POLICE in the UK are sifting through the names of a suspected 7,000 paedophiles who allegedly logged on to a child porn Internet site.

Dean Kirby looks at the rise of the evil hobby on the world wide web and what is being done to catch those responsible.

IT is difficult to tell whether child abuse is on the increase. The greater media focus it gets, the more willing victims might be to report it to the police.

But there has certainly been a huge increase in child abuse and child pornography on the Internet. The case of disgraced singer Gary Glitter, who was convicted of downloading indecent photographs of children from the Internet, has only highlighted the problem.

And police chiefs fear the world wide web is where the future growth will be.

Last year, Texas computer consultant Thomas Reedy was jailed for life after being convicted of running an Internet child porn ring.

FBI investigators discovered that his on-line porn empire stretched over three continents, had some 250,000 subscribers and had a turnover of $1.4 million a month.

Today, the same investigation that led to his arrest is continuing. Police officers in the UK are sifting through evidence against up to 7,000 suspected paedophiles as part of Operation Ore. The Who guitarist Pete Townsend has been arrested and released on bail after his name was passed on to British police.

A simple piece of detective work has led to the first arrests -- through credit card numbers. All the subscribers had to provide a credit card number so that Reedy's network could verify who they were before charging them to access 5,700 sites.

Once the authorities cracked the code scrambling the numbers, it was a relatively simple job of tracking down the owners of the cards.

The breakthrough was hailed as a major success in child protection, but the reality is that more money is needed to keep up the good work.

Detectives in Britain have asked the Government for emergency funding for the case, saying they face an enormous task to bring suspects to court. The problem for the police appears to be prosecution rather than detection.

Labour MP Deborah Shipley, who campaigns on child protection, recently told a radio discussion programme that £500,000 had been given, but the police needed about £2 million to tackle the huge scale of the problem.

"The police need to get a move on and the Government needs to finance it as a matter of urgency," she says. Some people may try to argue that there should not be so much fuss -- that looking at child pornography is no more serious than looking at other dirty pictures.

But detectives taking part in the investigation have found that 30 per cent of people already arrested for viewing child porn had physically abused children as well. And a number of child porn suspects in Britain have been found to be abusing their own children.

Deputy assistant commissioner Carole Howell, of the Metropolitan Police, who is a spokesman on Internet child abuse for the Association of Chief Police Officers, says: "Until recently people really had not realised what child abuse on the Internet is.

"There's been this sense that it's not more serious than mucky pictures.

"But every sexual image of a child on the Internet is a child being physically and sexually abused and we cannot forget that. We have got to gear up our response."

She said one way the Government could improve the situation would be to set up a national computer system of children at risk to give the police up-to-date intelligence.

When a decision is being made about whether a child should go on the at-risk register, officers should be confident they had all the relevant information.

Deputy assistant commissioner Howell said social services and the police were now working closer than ever before. She is also working with health officials to identify at-risk children early and to track them through childhood.

In Greater Manchester, a special Police Obscene Publications Unit scans the Internet every day in a bid to stop stomach-churning images -- many involving young children -- from being circulated.

The team, based at the force's headquarters at Chester House, has been involved in the forefront of national strategies to investigate porn via the computer network. More than 200 people have already been convicted for offences of possession and distribution since the team was set up. Every one of them has now been placed on the Sex Offenders' Register so that the authorities can keep a closer eye on their activities.

Paedophiles are clearly using the Internet as way of communicating with each other, finding new victims and as a way of searching for indecent material. Hopefully more and more will get caught.

But the net will only tighten if police are given the extra resources they need to keep up the search and them hunt down.

"My biggest wish for child protection overall is that it becomes a ministerial priority," says deputy assistant commissioner Howell. "By which I mean that the Home Secretary cites it as one of the key objectives for national policing."

The National Organisation for Adult Survivors of Child Abuse can be contacted on 0800 085 3330.