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Radio New Zealand
Friday August 14 1992
"Morning Report"
Karen Fisher (Presenter):
Customs minister, Murray McCully, says child pornography is increasing and
short of heavier penalties there's little the customs department can do to
combat it quickly.
Mr McCully says customs officers regard this traffic as seriously as illicit
drugs but they believe they pick up only a tiny proportion of the child porn
that's sent through the mail and videos and pictures. They believe they're seeing an increase
both in volume and in the level of degradation the material subjects children
to.
He quotes a nine month period where customs made 57 interceptions of material
relating to paedophilia alone, mostly in Auckland.
Mr McCully says it poses a very difficult problem for customs,
Murray McCully:
(Customs Minister)
Most of us would find it very difficult to understand why there's any demand
at all but I suppose it's got to be a worrying sign that there is a
requirement that some people have for it.
And certainly we do our best to try and pick it up but it's... You can
understand that for example in the mail room it's very difficult to pick out
child pornography or any sort of pornography from a whole bunch of letters
and parcels. At least with drugs you
can put the sniffer dogs in there and the track record which customs have in
that regard is most impressive, increasing levels of interception and...
Probably a major deterrent effect but there is literally no way other than
simply looking for some sort of tell tale mark about a place that it's come
from or some sort of indication given the address that it's going to in this
country, to give you a steer as to where to look - and so I think it's a
battle that's going to be very hard to win in that respect, which is why I
think we've got to take some interest in any measures that'll tighten up the
law because harsher penalties for those who you do catch I think are probably
the more appropriate way of providing a disincentive.
I think that where there is a significant difficulty in detection you have to
look probably at harsher penalties as the only means of providing a
deterrent. We could probably treble
the number op people that we have at the border to try to detect the stuff
without making a big dent in it but if you were to make the penalties more
significant I suspect that would have some effect. But we'll be discussing that internally. It's a subject that the department's got,
given some attention and some resource to and they've decided to mark
suffrage year by adopting a child pornography project which hopefully will
make us better informed in this area as well.
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