Child Sexual Exploitation - Child Pornography

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The Global Persecution of Women
Glossary

Human Rights

UDHR.

Article 1.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

Article 3.

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Article 4.

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Article 5.

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 6.

Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

Article 7.

All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

Article 8.

Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.

Article 5, CEDAW

States Parties shall take all appropriate measures:

(a) To modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women, with a view to achieving the elimination of prejudices and customary and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority or the superiority of either of the sexes or on stereotyped roles for men and women;

Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children, Supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime

Article 3. Use of Terms

(a) “Trafficking in persons” shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs;

(b) The consent of a victim of trafficking in persons to the intended exploitation set forth in subparagraph (a) of this article shall be irrelevant where any of the means set forth in subparagraph (a) have been used;

(c) The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of a child for the purpose of exploitation shall be considered “trafficking in persons” even if this does not involve any of the means set forth in subparagraph (a) of this article;

(d) “Child” shall mean any person under eighteen years of age.

Article 5. Criminalization

1. Each State Party shall adopt such legislative and other measures as may be necessary to establish as criminal offences the conduct set forth in article 3 of this Protocol, when committed intentionally.

2. Each State Party shall also adopt such legislative and other measures as may be necessary to establish as criminal offences:

(a) Subject to the basic concepts of its legal system, attempting to commit an offence established in accordance with paragraph 1 of this article;

(b) Participating as an accomplice in an offence established in accordance with paragraph 1 of this article; and

(c) Organizing or directing other persons to commit an offence established in accordance with paragraph 1 of this article.

Definitional

”What is Child Porn?” CBC Fifth Estate, 5 Nov. 2003.

"People do not understand what child pornography is. They often think it could be a child in a bathtub or an 11 year old frolicking on a beach. That's not what we're talking about," says Paul Gillespie, an investigator with the Toronto Police Child Exploitation unit.

He and nine other investigators have been tracking child porn for three years. Many of the images they've seen are shocking. "We regularly seize hundreds of thousands of images involving children as young as babies in diapers in pictures and in full length movies being brutally tortured, raped, sodomized and bleeding. This is the norm. There are now 3 and 4 year-olds in 20 minute movies screaming for daddy to stop."

The legal definitions of child pornography vary from country to country. In Canada it's illegal to distribute a picture of sex involving someone under eighteen (see porn laws in Canada). Unfortunately, many of the images seized by police go well beyond that definition.

Vancouver Police detective Noreen Waters is haunted by one particular image. "There's this one image of a little boy that looks terrified. He's being anally penetrated by an adult and he looks maybe five or six years old. That angered more me than anything. To think that this child looked so scared and somebody was collecting this as something sexual that stimulated them. They collect this material and think it's alright to look at these images of children being sexually abused."

The industry of child pornography has evolved along with the internet. It's now possible to access live online sex shows using Web cams and other real-time technology. In 1996, the Orchid Club, an internet club trading in child porn was busted after it hosted an online, by-request assault on a 10 year-old girl that was viewed all around the world.

HOW MUCH CHILD PORN IS ON THE INTERNET?

The internet is a sordid playground for people who are interested in accessing, sharing and selling child pornography; it's estimated that there are more than 100,000 child porn web sites.

According to Terri Moore, a Texan prosecutor involved in the Landslide case, (see more) it's an international problem. Her investigation into one child pornography portal revealed the names and credit card numbers of 300,000 subscribers from 37 American states and 60 countries. "The numbers are huge and the demand is enormous," she says.

And the problem is growing. In 1995, a Manchester police unit found only 12 images of children on the Internet. Now there are millions.

COPINE, a research group at the University of Cork in Ireland, that studies child pornography is seeing an average of three to four new faces of abused children each month. About 40% of the girls and 55% of the boys are between the ages of 9 and 12. The rest are younger.

They estimate that there are 50,000 new child abuse images being posted to newsgroups every month. That doesn't include pictures traded in e-mails or listed on peer-top peer sites commonly used to share music which are other ways to share child porn.

COLLECTORS OF PORNOGRAPHY

COPINE research has shown that collecting has become an obsession for many. Pornographic images are collected in series and labeled by a child's name, like 'the Heather series' or 'the Michael series' and feature children in various stages of abuse.

Some offenders acquire many images to increase their bartering power so that they can trade with other pornographers to obtain images of a particular child that they are attracted to. The more rare and complete a collection is, the more highly regarded the offender is by his on-line peers.

Some people have enormous collections. After the Orchid Club bust (see above) the investigation revealed another more sophisticated group, the Wonderland Club, another internet club, that required 10,000 child porn images as a membership fee.

During Operation Snowball (see more) Toronto Police raided a million dollar home in an upper middle class neighbourhood. Behind a door with four locks they found a vast collection of pornography. Inside the room were 13 safes of every size and description containing some 500,000 images. "I've never seen anything like that. So much in one place," said Ian Lamond, a member of the unit involved in the bust

Yet, the largest collection of child porn ever seized in Canada was much larger - 1 million images were found in one house.

Australia

Samantha Donovan, ”Police warn Werribee DVD will be treated as child pornography,” PM, 27 Oct. 2006.

MARK COLVIN: In Melbourne, police have been questioning a number of young men over an alleged assault on a teenage girl, which was filmed and then sold on DVD. The DVD reportedly shows the girl's hair being set on fire after she'd been allegedly sexually assaulted and urinated on.

Police are warning that anyone with a copy of the video could be charged with a child pornography offence. And a social networking website has deleted the accounts of users thought to have been involved in the alleged assault after they posted messages referring to the incident.

Samantha Donovan reports.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: The internet is playing a crucial role in this alleged crime and its aftermath. Today, the News Limited social networking website, MySpace, deleted the accounts of several people who may have been involved in the alleged assault and the making of the DVD.

Concerns about some postings regarding the incident had reportedly been raised with the site's administrator. MySpace says that it has notified the Victoria Police and internet safety groups of the postings.

Students from Werribee Secondary College were allegedly among those involved in the assault and the DVD is reported to have been sold there.

School Captain Joel Fisk says he's pleased that the company has closed down the accounts. He says he's shocked that anyone would post messages in support of the DVD and its makers.

JOEL FISK: I certainly don't support it and I know most of, in fact, all of my friends that I've spoken to about it certainly don't support it. So, it was a real shock when I started hearing and seeing that people had been blogging about it, and that they were in support of it. I mean, I just can't understand why someone would be.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: Victorian Police have now searched at least six homes and have seized extra video footage. Nine people have been interviewed in relation to the incident and several more are expected to be questioned.

Extracts from the DVD were posted on the video sharing website YouTube, but have now been removed. And police are warning that anyone in possession of the DVD could be charged with a child pornography offence.

Joel Fisk says it's been a distressing week for the students of Werribee Secondary.

JOEL FISK: The school morale is just really gone down over the last couple of days. Out in the streets and stuff our students are being targeted by people in the local community, verbally abusing, spitting on them.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: He says the news of the alleged assault and video came as a complete shock, and that it's hard to pinpoint the cause of such behaviour.

JOEL FISK: I think part of it is a lack of respect for others and themselves and then not an understanding of what's right and wrong, and what's legal and what's not legal.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: The alleged attack and its filming happened in the city of Wyndham in Melbourne's western suburbs. The city's mayor met with students at the school this afternoon.

Councillor Shane Bourke says the incident has horrified the community.

SHANE BOURKE: It's had the most incredible effect of anything that I can remember in recent years. It's probably one of the greatest challenges for this municipality and to say that the community is gutted would be an understatement. I think it's an inditement on our community. I think it's an inditement on the Victorian community, and I think it's an inditement on the whole of Australia.

So, what I'm calling on is, is, alright as community leaders we are going to do our darnedest to get to the bottom of this. But I would call on state and federal leaders to come and work with us in any way that they can.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: But the mayor is hoping that come good may come of the incident.

SHANE BOURKE: If you're looking for a silver lining in all this, and by God it's really hard to find any silver lining, but what I've noticed in our own home, in friends' home, in families homes, in the community's homes, everybody is talking about it and all of a sudden they are talking about it with their kids.

It might have been an issue that might never have been broached in anybody's home. I think young people can know now, you are responsible for your own actions. Now, these young people think that they are above the law, they are above the community. They are not.

Canada

Chad Skelton, “2nd ex-cop faces child-porn probe,” Vancouver Sun, 10 November 2006.

Prosecutors study report from Vancouver police department on allegations involving nine-year veteran's home computer.

Another former Vancouver police officer is under investigation for possession of child pornography, The Vancouver Sun has learned. The man, who resigned from the force in July, has been under criminal investigation by the RCMP's Integrated Child Exploitation unit since January after an allegation surfaced that he had child pornography on his home computer.

The man's name has not been released by Vancouver police, but The Sun has learned he is Tristan Johnson, 35, a nine-year member of the force.

In an interview Thursday, Insp. Rollie Woods, head of the Vancouver police professional standards unit, said the RCMP recently sent a report on the case to Crown prosecutors, who are deciding whether or not to lay charges.

"Last I heard, it was still before Crown," said Woods.

