Online sexual abuse has become a worsening problem in Canada, with a frightening growth in sexually violent images of very young children on illegal pay-for view websites, the RCMP say.

RCMP Supt. Earla Kim McColl, who runs Canada's National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre (NCECC), said the volume of new images is alarming, and so is the violent trend in the content.

"Probably 80 per cent of the images involve some kind of penetration -- oral, anal or vaginal -- and a significant number, about 20 per cent, also involving torture and bondage," she said.

Even more disturbing, the parties responsible are usually related to the victim.

"It's almost always somebody within the family," Internet safety expert Paul Gillespie told Canada AM Monday.

With the Internet service providers claiming they can't police such vast amounts of information, Gillespie stresses that it is up to parents to be vigilant.

"It boils down to the parents using good common sense...and using their best instincts," Gillespie said.

He also suggests having an age-appropriate discussion about internet safety when the children are old enough to understand.

Internet child pornography has turned into a $2.6-billion industry with 20,000 new child porn websites every month. At any given time, there are 50,000 pedophiles online around the world. Most of them access websites based in Third World countries where laws are more lax.

Canadian pedophiles, however, are contributing to the problem.

"There are rising numbers every year of new Canadians we find are using these sites," David Janes, an RCMP database analyst, told CTV News.

McColl put the number of Canadian men paying for online child pornography in the hundreds.

Since the NCECC was set up in 2002, the Mounties have rescued 100 children from predators.

In March, Canadian and U.S. investigators cracked an international child pornography ring that featured live molestations of children streamed over the Internet. Nine of the 27 accused are from Canada, 13 from the United States, three from Australia and two from Britain.

All but one out of the 27 charged has been arrested. The one who remains at large is considered a fugitive, officials said.

The case began when an Edmonton woman overheard two children talking and reported their conversation to police, said Det. Randy Wickens of that city's Internet Child Exploitation unit.

That led to an arrest in Edmonton in May 2005. The man, whose name has been banned from publication, was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

Open-source computer software created by Microsoft Canada was used to crack the ring. The Child Exploitation Tracking System, which contains data gathered from international sources, helped police to correlate such information as credit card purchases, messages from chat rooms and arrest records.

Seven child victims of sexual molestation have been identified as a result of the investigation. The youngest was just 18 months old.

The age of the victims starts with "babies with umbilical cords attached -- which is unbelievable," she said.

An alarming number of the predators are the children's fathers, said McColl.

"When we see children in videos screaming 'daddy don't, daddy don't,'" that is an indicator parents are involved, she said.

Chasing online predators subjects investigators to a mind-boggling array of horrific images. One, of a young girl who still had chubby baby fat on her legs, has been difficult to forget, said McColl. "Her arms are being held back and I will never forget that image."

A symbol of what keeps McColl and her investigators going is a quilt given to them as a gift from one of the victims they saved, who is still struggling to forget what happened.

"Most of the time I forget," the victim said. "I fight the urge to hurt."

With a report from CTV's Robert Fife and files from The Canadian Press