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Simon Fraser University’s first professor specializing in cybercrime doesn’t think child pornography on the internet will ever be completely eliminated, but it’s still necessary to fight it.

Sara Smyth, an associate professor in the School of Criminology, is teaching courses on cybercrime at the SFU Surrey campus this fall.

An SFU graduate who once practiced law in Vancouver, she returns to the West Coast from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Smyth says that despite increased public awareness, internet-based child pornography is on the rise.

“In the last six months, in the province of Ontario alone, there were as many as 70,000 independent IP addresses making child pornography available on peer-to-peer networks,” Smyth says.

“We would be fooling ourselves to think we could eradicate child pornography or catch all of the bad guys trading child pornography images and exploiting children on the web.”

More disturbingly, she says, the age of the children featured in the images is getting younger and the images are becoming more graphic.

Smyth is researching other types of online criminal activity as well, including child luring, crimes associated with online gaming environments and the drug trade, money laundering, and terrorism.

Education and research are key to combating cybercrime, Smyth says. Her priorities include organizing conferences to bring together others in the emerging field, adding more cybercrime courses at SFU and securing funds for new research projects.

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