Neither Johnson nor his lawyer could be reached for comment Thursday afternoon.

Earlier this year Vancouver police Sgt. John Dragani -- who has since retired -- was charged with possession of child pornography after allegations surfaced in 2005 that he had child porn on his home computer.

Woods said there is no connection between the two cases.

Johnson was charged earlier this year with one count of uttering threats while off-duty. The charge was dropped after Johnson agreed to sign a peace bond.

About the same time, said Woods, Vancouver police received an unrelated tip that Johnson was accessing child pornography at his home.

Because Johnson lives in Surrey the information was passed on to the RCMP and Vancouver police launched an internal code-of-conduct investigation of their own.

The standard of proof in disciplinary investigations is lower than in a criminal trial, where facts must be proven "beyond a reasonable doubt."

Instead, guilt or innocence is determined based on a "balance of probabilities" -- meaning it is more likely an officer committed an offence than not.

Woods said Johnson was suspended in March and, in July, the force determined that it had enough evidence of child pornography possession to fire him.

"We were able to obtain enough information from the RCMP to substantiate the disciplinary default under the Police Act," said Woods. "We were satisfied that we were going to be seeking his termination."

Woods said a meeting was held with Johnson to advise him that the force would be seeking his dismissal, at which point he decided to resign.

Woods said Johnson's office computer was searched for child pornography and none was found.

”Manitoba girl's tip leads to U.K. sexual exploitation conviction,” CBC News, 9 Nov. 2006.

A man in the U.K. was sentenced Thursday to 10 years in prison for sexually exploiting young girls, including one teenage girl from Manitoba, through the internet.

The Inner London Crown Court sentenced Adrian Ringland, 36, to 10 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to a number of charges, including blackmail, hacking, indecency with a child, and making indecent photographs of a child.

Ringland, a father of two, posed as a chat room teenager to manipulate school-aged girls, hacking into their computers and blackmailing them into sending him explicit photographs of themselves.

One of his three victims was a 14-year-old Manitoba girl, said Signy Arnason, director of Cybertip.ca, a national telephone tipline based in Winnipeg that receives tips about internet predators.

"She had had an individual she was conversing with. He had opened her [computer's] CD tray and an image was sent," Arnason said Thursday.

"And she was petrified, so she came into the tipline to ask if we could assist her with dealing with it."

A man in the U.K. was sentenced Thursday to 10 years in prison for sexually exploiting young girls, including one teenage girl from Manitoba, through the internet.

The Inner London Crown Court sentenced Adrian Ringland, 36, to 10 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to a number of charges, including blackmail, hacking, indecency with a child, and making indecent photographs of a child.

Ringland, a father of two, posed as a chat room teenager to manipulate school-aged girls, hacking into their computers and blackmailing them into sending him explicit photographs of themselves.

One of his three victims was a 14-year-old Manitoba girl, said Signy Arnason, director of Cybertip.ca, a national telephone tipline based in Winnipeg that receives tips about internet predators.

"She had had an individual she was conversing with. He had opened her [computer's] CD tray and an image was sent," Arnason said Thursday.

"And she was petrified, so she came into the tipline to ask if we could assist her with dealing with it."

The other two girls Ringland targeted were in the U.K.

Girl praised for launching investigation

Cybertip.ca passed along the information to the Manitoba Integrated Child Exploitation Unit, a joint effort of the RCMP and the Winnipeg Police Service.

Winnipeg police Const. John Siderius praised the young teen in Manitoba for having the courage to tell her parents and report the incident to Cybertip.

"It took a lot of courage; she's a young girl," Siderius said.

"Not only was it a scary thing for her, but it was very embarrassing to have to admit what actually occurred and come forward and tell us — the police, strangers — her story," he said.

In London, internet investigator Dan Haagman with 7Safe Information Security Services credited the Manitoba teen with making the tip that started the investigation. He helped build a forensic case that led to Ringland's conviction.

"The child in Canada was the one who complained, she deserves credit," Haagman said Thursday.

Haagman noted that it was scary how Ringland used his knowledge of technology the way he did.

"The tools that he used are freely available on the internet, and it's pretty worrying that that is the case," he said.

Ringland had allegedly used specialized software to take over his victims' computers. The software, called a "computer backdoor," allowed him to access their hard drives, move their cursors around the screen, open and close the computers' CD trays, and even take pictures on their webcams.

"He basically took over their computer, and very scarily in this particular instance, their webcams, and took photographs of them after making them basically pose for them," Haagman said. "That's a very scary thing."

Siderius said that the damage that predators like Ringland inflict on young victims can be enormous.

"The girls definitely feel threatened by it, and they become very fearful," Siderius said.

"They don't know where this individual is. This individual could be next door, he could be halfway across the world, as was in this case."

Victory for tipline, investigators

Arnason said Ringland's conviction is a victory for Cybertip and child exploitation investigators.

"I think it's outstanding news that someone has been held accountable for going out and clearly victimizing a number of children, both within Canada and around the world," she said.

"I think anytime you're dealing with the internet, you're dealing with no borders. And as a result of that, it's not surprising to have suspects and victims in different areas around the world."

Siderius said a family's best defence against internet predators is for parents to monitor their children's use of the home computer constantly, and to report suspicious behaviour to Cybertip.

“'Internet rape' paedophile jailed,” Guardian, 9 Nov. 2006.

A paedophile who took remote control of teenage girls' computers from his home and terrorised them into sending intimate images of themselves was jailed today for 10 years.

Posing as a teenage boy on internet chatrooms, Adrian Ringland, 36, would first get his victims' email addresses. He would then send them an email containing a virus that allowed him to hack into their computers.

Targeting girls on both sides of the Atlantic, he would visibly take control of their PCs, moving cursors around, switching on printers and, in one case, opening and closing the CD-Rom drawer.

He asked his terrified victims, who were as young as 14, to send him indecent images and pose for him on their webcams. Ringland would send the girls threatening messages if they did not comply, warning that he would crash their machines.

The case is thought to feature the most technologically advanced form of online grooming by a paedophile to have come before the British courts.

Ringland, a father of two, who police believe was self taught in IT skills, targeted teenagers in the UK and Canada, thousands of miles away from his home in Ilkeston, Derbyshire.

He was sentenced today at inner London crown court after pleading guilty to 20 charges relating to the internet abuse of three girls in Britain and a Canadian girl aged 14, including 10 offences of making indecent photographs of a child.

In each case, Ringland had posed as an "attractive and innocent-looking" teenager called Ant Jones, sending his victims photographs of a young boy, whom he claimed to be.

The photograph contained a virus, known as a Trojan, that allowed him to establish remote control of his victims' computers.

Lisa Wilding, prosecuting, told the court, the virus had enabled Ringland to "manipulate and distort" systems "in order to frighten the girls into doing as he ordered ... to terrorise them".

She said: "It is a startling tale that will bring home to you the horrors that lurk within the internet and the minds of some individuals who use it."

One of his victims said his considerable IT expertise reminded her of the science fiction film The Matrix. Another described her ordeal as "internet rape", while a third threatened to commit suicide in the wake of the abuse.

The court heard that once Ringland felt he had the children under his control, he forced them to provide ever more explicit pictures of themselves. He warned that refusal would result in the pictures he already had being sent to their friends, or that valuable files would be wiped from their computers.

Ringland was convinced he was untouchable, boasting to one child: "Call the cops ... they won't trace me."

However, he was caught after a 14-year-old Canadian girl, who lived in a remote rural area, ignored his threats and told her parents, who alerted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

After an extensive hi-tech investigation, officers eventually cracked the array of electronic defences Ringland had created and traced him to his home, 4,000 miles away.

Ringland, who was unemployed and living with his partner at the time, was eventually arrested by local police, and bailed. A random check later caught him having sex with a 14-year-old girl, whom he had also groomed on the internet.

Hayley Mick and Anthony Reinhart, “Child-porn battle takes toll on officers,” Globe and Mail, 4 Nov. 2006.

Sex-abuse sting near London [Ontario] highlights psychological cost of pursuing pedophiles

Chinese food. A love song. Or a blond, blue-eyed toddler wandering through Wal-Mart.

For most people, they are benign sights and sounds. For police officers battling one of today's most horrific crimes -- Internet child pornography -- they can trigger flashbacks of the rape of a child.

"You just wish you could delete some files in your brain," says Paul Gillespie, who headed Toronto's acclaimed sex-crimes unit for six years until his resignation in June.

The psychological toll exacted on cybercops was highlighted this week with the shocking discovery of a preschool-aged girl allegedly being abused live, in real time, in a townhouse near London, Ont. Detective Constable Paul Krawczyk, who was working undercover and played a pivotal role in the arrest, told reporters that even hardened veterans were sickened by what they saw.

"This job could easily make you want to lock your kids up," says the 35-year-old officer, a four-year veteran of Toronto's child-exploitation unit.

Adds Mr. Gillespie, who six months after retirement is still choked up describing the terrible images he cannot shake: "I think scarred for life would be very much understated."

And yet, those who can hack it say they love their jobs. They're driven by anger, revulsion and the technological challenges of the work. Their satisfaction comes from making arrests and saving victims.

