For the past ten years the European Union has made important efforts to develop an adequate legal framework to address the challenge related to child sex abuse.
On 16 December 2016 two reports of the EU Commission assessed the extent to which the EU Member States had taken the necessary measures in order to comply with the 2011 Directive.
In light of these findings, this Action decided to address an area where much more work needs to be done.
In fact, the reports stressed that an “integrated and holistic approach” is needed, however it seems that while much effort has been made to investigate and prosecute child sex abuse crimes while not enough attention has been paid to preventing them (COM(2016) 871 final, p. 20). The analysis suggests that one of the main challenges for Member States is now related to prevention and intervention programmes.
In all training events foreseen in the present Action (for more details see “objectives” and “activities”), the key challenges ahead related to preventing measures (i.e. ensuring that child sexual abuse material in Member States’ territory is removed promptly, that adequate safeguards are provided where the Member State opts to take measures to block access to internet users within its territory to web pages containing child sexual abuse material, etc.) will be presented and debated.