In a bid to encourage internet paedophiles to hand over their collections of abusive images, people who download child pornography should be offered counselling rather than automatically facing prosecution, according to a children's charity.

Under the scheme, people who hand over their indecent images of children to the police would not be taken to court but their names would be placed on the sex offenders register.

The man behind the idea, Donald Findlater, deputy director of a child protection charity, the Lucy Faithful Foundation, believes the scheme could encourage people who download child pornography to seek help before they abuse children.

"This proposal is aimed at people who have knowingly downloaded child pornography but not distributed it or abused children," he said.

"The intention is to encourage those who know they have a problem to come forward by sparing them the humiliation of a court appearance. They would be assessed by a psychiatrist, a psychologist or a probation officer while the police would investigate their computers."

Mr Findlater said the current approach, where people who download child pornography face prosecution and demonisation by the media if they break cover, prevents those uneasy about their sexual inclinations from seeking help.

"This is not about being soft on internet paedophilia. This problem is far bigger than the authorities can cope with. The police and social services are struggling to deal with those cases known to them. But there are thousands of others out there and we want to reach them before they turn their sexual fantasies into reality."

His proposal came after the government admitted that less than one in 20 of the 7,200 Britons found to have downloaded obscene images of children from a Texas-based website two years ago have been convicted.

Police forces involved in the huge Operation Ore internet paedophile inquiry have so far charged only 723 of the suspects of whom just 277 have been convicted, said a Home Office minister, Paul Goggins.

The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) said it would carefully consider Mr Findlater's proposal.

Stuart Hyde, Acpo's spokesman on combating child abuse on the internet and assistant chief constable of the West Midlands, said: "Whilst anything that can be done to protect children should always be considered, any such proposal needs to look beyond the removal of hardware, at the potential for such individuals to have been involved in actual child abuse."

Rachel O'Connell, director of the cyberspace research unit at the University of Central Lancashire, who spent five years investigating internet paedophile rings, shared the concerns raised by the police.

Ms O'Connell, a psychologist who has advised the government on internet safety, said the risk someone posed to children could not be assessed simply by examining the images they had downloaded.

"Much online paedophile activity is based around exchanging fantasies about child abuse and role playing abusive scenarios, and grooming activity - where they befriend children with the aim of meeting up with them to abuse them. So the police would also need to check for evidence of these activities."

But she welcomed the proposal for a less punitive approach to internet paedophilia.

"One of the most useful ways in which we could combat internet paedophilia is to recognise that there are many people at various stages of a sexual interest in children using the internet," she said.

"If we can enable those who recognise their behaviour is abusive to take steps to address it, that would be positive."

This view was shared by John Carr, internet advisor to the charity NCH Action for Children.

"If there are men locked into a pattern of downloading abusive images of children who are on the cusp of raping their own daughter, anything that might help them come forward for assessment and treatment should be seriously considered," he said.

Mr Carr said the proposal will be submitted to the Children's Charities Coalition for Internet Safety, which includes the NSPCC, Barnardo's, the Children's Society and NCH, later this month. The 13 children's charities will then formally propose the scheme to the police.