"You feel sometimes like you need to have a shower after," Det. Constable Krawczyk says. "But it's for the greater good. . . . The results are worth it."

The unique stresses faced by officers who work on child-pornography cases prompted the Ontario Provincial Police a few years ago to introduce a screening and support program called Safeguard. It was designed by Dr. Peter Collins, a forensic psychiatrist for the OPP and associate professor at the University of Toronto.

"Really it's just a spinoff of trying to protect undercover officers generally," Dr. Collins said yesterday, after a brief stop in Toronto to see how Det. Constable Krawczyk was doing. "You're having them sit down with professionals to essentially debrief them and make sure they're okay."

While there is no specific profile of an ideal child-porn investigator, Dr. Collins said, it is preferable to assign officers who are experiencing relatively little stress elsewhere in their lives.

Once they start on the job, officers must check in regularly with a psychologist trained to deal with exposure to such images. That includes whenever there is a stressful life change, such as becoming a parent.

In some cases, "you may want to remove them from that type of work, maybe temporarily."

Dr. Collins said the program has "been met almost uniformly by the officers as being something that they welcome. It's not resisted."

When child-porn investigators in Britain were surveyed recently about job-related stress by an occupational-health nurse, more than 90 per cent of them responded.

"On an ordinary survey you might get 40-per-cent response," Dr. Collins said. "On this survey, I had officers from other places in the country phoning her and saying, 'How come I didn't get a copy of it?' "

Horrific as it is to view child pornography day after day, Dr. Collins said, officers take comfort from successful prosecutions and from knowing they are essentially rescuing children.

While officers say counselling helps, sometimes it's just beer and wings with colleagues that does the trick. They also rely on outlets outside work. For Mr. Gillespie, it's exercise. Det. Constable Krawczyk embraces every second with his two young children.

Detective Sergeant Frank Goldschmidt, supervisor of Project P, the OPP's anti-child-pornography unit, says his release comes from breeding his Portuguese water dogs and power boating at the cottage.

But mostly, it's knowing that he's performing a desperately needed service. "When you know the public and everybody is behind you, it makes a big difference," he says.

”Internet cops arrest man after witnessing child abuse live online,” CBC News, 2 Nov. 2006.

An undercover police officer alleges he caught a man sexually assaulting a young child in southern Ontario live on the internet.

"You think you've seen everything, but at that moment what I recall is my heart racing out of control, sweating and thinking I was going to throw up," said Det. Const. Paul Krawczyk in a news conference held Thursday morning.

'I wanted to reach through the monitor and grab the child.'-Det. Const. Paul Krawczyk

When Toronto police Det. Const. Paul Krawczyk witnessed the real-time abuse of a child on the internet, he enlisted the help of other police forces to rescue the victim.

Krawczyk, who has worked with Toronto's world-renowned child exploitation unit for four years, said it was the first time officers in the unit have ever seen abuse unfold in real time on the web.

The undercover officer said he was posing as a pedophile and chatting online with a man in St. Thomas, south of London.

Then the man allegedly began taking images of the child, reportedly a preschool-age girl, and immediately sending them privately over the internet to the officer.

"I wanted to reach through the monitor and grab the child," said Krawczyk.

Officers in the child exploitation unit see these types of images all the time, he said, "but to see this child and look in that child's eyes and realize that child was live somewhere and that we had the possibility to save the child right then — it's difficult to describe."

Three police forces co-operate in rescue

Within moments of realizing he was apparently watching the assault live, Krawczyk called the Ontario Provincial Police, who then contacted police in St. Thomas.

Given an approximate location, the local police managed to track down and rescue the girl from the home two hours after the first phone call.

The St. Thomas man, who has not been named to protect the victim's identity, was arrested and charged with a number of child pornography-related offences.

Toronto police commended the St. Thomas police for their "extraordinary job" in locating the girl.

The victim is now safe with members of her family, police said. Child and Family Services has been involved in the case, said Krawczyk.

The alleged live sexual assault happened on Oct. 29, but Toronto police had been following the accused for 10 months, after receiving digital photos of a child over the internet in the months of January and October.

Krawczyk issued a stern warning to pedophiles lurking on the internet or those thinking of committing such acts.

"We are on the internet 24/7. We know where you go," he said. "We will find you and we will arrest you."

But he added that this type of live online capture of an assault is likely to increase, especially with the rising number of people who own digital cameras.

The St. Thomas man has been charged with:

• Three counts of making child pornography.
• Two counts of sexual assault.
• Two counts of sexual interference.
• One count of possession of child pornography for the purpose of distribution.
• One count of distributing child pornography.
• One count of possessing child pornography.
• One count of invitation to sexual touching.

He was scheduled to appear in the Ontario court of justice in St. Thomas on Thursday morning.

Jason van Rassel, “Tip leads police to sexually abused infant,” Calgary Herald, 18 Oct. 2006.

CALGARY - Police have rescued a one-year-old Calgary girl after receiving a tip from outside of the country that the infant's sexual abuse was being shown on the Internet.

Investigators with the Alberta Integrated Child Exploitation Unit revealed Tuesday that the tip led them to a southwest Calgary home, where they arrested a 31-year-old man on Friday. The man's name is being withheld by police to protect the child's identity, but investigators wouldn't disclose whether he is a relative.

The suspect is charged with five offences: distribution, possession and production of child pornography, sexual interference and invitation to sexual touching.

''I can't stress enough the need for international co-operation in these types of investigations,'' said Staff Sgt. Doug Andrus, a Calgary police member of the multi-agency ICE Unit. ''They know no borders. One investigation will lead you to a second, to a third, to a fourth and it's very common for them to cross international borders.''

A tip from an undisclosed foreign agency came into the National Child Exploitation Co-ordination Centre in Ottawa, an RCMP-administered bureau set up to investigate and refer child pornography investigations to the appropriate local police force.

In this case _in which the images were being uploaded to other pedophiles and being traded - Alberta ICE investigators made an arrest within a week.

''We believed there was a child at risk and we put a priority on this," Andrus said, adding the child is safe and social services agencies are involved.

He added that it's common for pedophiles to sexually abuse infants and share depictions of the crime online.

''It's not rare at all. It's fairly common," Andrus said.

An estimated 14 million websites display child pornography and an estimated 20,000 new images are posted on the Internet every week, according to the National Child Exploitation Co-ordination Centre. The Ottawa centre receives an average of 300 complaints monthly from around the world.

Joanathan Fowlie, “Hunting child pornographers in B.C.,” Vancouver Sun, 16 Sept. 2006.

Raped and sexually tortured children: Their images are traded by thousands in B.C.

"In the three years since the inception of the five-member Integrated Child Exploitation (ICE) unit, the files have steadily piled into a backlog leading its commanding officer to an alarming reality -- investigators are falling behind.

"As a result, some child sexual predators are not being pursued in B.C. because there are not enough police officers to go after them.

""We are overwhelmed. We have serious resourcing issues," Sgt. Janis Gray told The Vancouver Sun. "It's very stressful."

"She contends that her unit is about one-tenth the size necessary to keep pace with the activities of predators in this province.

""[There are] known predators that we know are out there, but for whatever reason . . . we haven't been able to get the evidence against them," she said.

"Gray said gut-wrenching images of child sexual abuse are being traded among people in this province every second of every day. What's more, each one of those images represents a child who has been victimized and abused.

"Five officers, she said, are not enough.

""What are we going to do about [this problem]? We are going to have five people in a province this size trying to tackle it? It's ridiculous," Gray said with exasperation.

"She said there is enough work flowing in to steadily employ 50 ICE investigators.

""On the flip side, [there are] police units dedicated to cigarette smuggling," she added. "Who cares? I mean, really, who cares? But you know what, it's about money."

"Gray said she has allowances to bring four more officers into her ICE unit, but a province-wide police shortage means the qualified officers interested in the job cannot be pulled from their current duties.

"As a point of comparison, the Toronto Police Service has 14 xxxxxxxxx investigators in its Child Exploitation Unit -- meaning that per capita it has more than

"4 1/2 times the number of officers fighting child exploitation than here in B.C.

"In an interview last week, B.C. Solicitor-General John Les said the fight against child exploitation and pornography is a big priority for his government and that the province has put "significant funding" into the ICE unit.

""It's been several months since I last talked to them, but I'm definitely going to follow up with them to see what other resources are required," he said.

"Les said he has never heard a request for 50 dedicated ICE officers, and said he thinks that might be an overly ambitious target.

""I'm not sure it's realistic to expect us to be able to put those kinds of resource towards it," he said.

"But that does not mean his government is not committed to fighting child exploitation, he added.

""I've got kids and grandkids of my own," said Les. "Nobody needs to prod me too much to make sure that we're doing everything we possibly can to get after these folks who would do these kinds of things."

"When asked if he could define the scope of the problem in B.C., Les admitted it is very difficult to quantify.

""It is tough to get your head around," he said. "But the fact is it goes on and . . . so long as that happens, we have work to do."

"Gray said she too is unable to define the prevalence of child sexual exploitation in B.C., especially because so much of it goes unreported.

