“An example might be … if I've sent a video to a friend of mine in Australia, then that becomes an offence under the Customs and Excise Act as an export,” said Peterson.
“I think we see it as a bit more serious than just having it yourself, because what you're doing, if you're exporting it or importing it, is you're creating this churn, you're encouraging the demand and the trade of this material globally, which is more of a problem … than simply just having it on your own devices.”
Only Customs has the power to lay charges for import-export offences. The DIA deals with distribution, which may also go between countries.
People are occasionally picked up at the border, where their devices are searched, but that’s a very targeted approach. Don’t expect to be randomly spot checked so an officer can look at what’s on your phone, unless there’s a good reason.
Not only would that be “far too much work”, but it could also see people wrongfully targeted for one of the most serious offences.
“If you're accused of that wrongly, that's quite an accusation to make, so we're very careful about making sure we target people properly,” Peterson said.
“We work very closely with not just DIA and police, but with our partner agencies offshore as well, and we do quite a bit of targeting against people that we know may have offended online, and that's where we probably pick them up at the border.
“So someone who has offended online may well be actually dealt with at the border when they're travelling, and that's when we would find material on their devices.”
‘Hard to detect … hard to deal with’
Peterson said people react in different ways when they’re caught. Some are “almost relieved” and very forthcoming, while others will “resist right up to the very last day in court”.
According to Tyler, many have no previous convictions and are quick to confess.
“They plead guilty because they know the stigma that's attached to it, and they want this over with as quickly as they can. They get remorseful, but they also get advice from the solicitor that there's no way out of this, so the best thing you can do is plead guilty and throw yourself at the mercy of the courts.”
It’s difficult to quantify the scale of the problem.
Tyler estimated that of the high number caught attempting to access illegal material by DIA’s filter, true unique attempts will be much lower. It’s likely about 2-3% of the New Zealand population.
“A bit of ‘finger in the air’ backed up with some science,” he said, though “attempts to reach [abuse material] are frequent enough that automated filtering registers them at a national scale.”
A lot of different metrics are looked at, but ultimately, it is a “clandestine activity”, Peterson added.
“So it's hard to detect, it's hard to deal with, and a lot of people don't even want to talk about it.
“It is quite hard to get some really steady stats - unlike drug seizures, that's quite easy to deal with.”
About 18,000 reports have been received this year from social media companies in the United States, triaged across the three main agencies.
“But … there's the rest of the world that we don't know about. I think we've done just over 770 cases this year, which has ultimately resulted in 14 people being arrested so far, which is almost the most people we've done,” said Peterson, who said one more arrest in 2025 would set a new annual record.
Most of the material being dealt with - “I would say 99%” - has originated overseas, but tracking that is quite difficult.
“The material that we're dealing with shows us that there is a massive amount of importing going on at some point, but what we end up prosecuting most frequently is people in New Zealand who are exporting it to others offshore.”
Police provided figures from its Digital Forensic Unit, which records cases based on the initial charges.
These numbers can act only as a guide, given charges for possession or distribution of objectionable material are sometimes added later or not initially captured.
There have been 159 cases this year involving devices coded as either possession or distribution of objectionable material. Though not all would be child abuse material, “the majority is”.
The figures have been rising since 2017 (when 98 were recorded).
Police also receive reports when information is discovered on a device by acquaintances, arising from a sexual abuse complaint, or subsequently identified during another investigation when exhibits are analysed.
Agencies working at capacity
With artificial intelligence becoming more widespread, there’s concern the problem will only increase.
“We don't want to use our resources essentially trying to investigate a child that doesn't exist,” said Houston from DIA.
There are also resourcing issues across all the key agencies.
“The fact is, there are not many officers around the world that are dedicated to this type of investigating and policing,” Tyler said. “It's just a fact of life.”
Peterson puts it more bluntly: “The problem is big, but we'll never have enough resource to deal with it either.”
Worryingly, there is a growing trend towards more violent and abusive content, even some involving infants, he added.
The challenge isn’t just catching offenders, it’s keeping up with them.
“It's always distressing … it's always distressing. It's always confronting. Doesn't matter how long you've been doing the job.”
Where to get help:
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thelowdown.co.nz Web chat, email chat or free text 5626
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