Warning over kids' holiday photos on internet

EXPERTS ARE warning parents not to put holiday snaps of their children online because they could end up in a child porn collection.

NetSafe spokesperson Lee Chisholm says authorities have found holiday photographs of children, pulled off the internet, in collections of child abuse images.

And Auckland psychologist Nathan Gaunt, an expert in online sex abuse and pornography, says some men who view child abuse images are actively trawling the internet for "child-next-door images".

"There has definitely been huge interest in `normal' images of children," Gault says. "There are people out there who do have an interest in school websites, or holiday snaps. These pictures are very real to people, so of course people who have a sexual interest in images of children find that quite interesting," he says.

He says some men will conjure up fantasies around a picture of a child, while others will find a text-based story on the internet, then go looking for a picture to match: "say, a red-headed eight-year-old".

Others, who have collections of images of a particular child being abused, will search for lookalike children on the internet to add to the fantasy.