""It's impossible to quantify because every time an image is viewed, let alone copied or distributed or created, it is an offense," she said.

""It's million and millions of images, therefore millions and millions of children that are being victimized, [and] re-victimized often over years," she said. "How do you wrap your brain around that amount of abuse and criminality? It's impossible."

"Since ICE's inception in February 2004, the unit has helped B.C. police and RCMP detachments with about 310 cases and has been directly involved in 30 arrests, all on charges relating to child pornography or child exploitation.

"Many of those have involved teachers or others in a position of authority, she said, because the mandate at ICE is to concentrate on either the most dangerous offenders, or those with regular access to children.

"The cases have included former Capilano College acting instructor Michael Berry, who faces child pornography and several sexual assault-related offenses; Chi Yung Luu, the North Delta teacher who brought a video camera into a boys' changing room in Washington State; and George Heinz Kraus, the Surrey teacher who pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography after 27,000 images were discovered on his home computer.

"But this is just the beginning, said Gray. Elsewhere in the province there are several others with a sexual interest in children and an occupation or hobby that puts him into regular contact with children.

""We are so far behind," Gray warned recently, speaking about everything from her own policing resources to the willingness of corporations to help fight the problem of child pornography.

""The gates are open and the river is rushing in. Especially when it comes to the Internet, we are lost."

"On May 11, 2005, police from the ICE unit arrested former Capilano College acting instructor Michael Berry of West Vancouver.

"At the time, the 67-year-old was charged with possession of child pornography, and police said they had reason to believe he might have been involved in making some of the images himself -- most of which are thought to have been created during the late 1970's and early 1980's.

"Berry has since been charged with various other offenses, including: sexual assault against one girl between January 1983 and December 1986; gross indecency between January 1980 and December 1986; and indecent assault of the same girl between January 1980 and January 1983.

"The Berry investigation is almost two years old, but there is so much evidence, it took a moving truck to carry the thousands of images from Berry's home to ICE's Surrey offices. As a result, the five-officer RCMP unit is still individually categorizing each image and still searching to identify and contact possible victims. It has hired two civilian employees to help with the task.

""That one file has [occupied] a large majority of my resources," said Gray.

"She explained that on each case, investigators attempt to look at every image of child exploitation and categorize it into themed groups such as sadistic acts, torture and child on child.

"This helps give the judge and jury of the eventual trial a clear idea of what the accused person has been collecting, and possibly making or distributing, she said. It also serves as a good reference if a convicted child pornographer reoffends after being released.

""We want to look at every image," she said. "It's important to us, because we want to see what [the suspect] has in his collection and see if there are local victims."

"This self-imposed mandate to view each image in an investigation isn't always possible, she said, especially when other cases are building in the queue.

""We had one guy and in his collection we stopped counting at over a million [images]," she said, noting that even at a million photographs the charge would still only be one count of possession.

""We just had to stop. I couldn't dedicate any more resources."

"Investigations can be extremely complex, stretching to web sites and locations around the world.

"In one case involving a B.C. man, Gray said, a small hotel card in the background of one photo led investigators to Vietnam where local police helped them zero in on their suspect -- who was believed to be in Australia at the time. When the ICE investigators contacted Australian police, they were told that Interpol was already following the same trail.

""Oh my God, I was so disappointed," said Gray, recalling the moment she heard her unit's impressive sleuthing had been for nothing.

"This example illustrates how quickly a local investigation can quickly spread around the globe into a multi-year affair.

"Gray added that one of the main problems is that there is often not enough information to properly assess the priority of a case until investigators spend time searching out and reviewing the evidence and details.

""I have a queue. Every day we reprioritize our files," she said.

"The unit currently has about 85 files ongoing, with each of the five investigators assigned about 10 cases, and the other files waiting in the queue.

"I don't have a crystal ball. All I have is the information people give me and who's to say that my guy that is 50 in the queue isn't offending? I can't tell. A lot of the times I can't tell just from the information I have."

"Cases rarely begin within the ICE unit. Rather, they come as referrals from local detachments where officers have identified a local person believed to be making, possessing or distributing child pornography on the Internet.

"Gray said ICE investigators will take on cases that meet the priority threshold, working directly with local police on everything from filing arrest and search warrants to conducting the arrest to interviewing the suspect.

"That doesn't mean detachments with cases not meeting the threshold are ignored, she added. Gray said officers will review warrants to ensure they are properly worded and may help with specialized tasks such as pulling any personal information from the Internet that may be connected to a given e-mail address.

"She conceded the system is imperfect, and several offenders are likely falling through the cracks. In an ideal world, the unit would have 50 investigators, making it a "fully functional ICE unit," she said.

""Keeping up on trends, keeping up on technology, keeping up on bad guy's movements -- the product would be far superior," she said.

"Earlier this year, Gray wrote a letter to a local newspaper to clarify something a reporter had written about a recent ICE case.

"The story said that Surrey teacher George Heinz Kraus had pleaded guilty to "possessing 27,000 images of naked children," something most people without direct knowledge of the case would reasonably see as accurate.

"Gray, however, was incensed -- so much so she had to wait 24 hours to cool down before crafting a response.

""These are not simply pictures of 'naked children,' " she wrote in a published letter to the editor.

""Child sexual-abuse images are a permanent record of a child being abused, raped and tortured. The images pose as a monument to our children's suffering and degradation, forever captured for predators to view over and over again."

"In a recent interview, Gray reiterated her concerns, saying she hopes people will someday understand that child pornography is not just pictures of naked children.

""There's torture and abuse and live rape and it's just the most horrific disgusting pictures anyone could ever see," she said.

""You feel like you are beating your head against the wall a lot, making people understand this isn't just kids from Russia; these are our children."

"Cpl. Sharon Simons, who has been working on the ICE unit for a year and who has been a sex crimes investigator for 18 years, agrees that these images breed frustration and need to be properly understood.

""The public has absolutely no idea what child pornography really is," she said recently.

""The sexual acts that are taking place, women wouldn't submit themselves to those acts and here you have children being forced.

""You'll have two men holding down a child and they are videotaping ... You see a child that's struggling and they've got vomit in their hair and everything else, how do you even begin to cross those boundaries?"

"Simons added: "If the general public had even a faint clue about the number of sexual cases that are out there, a lot of people would become very fearful. I think the education has to be more enhanced."

"Because of the sights they regularly see, investigators at the ICE unit tend not to use the term child pornography, preferring instead to refer to it as "images of child sexual exploitation."

"Every member interviewed said that at some point in their career, an image or a sound from a video -- or just the thought of a child waiting to be saved -- has kept them awake at night or haunted their dreams.

"Despite the nightmares and the need for regular checks, ICE investigators say the images are not what bother them most, but rather not being able to get to every case, or save every child.

Jonathan Fowlie, “Kids Hurt Beyond Belief. POLICING I. Investigators in B.C.'s child exploitation unit stay grounded by focusing on saving the victims,” Vancouver Sun, 16 Sept. 2006.

The visceral cries of children in distress, the brutal images of child rape and sexual exploitation: these are the horrifying realities of daily police work for the investigators at B.C.'s Integrated Child Exploitation unit.

"It's probably the saddest part of policing you'll ever experience, when you're dealing with injured children," said Cpl. Sharon Simons, one of five investigators on the provincial ICE team.

"For someone to do totally unspeakable things to a child is totally beyond our comprehension.

"There are some people out there that are so demented . . . they're not even human."

While Simons and others in the unit acknowledge the job involves viewing some of the most gruesome images available, the investigators say they are able to remain grounded by focusing on saving victims.

"You learn to deal with it," said Simons, who has been investigating sex crimes with the RCMP for the past 18 years, and who has been with the ICE unit since August 2005.

Still, Simons conceded, it can be difficult to block out everything.

As an example, she recalled the haunting sounds of abuse on a videotape where a father was sexually assaulting his four-year-old daughter, and how they played over in her mind long after the initial viewing.

"She was crying and whimpering and he was ignoring her and continuing," she said.

"That alone -- there are just some emotions that build up."

Const. Tania Carroll, who started with ICE in September 2005, said she was "shocked" when she first joined the unit.

"I didn't think [sexual acts] would be anything someone would do with a baby in diapers or sexually abusing a three-month-old. Those kind of images, those aren't the types of things you can easily forget," she said.

Members of the unit receive mandatory psychological debrief sessions every six months. They also have an informal policy of checking on each other while viewing images and try to look at images in the morning so they are not fresh in the mind when they return home.

Not only that, but the unit has three private screening rooms where investigators can look at images of sexual child exploitation without exposing it to others in the office.

"The least amount of people that have to see it the better," said Carroll.

The effects of the job spill into personal life as well, the investigators say, including how they look at teachers, coaches or others in positions of authority.

"Every time I'm going by a playground or anywhere there are kids I'm looking, and let me tell you if I see something happening, I'll be acting on it," said Simons.

"We get really good at picking out the bad ones," she added. "There'll be no free rides."

Sgt. Janis Gray, who heads ICE, said she too is more cautious in her life, particularly when it comes to her own kids.

