reporting child pornography

This morning, amongst the mountains of spam I delete every day, one caught my eye. It was advertising "widest range of child pornography and exclusive lolita galleries".

Probably a scam, but just in case I wanted to report it to the proper authorities for follow up.

As the email originated from a .com address, I first tried the FBI site. They indeed provide a link to report Internet crime, but only accepts "complaints from either the person who believes they were defrauded or from a third party to the complainant". You also have to provide your full details and agree that these might be used in future by various government agencies. No place for anonymous tips on child pornography, thus.

Next I tried childpornography.com, the "Adults Against Child Pornography Child Pornography Reporting Center". I very much applaud the initiative, but at first glance, there didn't seem to be any link or email to actually report a crime. After my initial confusion, I noticed the scroll bars. Indeed, hidden way below is a reference to the "National Center for Missing and Exploited Children". This links to an obscure page on the FBI site (with broken pictures), which in turn links to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Protection (that does not seem to provide any facilities to report a suspected crime) and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. After some searching on this site, I spotted an obscure link to Cyber Tipline, a complex form with lots of fields to report actual abuse, but no facility to forward a suspect spam message.

I decided to search for "Child Abuse" on Google and found the US Department of Justice's guide to exploitation and obscenity law, Wikipedia's definition of child pornography, along with a multitude of articles, papers, and public calls for action. But still no link to report my message to.

At this point I almost gave up. As a last attempt I tried to search for Dutch sites and found the "Meldpunt Kinderporno op Internet". On the homepage there's an obvious link to a quick and easy Web form to report suspect spam messages anonymously.

Instead of an online form, I would have preferred an email address to forward the message to, but at least I can now rest in the knowledge that I did my best to report the message and hope the proper authorities will follow up on it!