More than 60% of child pornography in Europe is hosted on Dutch servers, new research has found.

The Netherlands’ high-quality digital infrastructure and reliable electricity networks has made it an attractive base for producers of online material, including images and videos of child sexual abuse, children’s rights charity Terre des Hommes said.

The organisation has called on political parties to commit to strengthening the regulation of what it calls an “online Wild West” to crack down on abusive content.

The Netherlands accounts for 30% of all abusive videos, photos and digital media featuring children produced in the world, the research team based at Edinburgh University found. The researchers use the term Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) to emphasise the fact that the victims cannot consent.

“In public we accept that we have to stop for a red traffic light,” Terre des Hommes spokesman Sven Stijnman told NRC. “We need those kind of rules online as well.

“It’s not just about storage: it’s being made here as well. We’ll never be able to prevent it completely, but we can do our best to minimise it. That’s what politicians should be talking about.”

Online safety

Several parties mention preventing sexual assault in their manifestos, but mainly in the context of making the streets safer for women, in some Stijnman pointed out.

“Just as people on the marches are saying ‘the night is for me’, I think it’s important for young people and children to say: ‘The internet is for me’,” he said.

In the last week police in Zuid-Holland have seized servers containing suspected child pornography from the homes of nine people across the province.

The investigation was based on reports from cloud servers and social media sites. Police are also trying to identify the victims that appear in the images.

The suspects are aged between 21 and 62 and live in Rotterdam, Barendrecht, Dordrecht and Capelle aan den IJssel.

“By effectively acting on these investigations the police and the public prosecution service want to keep sending out the message that downloading and possessing child pornography will not go unpunished,” Dennis Sneeuw of Rotterdam’s specialist police team for child pornography and sex tourism offences said.