"When it comes to the Internet and Internet safety . . . yeah I'm a little bit over the top, but I'm seeing what's happening."

Jonathan Fowlie, “Public 'blind' to abusers,” Vancouver Sun, 16 Sept. 2006.

If there's one major misconception about pedophiles, it's that the predator is going to be wearing a trench coat and idling outside your child's school in a van with stained window curtains.

While experts say most people know that the majority of child sex offenders are either family members or close friends, many are unwilling to see the pattern of abuse when it starts to emerge in their own lives.

"About 80 per cent of offences are committed by someone known to the victim, yet the people we, as parents and community members, most fear are the strangers," said Dr. Arthur Gordon, executive director of the Correctional Service of Canada's Abbotsford treatment centre.

"You should be more scared about uncle John with your kids than you should be the stranger in the playground."

When asked what leads to pedophilia, Gordon said the science is undecided.

"One of the more provocative theories is that you may be born as a pedophile -- that through a variety of genetic and biological events in utero you may be born with a brain that demonstrates a preference for underdeveloped sexual partners," he said.

But this is just one of many possible theories, he added.

One thing he did point out, though, is that many pedophiles are attracted to children in the same way others are attracted to adults.

When it comes to treatment, Gordon said there are a variety of options, but that there is no such thing as a cure.

"At very best what you can do is teach them how to control the thoughts, the emotions, the actions that go along with their molesting kids and teach them alternate ways of dealing with things and alternate social and sexual outlets," he said.

Jonathan Fowlie, “Abuse is often 'chilling,'” Vancouver Sun, 16 Sept. 2006.

The sexual abuse many child victims endure, and the effects it has on them as they begin to realize what happened, can be chilling, says a police investigator with the Integrated Child Exploitation unit.

Cpl. Sharon Simons recalled a case in which a seven-year-old boy was so upset about being abused by his father, he wet his pants on the way to an interview with police.

"It's very stressful for the children," she said. "It's confusing for them. They are deceived when everything turns sexual."

A leading expert in the field warned it should not be assumed that all children who have been sexually abused are affected equally.

"Children can be everything from temporarily upset, to moderately distressed, to ruined," said Dr. Lucy Berliner, an expert in the field of sexual abuse and director of the Harborview Center for Sexual Assault & Traumatic Stress in Seattle, Wash.

"We don't want to adopt a social framework that every kid is ruined for life and everyone who does this should be shot.

"It does not help a kid to have everyone around them think they are ruined."

Berliner said some victims of child sexual abuse are unquestionably traumatized to the point of severely hampered development, where self-esteem and self image are challenged. But this isn't always the case.

She said the main factors that affect the severity of the damage appear to be the threat a child perceives from the abuser and the length of time over which the abuse happens.

Other factors can include the relationship the molester has with the child -- a father may cause more damage than an uncle, for instance -- whether the child has been previously physically abused, and what kind of support a child receives after the sexual abuse has ended.

BLOWING THE WHISTLE

Anyone who discovers child pornography on the Internet can immediately report it to authorities at www.cybertip.ca. Since it was established in September 2002, the service has forwarded reports to law enforcement that have resulted in 20 arrests and the removal of as many as 1,100 websites.

Jonathan Fowlie, “More help needed to fight exploitation,” Vancouver Sun, 16 September 2006.

While Sgt. Janis Gray of the RCMP Integrated Child Exploitation unit says she needs more officers to properly fight child exploitation in B.C., she also says police will never be effective if they have to do it alone.

"We need help," she said. "We need help from society, we need help from corporations."

"Our Internet service providers and the credit card companies are not doing what they should be doing -- morally and socially," she said, explaining that companies in those industries collectively can potentially make millions of dollars from people who buy, sell and trade child pornography.

"They say it's not [their] responsibility to police the Internet, well whose is it then?," she asked, clearly frustrated.

"Are you a member of society? Are you a contributing member of society? Yes, you're making money off this; then why are you not being held to task?"

A spokeswoman for Visa Canada said, in a recent interview, that Visa already does a great deal to fight child pornography around the world, including paying a private firm to search about one million web pages a day to ensure illicit websites are not using Visa products to facilitate the sale of child pornography.

"Our payment products are not accepted at all for purchase or trade in child pornography, regardless of any local laws," Mei Ankrett said from her office in Toronto.

Ankrett said Visa is involved in other initiatives as well, including membership in the Financial Coalition Against Child Pornography and by cooperating with various law enforcement agencies around the world.

"We deplore child pornography and won't tolerate the use of our products with that activity in any way," she said.

Gray said she appreciates that, but adds that, regardless of Ankrett's assertions, she continues to see people using their credit cards, including Visa, to purchase images of child pornography, and would like that to stop. "How do you do that? I don't know," she says. "But perhaps the credit card companies do."

Telus spokesman Shawn Hall said his organization also does what it can to combat the problem of child pornography.

"Child pornography on the Internet is a horrible crime," he said. "We're actively engaged in the fight against it and we invest considerable money and resources to support industry efforts and organizations dedicated to the fight," he added.

Hall said Telus cooperates with law enforcement agencies across the country, is a member of the Canadian Coalition Against Internet Child Exploitation and financially supports many other programs that fight child pornography or raise awareness.

Despite these efforts, however, and those of other companies in related industries, Gray said the corporate world still needs to step up, be more proactive and simply do more.

"This isn't prostitution, it's slavery. It's sexual slavery and it's being expedited and its growing because of the corporate ignorance," she said.

"Why aren't we holding these people and these companies that are making money on this, why aren't we holding them responsible for trying to police it?" she asked.

Jonathan Fowlie, “Kids Hurt Beyond Belief. Investigators in B.C.'s child exploitation unit stay grounded by focusing on saving the victims,” Vancouver Sun, 16 Sept. 2006.

The visceral cries of children in distress, the brutal images of child rape and sexual exploitation: these are the horrifying realities of daily police work for the investigators at B.C.'s Integrated Child Exploitation unit.

"It's probably the saddest part of policing you'll ever experience, when you're dealing with injured children," said Cpl. Sharon Simons, one of five investigators on the provincial ICE team.

"For someone to do totally unspeakable things to a child is totally beyond our comprehension.

"There are some people out there that are so demented . . . they're not even human."

While Simons and others in the unit acknowledge the job involves viewing some of the most gruesome images available, the investigators say they are able to remain grounded by focusing on saving victims.

"You learn to deal with it," said Simons, who has been investigating sex crimes with the RCMP for the past 18 years, and who has been with the ICE unit since August 2005.

Still, Simons conceded, it can be difficult to block out everything.

As an example, she recalled the haunting sounds of abuse on a videotape where a father was sexually assaulting his four-year-old daughter, and how they played over in her mind long after the initial viewing.

"She was crying and whimpering and he was ignoring her and continuing," she said.

"That alone -- there are just some emotions that build up."

Const. Tania Carroll, who started with ICE in September 2005, said she was "shocked" when she first joined the unit.

"I didn't think [sexual acts] would be anything someone would do with a baby in diapers or sexually abusing a three-month-old. Those kind of images, those aren't the types of things you can easily forget," she said.

Members of the unit receive mandatory psychological debrief sessions every six months. They also have an informal policy of checking on each other while viewing images and try to look at images in the morning so they are not fresh in the mind when they return home.

Not only that, but the unit has three private screening rooms where investigators can look at images of sexual child exploitation without exposing it to others in the office.

"The least amount of people that have to see it the better," said Carroll.

The effects of the job spill into personal life as well, the investigators say, including how they look at teachers, coaches or others in positions of authority.

"Every time I'm going by a playground or anywhere there are kids I'm looking, and let me tell you if I see something happening, I'll be acting on it," said Simons.

"We get really good at picking out the bad ones," she added. "There'll be no free rides."

Sgt. Janis Gray, who heads ICE, said she too is more cautious in her life, particularly when it comes to her own kids.

"When it comes to the Internet and Internet safety . . . yeah I'm a little bit over the top, but I'm seeing what's happening."

Jobathan Fowlie, “Abuse is often 'chilling,'” Vancouver Sun, 16 Sept. 2006.

The sexual abuse many child victims endure, and the effects it has on them as they begin to realize what happened, can be chilling, says a police investigator with the Integrated Child Exploitation unit.

Cpl. Sharon Simons recalled a case in which a seven-year-old boy was so upset about being abused by his father, he wet his pants on the way to an interview with police.

"It's very stressful for the children," she said. "It's confusing for them. They are deceived when everything turns sexual."

A leading expert in the field warned it should not be assumed that all children who have been sexually abused are affected equally.

"Children can be everything from temporarily upset, to moderately distressed, to ruined," said Dr. Lucy Berliner, an expert in the field of sexual abuse and director of the Harborview Center for Sexual Assault & Traumatic Stress in Seattle, Wash.

"We don't want to adopt a social framework that every kid is ruined for life and everyone who does this should be shot.

"It does not help a kid to have everyone around them think they are ruined."

Berliner said some victims of child sexual abuse are unquestionably traumatized to the point of severely hampered development, where self-esteem and self image are challenged. But this isn't always the case.

