UL researchers aid Brazilian police in developing method of arresting paedophile gangs
University of Limerick researchers have helped Brazilian Federal Police devise one of the best ways of arresting gangs involved in the distribution of videos and photographs of children being sexually abused.
The initiative was a first for both Brazilian Police and the University of Limerick and came about after a Brazilian police officer came to Limerick to do a research PhD.
The research Dr Bruno da Cunha was involved with centred around mathematicians from Limerick working out which paedophiles detectives should go after on the so-called ‘dark web’.
As a result, police officers targeting them in the future look set to be more efficient.
The research project worked on data from a Brazilian police operation carried out between 2014 and 2016.
It led to the arrest and identification of 182 users – 170 of whom were distributors – and the rescue of six children.
Of over 10,000 users, 766 were sharing content.
The team of researchers from the Mathematics Applications Consortium for Science and Industry (MACSI) and the Centre for Social Issues Research, both based at UL, investigated how effective the operation was in disrupting the distribution of the content.
The research team, which was led by Professor James Gleeson, used the analysis to suggest the best ways to target individuals to maximise the effect of this disruption.
“Network analysis has previously been applied to drug trafficking networks and terrorist networks to identify structural weaknesses and key figures in these illicit networks,” Dr Pádraig MacCarron said.
He is the postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Social Issues Research and MACSI who worked with Dr Bruno da Cunha, Kleber Oliveira and Professor Gleeson on the research.
“The dark web network in this study, however, was much denser. There were more connections between users than normal, making it more difficult to break down using traditional network methods.
“It was found that the 60% of those core 766 distributors would need to be removed to completely fragment the network."
The research was partly funded by Science Foundation Ireland and by the European Research Council.
