Earlier this week, Graham Coutts was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of teacher Jane Longhurst after his obsessions with strangulation and necrophilia were apparently fuelled by internet sites containing violent and pornographic images.
With Jane's mother now calling for such sites to be closed down, the case raises fresh questions about how the internet can or should be policed. For all it gives us, the internet, it seems, cannot escape being portrayed as a terrible curse as much as a blessing.
The complexity of the issues involved in such pleas for content control should not be underestimated: safety and protection for internet users, censorship of content, international relations, global legislation, and individual responsibility and compliance.
Millions of people use the internet every day and enjoy the freedom and access it gives them to information from all over the world. But when the "bad stuff" is contextualised in such an extreme way as in a murder case, finds themselves asking why we are not able to stop such content.
In the UK, we actually have a high awareness of internet content issues. The Internet Watch Foundation works closely with the country's internet service providers (ISPs), police forces and central government to ensure that we are doing all we can to control the online availability of illegal or potentially illegal images.
There is a clear divide in legislation covering images of child abuse and adult content. Child abuse images are deemed globally unacceptable and international laws reflect this. Attitudes to adult content, however, vary enormously around the world, a fact reflected in less precise laws determining what it is and how it should be controlled.
In either case, much of the content comes from sites hosted outside the UK. These are governed by the country of source, so cannot be controlled by the internet industry, regulators or law enforcement agencies in Britain.
Ongoing international discussions between governments, police departments, regulators and industry bodies as well as safety and protection organisations, hope to reach a more cohesive position on how illegal internet content should be managed.
The model in the UK works. The ISPs are responsible and compliant, and since 1997 the percentage of content categorised as potentially illegal has dropped from 18% to 1%.
The rest of the commercial internet industry, such as software vendors, continue to develop new filtering mechanisms which allow individuals to protect themselves. Search engines have their own means of filtering and regularly review new ways to protect users.
It is acknowledged that the internet has allowed images of this type to be more accessible to a wider audience than ever before and that all types of pornography in many different media formats, such as pay-per-view websites, can be a lucrative business.
Efforts continue to find new ways to combat the availability of potentially illegal images online, with organisations both at home and abroad building relationships to this end.
In the meantime, we encourage internet users to be vigilant and proactive if they have any kind of exposure to obscene and potentially illegal images, and report it.
Please also support what is being done in the UK, so we can set an example by leading the way and move towards a more widely adopted international model of monitoring what's out there.
· Fay MacDonald is communications coordinator for the Internet Watch Foundation