She said the main factors that affect the severity of the damage appear to be the threat a child perceives from the abuser and the length of time over which the abuse happens.

Other factors can include the relationship the molester has with the child -- a father may cause more damage than an uncle, for instance -- whether the child has been previously physically abused, and what kind of support a child receives after the sexual abuse has ended.

BLOWING THE WHISTLE

Anyone who discovers child pornography on the Internet can immediately report it to authorities at www.cybertip.ca. Since it was established in September 2002, the service has forwarded reports to law enforcement that have resulted in 20 arrests and the removal of as many as 1,100 websites.

Jonathan Fowlie, “Anatomy of a child pornography case,” Vancouver Sun, 16 Sept. 2006.

On Sept. 19, 2005, Surrey teacher George Heinz Kraus received a conditional sentence after he pleaded guilty to one count of possession of child pornography involving 27,000 images. The following shows how the case unfolded.

GEORGE HEINZ KRAUS

Born in Poland on October 16, 1944, George Heinz Kraus spent time in a refugee camp in the Second World War. After spending time in Montreal, Kraus moved to B.C. in 1987. He received a B.A. from Simon Fraser University and taught for 13 years at White Rock elementary before moving to Laronde elementary in Surrey, where he worked for two years before his arrest. He has never married.

THE INVESTIGATION

A U.S. investigation into user-pay child pornography websites in 2002 showed Kraus had accessed Internet sites known to take payments for child pornography. The B.C. Integrated Child Exploitation Unit began its investigation into Kraus upon its inception in spring of 2004.

THE ARREST

On March 2, 2005, members of the ICE unit arrested Kraus at Laronde elementary, where he had been teaching Grades 5 and 6. Investigators searched his White Rock residence and found 27,000 images on his computer and in a separate data storage device. He had no prior criminal record.

THE CONFESSION

Kraus admitted to possession of child pornography and said he had been paying for child porn from websites for two years. "Most of them are just pictures of naked kids . . . It's not hurting anyone. They are all overseas," he told a reporter at the time.

Kraus said he had been attracted to children since his late teens but said he did not view them as sexual objects and that he has never molested a young child.

THE IMAGES

ICE investigators categorized the images seized, finding examples that fit into each of the following five categories.

Level 1: Non-erotic, non-sexualized material including nudity.

Level 2: Material where the dominant characteristic demonstrates a sexual purpose (emphasis on the genital area, a sex organ or anal region).

Level 3: Explicit sexual activity and assaults, involving adults and children and sexual acts between young children.

Level 4: Gross assaults, penetrative involving adults.

Level 5: Sadistic sexual images involving children.

THE SENTENCE

Kraus was given the following:

A conditional sentence of 14 months.

A 12-month probation order.

A three-year prohibition from places and situations involving children under 14 and from using a computer system.

A requirement that he provide a DNA sample to authorities and that his name be put into the federal sex offender information registry for 10 years.

”Child porn seizure was largest in Alberta's history, police say,” CBC News, 6 Sept. 2006.

An Edmonton man is facing several charges after police found more than a half-million images, videos and stories of child pornography when they raided a home.

Alberta RCMP announced the charges on Wednesday, calling it the largest child pornography seizure in the province's history.

An investigation by the Northern Alberta Integrated Child Exploitation Unit led to the raid on a home in north Edmonton in April.

Police said they seized a computer, compact discs and electronic storage devices.

Police said the same man was also the subject of a child pornography investigation being conducted by the FBI in the United States.

Warren Randall Mayo, 31, is facing four separate charges, including making and distributing child pornography.

He was released after being charged and will make his first court appearance on Oct. 17.

The Northern Alberta Integrated Child Exploitation is a multi-agency investigative unit involving the province, the RCMP and police in Edmonton, Calgary, Medicine Hat and Lethbridge.

Trish Audette, “Alleged predator posed as pal,” Edmonton Journal, 29 July 2006. Girls tricked to flash webcam while in chat room, police say.

EDMONTON - Police credit two Edmonton girls with helping to bring an alleged international child pornographer to justice.

After being coerced into exposing themselves online, the girls, aged 13 and 15, reported the abuse to Edmonton police last year.

As a result of the girls' claims, Mark Gary Bedford, 21, of Kingston, Ont., is charged with two counts of child luring, two counts each of possession and distribution of child pornography, three counts of making child pornography and three counts of extortion.

Bedford allegedly targeted girls from Canada and the United Kingdom, where he was the subject of another investigation.

More charges are expected to be laid, Ontario Provincial Police said Friday in Toronto.

"It comes back to the victims and what they're going through. We had two very young girls who had been victimized," said Kevin Fald, an Edmonton detective with Alberta's Integrated Child Exploitation Unit.

"They are terrified to come forward and tell their parents. Life as they know it is pretty much over and they don't want to talk about it with police. It must have been terrifying for them. But they did it anyway. ...

"Without victims coming forward to us, we have nothing. We don't have a starting point."

Last summer, the girls told police they were using Internet chat rooms when friends dared them to flash or expose themselves in front of their web cameras. On meeting the dare, the girls received the message, "I am not who you think I am."

Their friends' web identities were allegedly hijacked by a man living three provinces away, who masqueraded as a teenage girl to gain their trust. The message was followed by threats that the images would be shown to the girls' parents, friends and the world at large unless more explicit nude images were shared.

"(Predators) try to make you feel so overwhelmingly guilty about what you have done, you won't want to tell your parents," Fald said Friday.

The detective, who is a member of Alberta's Integrated Child Exploitation unit, urged young people who have been similarly victimized to tell their parents and police.

"Don't keep this inside you."

He could not say whether the two victims know each other. But, he said, there are about 10 other young people in the Edmonton area whose experiences are being investigated and may be linked to the same case.

"The only thing that was common was how it started. They thought they were talking to a friend," Fald said.

Bedford became a suspect after complaints were lodged in the United Kingdom this spring.

Officers in the U.K. were able to track the alleged offender's Internet protocol address to Kingston. Investigators learned of the Edmonton cases and they began working together along with police in the United States. Other victims have been identified in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., and Kent, east of London, England.

Police estimate more than 100 girls have been targeted based on what they've found so far in the suspect's computer.

They allege initial requests and threats escalated from asking children to lift up their shirts on-camera to masturbating.

Sometimes the web identities of young girls were used, other times the online names "Marco1812000" or "Supalover666."

Bedford lives with his parents in Kingston and surfed the Internet from his bedroom.

For technology-savvy children, the threat of losing their online account or messenger lists is more serious than many parents realize, said Internet security expert Rick Broadhead.

"For young kids today, there's probably very few things as precious as their online ID," he said. "Their online world is as important as the physical world they exist in day to day."

The child exploitation unit was launched last summer when the province put $1.75 million into the new program, more than doubling the number of investigators and forensic computer analysts going after child pornographers. There are two unit teams, one in Edmonton and one in Calgary, pulling together the resources of Edmonton, Calgary, Lethbridge and Medicine Hat police and RCMP. There are tentative plans to expand the investigators' roles to see them educating kids directly.

This is the second international child pornography case broken in the last six months as a result of investigations begun in Edmonton.

The first was in March, when the arrest of married father Carl Treleaven allowed police to unravel an Internet ring that saw more than 40 people sharing graphic photos and live streaming video involving children as young as 18 months.

In that case, Treleaven, 49, was charged with distributing child pornography in his position as administrator of an unnamed chat room. He was arrested in January, and while he was in jail police pretended to be him, allowing them to break into the underworld of Internet child sexual exploitation.

”2 Edmonton teens provided break in child porn case, police say,” CBC News, 28 July 2006.

A 21-year-old man in Canada allegedly used the internet to lure and extort pornographic images from more than 100 young girls in Ontario, Alberta and the United Kingdom, police said Friday. A tip from two teenagers in Edmonton helped break the case open, police say.

"We had two very, very young girls that had been very badly victimized over the internet," Det. Kevin Fald, of the Alberta Integrated Child Exploitation Unit, said at a news conference Friday in Edmonton.

"To make matters worse, they're ashamed, they're embarrassed, they're isolated. This was an online predator that was very very good at what he did. So they're terrified to come forward, to tell their parents. Life as they know is pretty much over. "

Police said the two teens who spoke to them were aged 13 and 15.

Officials said police are now talking to 10 teenagers in the Edmonton area and expect many more to come forward over the coming days.

Continue Article

Police allege Mark Gary Bedford of Kingston, Ont., used the internet to lure and extort pornographic images from more than 100 young girls in Edmonton, Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., and in Kent, England, police said Friday.

Officials allege he hacked into his victims' e-mail accounts, gained access to their lists of friends and tricked the young girls into sending him pornographic photos and videos over the internet.

"The accused would basically pretend to be a friend of one of these contacts and get them, threaten them and extort them to do some very awful sexual acts on web cam," Fald said. "Once he actually had what he needed from them, he would take over their account and go through all their contacts."

Threats made, police allege

Police allege the man used blackmail and threats of death, rape and bodily harm to convince his victims to continue sending him pornographic material.

