MADRID, April 5, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – Spanish police have launched a nationwide campaign against child porn Web sites, the seventh in three months’ time to crack down on the dark corners of cyberspace.

As it tops the world’s list of countries where Internet child pornography is widespread, Spain is working in tandem with child rights organizations to protect the younger generation from falling prey to child abusers.

Early this year, Spanish police smashed an 11-member child porn ring and questioned 28 suspects.

The past year witnessed one of the largest anti-child porn raid in Spain, which netted up to 100 pedophiles in 26 cities.

Statistics of Spanish police showed that European countries top the list of countries misusing the Web to distribute a plethora of child porn Web sites.

The list also includes 15 African countries, 11 from Asia and 12 from the Americas.

Police sources also say there are over 100,000 images of abused children with some of the children only two years old.

NGOs and child rights organizations are also on the prowl for child pornography, defined by NGOs and federal laws as a “visual depiction of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct.”

The civil campaign is primarily aimed at raising the awareness of parents and schoolteachers about how to closely monitor their children and regularly check the history of their Web pages.

It further recommends parents to prevent their children chatting with strangers even if they are children.

Papers are full of stories on how many children and teenagers were lured into the trap of a man posing as a child or a teenager, who are actually nothing but pedophiles.

The Spanish Society of Defending Teenagers revealed that 44 percent of children using chat rooms were abused by adults, which left them psychologically scarred.

It said 11 percent of them were abused more than one time.

In 2003, Microsoft’s Internet service, MSN, decided to shut down its MSN chat service in over 25 countries.