The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) has pledged that those who deliberately view child pornography online will go to prison, but has suggested that non-custodial sentences may be suitable in some cases.

CEOP chief executive Jim Gamble said on BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the scale of the child abuse problem in Britain is such that not everyone who views an image could be sent to jail without a major prison building programme.

But he was clear that those who seek out such material will be jailed. "If someone deliberately goes to one of these sites and uses a credit card to buy child pornography, they should go to prison," he said. "It needs to act as a deterrent."

Ray Wyre, director of RWA, an independent child protection group that aims to help to rehabilitate sex offenders, said that not everyone who downloads child pornography is a paedophile because web page viewing can be inadvertent.

"They see a sentence under pictures that says 'three virgins', or something like that, and they get curious as to what that is, and they download it," he said. "It is that easy to have illegal images on your computer."

Wyre added that peer-to-peer services like Lime Wire are also catching people out with misnamed files.