Fald said investigators were able to find the accused, who had allegedly been exploiting girls unchecked for at least one year, using electronic fingerprinting tracking methods. He said the main challenge now is persuading victims to come forward.

"The task that's going to be daunting to us is victim identification," said Fald. "This could take a great deal of time obviously since we're dealing with victims that are hesitant to come forward, embarrassed, isolated and not going to be wanting to talk to police."

Det.-Sgt Frank Goldschmidt told a news conference in Toronto that he considered the far-reaching scope of the case to be unprecedented.

"I have never seen this many victims involved and I'm safe to say that, at this point and time in this early stage of this investigation, we're looking at well in excess of 100," Goldschmidt said.

The investigation took place from September 2005 to April of this year and involved the Ontario Provincial Police, RCMP, Kingston Police Service and Kent police in the United Kingdom.

Check computers, parents told

Goldschmidt added that there may be victims who have not yet been identified and advised parents to check their children's computers for messages from two internet aliases: marco1812000 and supalover666.

He also warned parents to monitor their children's activities.

"It amazes me to this day that parents allow their children to be locked up in their bedrooms with state-of-the-art computer equipment and then they get involved in this type of activity," said Goldschmidt.

In relation to the two victims in Edmonton, Bedford has been charged with:

• Two counts of luring a child by means of a computer.
• Two counts of possessing child pornography.
• Three counts of making child pornography.
• Two counts of distributing child pornography.
• Three counts of extortion.

Additional charges are pending, police said.

It was not clear if charges will be laid in the United Kingdom.

Police said the victims ranged in age from nine to 15 years. Officials seized a computer system, hard drives, computer discs and floppy diskettes from Bedford's home.

Police said the accused, who is unemployed and living with his parents, spent a lot of time online.

Bedford appeared at a bail hearing on Thursday and remains in custody. He is scheduled to make another court appearance on Monday

Shannon Kari, “Former Mountie charged with luring children,” 31 May 2006.

VANCOUVER -- A former RCMP officer in Langley has been charged with two counts of "child luring," allegedly while he was on duty and using a police computer.

Adam Jonathan Clarke, 23, is free on terms that include restrictions on his computer use. He is scheduled to make his first court appearance next month in Surrey, to enter a plea.

The former patrol officer resigned from the RCMP in February and is currently living in Newfoundland.

The Integrated Child Exploitation Unit of the RCMP began an investigation into alleged viewing and possession of child pornography in February of 2005. Corporal Diane Blain said yesterday that the investigation was initiated after an internal complaint.

The criminal charges stem from two incidents in May of 2005. Mr. Clarke is alleged to have tried to contact a 12-year-old girl from Langley and a 15-year-old girl in Richmond through Nexopia, a "community" website used primarily by teenagers. "It is alleged he was doing this while he was working," Cpl. Blain said.

Mr. Clarke is accused of using computers at one of the community police stations in Langley to try to contact the girls.

A child-luring charge requires the Crown to prove that a defendant was using a computer to communicate with a minor for the purpose of committing a sexual offence. It carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

The RCMP forwarded its investigation report to the provincial Ministry of the Attorney-General late last year.

Charges were filed against Mr. Clarke on May 19 although they were not made public until yesterday. The Crown's office did not respond to a request for comment about the delay in filing charges.

Mr. Clarke appeared in court in Grand Falls, Nfld., on May 23 and was released on conditions.

Liane Faulder, “Danger Zone: Internet offers feast of opportunities for predators, and naive kids deliver them a ready source of victims,” Canwest News Service, 28 Jan. 2006.

EDMONTON -- Det. Randy Wickins is on the trail of a middle-aged man who has been trying to lure a 13-year-old girl away from the safety of her home.

The man, we'll call him Joe, met the girl in an Internet chat room where he tried to coax her into a rendezvous for sex. Luckily, the girl told her teacher.

That's when Wickins stepped in. Now he's on the way to Joe's home, where he will join other offi - cers to arrest the man on charges of Internet luring, a crime with a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

"His world is about to be rocked," says Wickins. "What he thought he was doing anonymously in private no longer is anonymous and private."

Wickins is one of two Edmonton detectives who works full time on the Integrated Child Exploitation (ICE) team. The team tries to thwart predators and pornographers who have taken advantage of the Internet to create new ways of violating children and distributing illegal images of them.

Wickins is a sombre man who speaks carefully, measuring his words in low tones. But this night, Wickins allows himself a look of satisfaction.

"We need to protect our children," says Wickins. "That's what I'm doing right now -- You betcha."

While trailing pedophiles who use the Internet as a virtual key to a child's bedroom is a big part of Wickins's work, the bulk of the ICE squad's time is spent on child pornography -- finding it, expunging it and tracking down the people who trade, distribute and produce it. Nothing makes Wickins more angry than someone who refers to child pornography as "kiddie porn," as if it were somehow smaller, less harmful than the real thing.

"This is really important. It's not kiddie porn. It's about the different ways children are molested and exploited," he says. "Children are groomed to the point that they think it's the right thing to do. You have kids who are willing participants and you have three-year-olds being raped by an adult and kicking and screaming.

"I have lots of photos like that. The same thing is happening to a homeless child in Thailand as is happening to a kid in Edmonton. These aren't just pictures. These are real children. If there was nobody to look at it, it wouldn't be made."

Wickins is clear: These people are "monsters," and it's his job to stop them.

This month, his job may get a little bit easier. Thanks to a $1.65-million infusion by the Alberta government, Edmonton's ICE team is set to expand.

Soon, 14 new police officers, including investigators and team co-ordinators, will be hired across the province to fight the Internet exploitation of children, bringing the total provincial contingent to 21 officers.

The money couldn't come at a better time. Internet sex crimes are surging, and although Wickins and his partner, Det. Howard Kunce, routinely work 60-hour weeks, there is just too much to keep up with. Alberta Justice, too, is swamped.

The department decided in 2003 to make cybercrime a priority, says Crown prosecutor Steven Bilodeau, co-ordinator of technology and Internet crimes.

"I thought we'd be doing EBay frauds 80 per cent of the time," says Bilodeau. "It's the opposite. Child exploitation is 80 per cent of the work. And I just didn't see it coming."

Cybertip.ca, a national tip line for crimes involving the sexual abuse of children, reports that one in four youth have been sent pornography on the Internet by a stranger.

"The typical scenario is that a guy gets online and is talking, ostensibly, to a single parent with a small child," says Bilodeau. "The perpetrator will say something like, 'You don't want the kid's first sexual experience to be a negative one -- and I can help you with that. I'll come and have sex with the child.'"

Bilodeau says there is no specific law to cover that particular ploy, so prosecutors have to get creative by using different provisions of the Criminal Code, such as invitation to sexual touching, to bring a perpetrator to justice.

Technology has changed the world of child exploitation. Before the Internet, people who found themselves turned on by the sight of sex with children had to rely on securing pictures from a hardto-access underground community which often involved brown-paper-wrapped packages ordered by mail from other countries.

"Child pornography used to be very, very hard to find," says Bilodeau. "It was always in print, and you had to know somebody who had access to it. It was traded in back alleys.

"And keep in mind that a physical piece of paper would eventually crumble -- you just had photocopies of it and over time, it would deteriorate and the picture stopped existing."

But no more. With the onslaught of digital cameras and advanced computer technology (including webcams capable of recording and transmitting live sex scenes all around the world), nothing disappears.

"Every one of those digital images and videos is as clear today as it was the day it was made, and it will be again five years from now," says Bilodeau. "And it's out there, it's very easy to find. Anybody can find child pornography on the Internet."

Cybertip.ca says that of 3,504 reports of child pornography it has received since its inception three years ago, more than 1,600 involved images received via e-mail. More than 1,100 reports mentioned websites featuring child porn and more than 600 reports pointed to instant messaging, newsgroups and bulletin boards as the source of the illegal material.

Wickins says predators are having a field day due to the explosion of chat rooms and special Internet sites for young people to play games, to meet and visit, and to swap everything from ideas about music and favourite DVDs to pictures of themselves.

"It's a feeding frenzy. There is no shortage of victims and no shortage of opportunities," says Wickins, a cop for 20 years who spent a couple of years in vice before coming to the ICE team two years ago.

Endless opportunities to make contact with youngsters anonymously have made some predators very bold.

Take Jason James Bresnahan, who pleaded guilty in Edmonton in June in one of the first Internet cases in Canada involving an adult procuring another adult to commit sex acts on a child

Calling himself "THEMAN," Bresnahan met a woman named Nikki in an adult chat room. When he discovered she had a seven-year-old child, he suggested sex acts with the child.

Nikki, however, was actually Det. Wickins, undercover. Wickins began visiting the same chat room as Bresnahan after police were alerted to Bresnahan's online activities by two separate complaints. Bresnahan had been talking to other online participants about having sex with children. During one online conversation with Nikki, Bresnahan said he was about to abuse his own four-year-old child.

With the help of Shaw Cable, the police traced Bresnahan's Internet address to a cafe in Kamloops. Police caught him with his hands on the keyboard.

