"Doctor Li," a user on question-and-answer website Zhihu, was the first to break the news on the website about the existence of child sexual abuse sites in China. (Photo : Getty Images)
The question-and-answer website Zhihu became a hot venue for Chinese users reporting websites that host sexually abusive content against children, after a certain "Doctor Li" first wrote about accidentally stumbling upon a forum where such material, involving children below 14 years of age, is distributed.
Global Times reported that the discovery prompted Doctor Li to discover and report 10 more similar websites to authorities, largely with the help of other users from Zhihu who have also taken to task reporting all sexually-abusive content they find online.
Such discoveries have become a massive source of concern among Zhihu users, among which is an account representing the Communist Youth League of China, which confirmed and reported the first child porn site discovered by Doctor Li to both the Beijing police and the Cyberspace Administration of China.
Zhihu, in that way, became a venue for concerned users to ally with one another to perform reports against child porn sites over what can be described as a digital variant of the classic citizens' arrest. Such has been confirmed by the China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Centre (CIIRC).
The CIIRC, one of the authorities policing illegal activities on the Internet in China, said that while they frequently receive reports of child porn sites to the police departments concerned, they admit to having difficulties arising from domain name issues and presence in overseas servers.
Domain names ending in .cn are registered using real names, which is why CIIRC only inspects such websites. But the Internet watchdog said that domain names that end with ".org" are registered by U.S. company Verisign, making them harder to investigate as they are from foreign servers.
The discoveries have further highlighted the issue of sexual abuse blighting children in China, with the so-called "left-behind children" being the most vulnerable. The China Foundation of Culture and Arts for Children (FCAC) said that the press has reported 928 cases of sexual abuse against children in 2013-2015.
Said cases involve around 1,790 child victims, with 70 percent of them being within the 7-14 years old age range. Over 70 percent of the crimes those children have experience have been under the hands of relatives, teachers, neighbors, and other acquaintances.
