Lancaster boffins aid hunt for sex beasts (From Lancaster And Morecambe Citizen)

Lancaster boffins aid hunt for sex beasts

7:55am Friday 20th June 2008

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COMPUTER boffins at Lancaster University are helping police track down paedophiles - with a new tool that can help identify perverts hunting children on the internet.

Uni experts have linked-up with Swansea and Middlesex universities and UK law enforcement authorities to develop a way to identify paedophiles masquerading as children in online chat rooms.

The social networking boom in recent years means there are more chat rooms and file sharing systems available online than ever before.

Paedophiles can exploit these environments to groom young users, to network with other paedophiles and share images of child abuse.

Now the universities are helping to develop new monitoring techniques as a practical tool for law enforcement officers.

Once developed, they will free up police time and add to the expertise already deployed in identifying and tracking down child sex offenders.

Lead researcher Professor Awais Rashid, of Lancaster's department of computing, says: "Paedophiles often pose as children online and can be difficult to track as they move quickly from site to site.

"Using new language analysis tools and drawing on the expertise of specialist officers, we hope to develop an automated system which can pick up on quirks of language particular to a certain age group.

"These language patterns can help us to expose adults that seek to groom children online, by posing as children in chat rooms for example."

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