While the number of sites offering pornographic images and video has fallen as enforcement improves in some countries, activity has shifted to less easily tracked parts of the Web such as news groups and networking sites, experts say.

Brazil and Russia have cracked down on child abuse online, but about 80 countries have no specific laws against child pornography and places like Panama have emerged as hot spots.

“It’s evolving but it’s not stopping,” said Ethel Quayle, a psychology professor at the University of Edinburgh who specializes in the subject.

Quayle was one of about 3,000 delegates at the U.N.-backed World Congress Against Sexual Exploitation of Children and Adolescents in Rio de Janeiro last week, which called on countries to improve cooperation against online abuse. The British-based Internet Watch Foundation, which monitors child pornography online, in 2006 reported a four-fold rise in images of violent abuse since 2003 with extreme images such as those depicting rape of children becoming more common.

In its 2007 annual report, it noted signs of success in the fight against such sites, with a 10 percent drop in the number of domains.

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