Sex crimes unit already overwhelmed, and EU lawmakers only want to make it worse
Dutch sex crimes investigators are already overloaded: sexual abuse victims have to wait far too long for their cases to be heard. The European Commission has plans that will only make this worse by generating a plethora of, often unjustified, reports.
Disastrous proposal
A bill to crack down on online child abuse is currently being discussed in Brussels. The aim is admirable, but the proposal disastrous: it puts the confidentiality of communications at risk. With such a law in place, the government could force companies to monitor their users’ chats, when in fact these chats are protected with end-to-end encryption. In doing so, this law harms everyone, including the very children and young people it aims to protect.
It’s a serious problem and we can’t afford to waste time and energy on measures that do not work, or that even make the problem worse.
To be clear: we find child sexual abuse shocking. That also means that, as a society, we cannot afford to spend energy into counterproductive measures. Staring blindly at technology is simply irresponsible. At best, that will only polish the image of a few politicians. Effective measures are not that difficult at all.
Bad by nature
For example, European lawmakers want to be able to force companies to detect grooming. This can’t be done without the application of computers and artificial intelligence. There is a lot wrong with that. Namely, it means that those companies, by order of the government, have to monitor the communications of all their users in an undirected way (a “general monitoring obligation” in the legal jargon). It also means jettisoning end-to-end encryption, as this would get in the way of such an obligation. But, more important for this story is that those companies could only automate that by deploying artificial intelligence. That kind of technology is notoriously bad at properly understanding context: a sexual conversation between two teenagers is different from an adult trying to seduce a small child.
Marking your own homework
So if you want to deploy this technology at all, you have to expect a large number of unjustified reports. All of those times someone will be wrongly accused. That alone is incredibly intense, and such a wrongful accusation can also haunt you for a long time. On top of that, every time you waste precious investigative capacity that is not put into effective measures. The European Commission does believe in that technology. Based on what do they believe this? Well: the figures from the makers of that technology. This is the only possible source since, as far as we know, there simply isn’t any independent and scientifically sound research either.
The European proposal will only create even more reports. The Dutch police were crystal clear about this: “We cannot handle that.”
Incidentally, the European Commission also knows that a lot of errors are to be expected in the detection of grooming. The Commission assumes ten percent of false positives! So, in at least one in ten cases, the research is lost capacity. She is in no doubt basing this on the optimistic figures of the makers of that technology. The Commission refuses to commit to a minimum reliability for such technology. Such a limit would make the law no longer “technology-neutral”, or so they argue.
Already overloaded
All of this while the police are already overloaded. For years now, Dutch police have not met agreed deadlines for handling cases. If the police only pick up your case after a year, it is difficult to find out what really happened. If you report a case now, you can easily have to wait two or three years before the case goes to court. That is, if you are not already discouraged beforehand, because partly due to the workload in the police, the treatment of victims is substandard. This has been a thorn in the flesh of the House of Representatives for years. But in recent years, research shows, despite millions of investments, the number of sex crimes investigators has not increased.
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For grooming, that capacity issue is no different. The police called it “already a challenge” in a technical briefing in the Lower House. The European proposal will only create even more reports, and in particular also a very large mountain of unjustified reports. The police have no room for that at all. The police were crystal clear about this in the Dutch Lower House : “We cannot handle that.”
Assist and prevent victims
In short, if you really want to protect children and young people, you need to focus on effective measures. One such measure is increasing the capacity of the police and prosecutors. Because now the victim is often not helped, and the perpetrator goes unpunished. More attention should also be paid to counseling victims. As long as the reality is that we cannot help victims properly, more reports are of no use at all, and wasting time and energy on unjustified reports only makes the puzzle even harder. That is why the European Commission’s proposal should go straight into the bin.
Blindly focusing on technology is absolutely irresponsible.
Blindly focusing on technology is absolutely irresponsible. It’s a serious problem and we can’t afford to waste time and energy on measures that do not work, or that even make the problem worse. The bar must be set much higher, precisely because everyone agrees that children and young people should be allowed to ask the most of us.