Bresnahan was sentenced to 10 months in jail and three years probation for transmitting obscene material, transmitting child pornography and counselling sexual interference.

Bilodeau says there's something about the Internet that makes predators think they can get away with indecent behaviour.

"Remember, they are probably doing this from the safety and security of their own home so when they look around, they see only things they are comfortable with," says Bilodeau. "They are only typing on a keyboard, it's not like they're looking somebody in the eye. I think there is a disconnect between what they're doing and reality. They think, 'I'll never get caught.'"

Unfortunately, children operate under the same misapprehension as the perpetrators. Though their parents may tell them not to give out phone numbers or other identifiers online, some get caught up in the moment and make a bad mistake.

Still, in its most recent report released in November, the Media Awareness Network in Ottawa says children report that more than 80 per cent of their online experiences are good ones.

Signey Arnason, director of Cybertip.ca, says the organization has logged 6,500 reports of Internet exploitation since 2002. There have been 14 arrests generated through the tip line and 550 websites have been shut down after being fingered by Cybertip.ca.

While there is no way of knowing how many children end up being exploited online, Canada is among the most "wired" nations in the world.

The Media Awareness Network says 94 per cent of Canadian children report they have Internet access at home. Furthermore, 22 per cent have their own webcams. The network found that 25 per cent of kids reported they had been asked to meet an online acquaintance in the real world.

Cybertip.ca notes that 15 per cent of all young Internet users have met, in the flesh, at least one person first contacted on the Internet; only six per cent of that group were accompanied by an adult.

"What I can say is that we believe that is only scratching the surface," says Arnason, whose organization is run through Child Find Manitoba.

Arnason says the Internet is the most popular way for children to communicate with their friends. And kids who lack friends at school or in their neighbourhoods can generate a social life via the Internet.

Girls, says Arnason, may be particularly vulnerable.

"Adolescent girls are the most victimized segment of the population," she says. "During that precarious stage of adolescence, they're seeking autonomy, their own independence and they are in a stage of sexual exploration.

"They are very vulnerable to flattery -- their misperception is that this is a safe environment for them to be exploring. But it's a false sense of privacy."

Young people will often visit games rooms and other meeting places, such as Nexopia, an Edmonton-based website and chat room where teens often post pictures of themselves together with information about their hobbies and favourite bands. They may give themselves online nicknames, such as dirtyho69.

Arnason remembers two girls who donned shorts and T-shirts and then posted pictures of themselves for Nexopia visitors to vote on. "They were flattered when people were voting on their photographs and they were extremely vulnerable, " she says.

Information supplied by the girls could have been used by predators looking to groom such naive youngsters into meeting in person. Sometimes such predators lie about their ages. But often they don't need to, because some young women in particular fantasize about having older boyfriends.

Arnason says adolescents don't have to be involved with predators to do stupid things on the Internet. She says young women have met guys their own age on the Internet, and sent nude photos (often via webcam) as part of the courtship.

"What children and youth don't understand is that once you've sent the image, you've lost control of it. It could be that you break up and he sends it to his friends. What they don't understand is the public nature and permanence of the Internet."

Arnason says parents must supervise carefully their children's Internet use. It's the one area of family life in which parents generally aren't role models for their kids, because many parents are Internet novices.

"You take your child to the swimming pool and you show them where to put the quarter for the locker, and where to rinse off. What we've done with the Internet is we've plunked them down and they've been presented with things they 're not developmentally equipped to handle. And we've made a huge mistake in doing that."

Nobody knows about the importance of supervision more than Karen (not her real name). At least now.

Over a year ago, the Edmonton mother had a terrible shock. It was about 11:30 p.m. and the nurse was just getting home after an evening shift at an Edmonton hospital. Karen was sitting in her car, smoking a last cigarette before going inside, when her cellphone rang. The call display revealed that the mother of a friend of Karen's 12-year-old daughter was on the line. She had disturbing news.

"Do you know what your daughter is doing?" asked the mother.

"She's in bed, asleep," replied Karen.

"Actually, she's not," was the reply.

Moments later, Karen found herself muscling open the door of her daughter's bedroom, only to catch her red-handed. The girl was on her computer, making tentative plans to get herself to Lethbridge to hook up with the guy she had met on the Internet.

"I had a little temper tantrum," recalls Karen. "And then I called police the very next day."

Police seized the girl's computer. More than a year later, police are still combing through the contents of its hard drive, looking for evidence against predators with whom she may have been in contact during her many night-time assignations while her mother was at work.

"Karen says her daughter was being offered drugs for sex and receiving live webcam feeds of men masturbating.

"Grown-up men, seniors," Karen says in disgust. "I never dreamed she'd be on those sites. I bought the computer for her 12th birthday. We got her games."

Now 13 and in Grade 9, Karen's daughter says she was never going to travel to Lethbridge the night she got busted by her mother. It was just a little fun with her online date. But she admits she had got in deeper than she had meant to, with more than one man online.

"I lied about my age," she says of her charade. "I'd say I was 18 or 19, depending on how old I felt. I told them I was a model and that I was rich. It's so easy to do."

She would spend hours on the web, eating junk food and drinking pop. But she 'd be wired and antsy, and couldn't sleep. Her marks plummeted. She put on weight.

"It was, like, let's see if I can do this today. Let's see if I can make this guy fall more in love with me," the girl says, emphasizing that she was really only interested in guys roughly her own age.

But she knows many of the guys she connected with online could have been lying about how old they were. Just as she was.

As Wickins drives back to police headquarters after the arrest of Joe, he thinks about many things. The children's pictures tacked up beside the condo's front door have Wickins feeling anxious. He wonders who made those pictures.

"We need to find that child and that child needs to be interviewed. At this point in the investigation, I have no idea who that child is, where she is, or what her relationship is. But it's our responsibility to find out.

"My investigation involves a man who has a sexual interest in children as defined by the Criminal Code. He's got a child in that house? That causes me concern.

Wickins is also thinking about the interview he'll do with Joe after two constables drive the alleged offender to the police station.

"I want to talk to him about what's going on in his life that he had this need to be doing what he's doing. Ultimately, I'm seeking evidence, certainly. On another level, I want to know so I can better understand why these people are doing this, what makes them tick, so maybe we can do something in the future that might stop this from happening so much."

Many perpetrators say that they are addicted to pornography and that they were molested as children themselves. Some are just "lonely, curious people who do stupid things online." And some are monsters. Wickins doesn't yet know where Joe will fall on the continuum.

"Often times with computer-facilitated crimes against children, the people that are doing these crimes, by community standards, are just average, ordinary people.

"But they live another life. Behind closed doors, behind the keyboard. Often times that involves exploitative behaviour with children, from teens on down.That's just wrong."

Kirk Makin, “Squeamish judges blamed in child-porn cases,” Globe and Mail, 26 Oct. 2005. Refusing to view evidence, many deliver lax sentences, top Ontario prosecutor says

Some judges are so repulsed by Internet child pornography that they refuse to view images seized from offenders prior to sentencing them, according to a senior Ontario Crown attorney.

Prosecutor Alex Smith told a conference of crime victims that while this squeamishness is understandable, many prosecutors believe that these judges pass sentences that are too lax for such a horrendous crime.

"There is no substitute for actually viewing the images," Mr. Smith, the head of the Ministry of the Attorney-General's Internet abuse section, told a Canadian Association for Victim Assistance conference. "You don't realize how bad this stuff is until you have been exposed to it.

"I don't want to be critical of the judicial system, but police are generally disappointed with the sentences meted out in many of these cases," he said. "Certainly, many Crowns are disappointed in the sentences meted out."

Mr. Smith said prosecutors will have to become "more persistent that judges view the images. It is kind of a touchy issue. Viewing this stuff is different from viewing other stuff. I haven't done a child pornography case in six years, but I can still remember some of the images. They stick with you and they haunt you."

His remarks came during a panel session at which Mr. Smith and Ontario Provincial Police Detective-Inspector Angie Howe unveiled a province-wide Internet child pornography strategy they helped develop over the past two years and which is to be launched next week.

The $5-million strategy will feature central co-ordinators who will pool information, resources and investigators from 15 police forces across Ontario. The strategy will replace a hodgepodge of individual police child pornography units that had few resources and precious little ability to share information with one another.

"The offices doing this locally were underequipped," Det.-Insp. Howe said. "There was one poor officer in Hamilton doing this who had to buy his own equipment."

Det.-Insp. Howe and Mr. Smith said the strategy, which has been two years in the making, will feature:

A victim identification unit to collate Internet images of sexually abused children and use the latest techniques in image analysis in order to find and rescue child victims.

Standardized training for all police officers on Internet abuses against children.

A province-wide tip line for children who suspect, or know of, a possible offender.

Training for an initial crop of 20 prosecutors to provide sound advice to police well before they lay charges to make sure they obtain proper evidence.

Links between police and prosecutors, and other government and non-governmental agencies.

An "on-line undercover luring team" that will patrol the Internet, seeking to detect and obtain evidence against offenders.

Det.-Insp. Howe said the ubiquity of the crime and the anonymity of its perpetrators make Internet child pornography offences unique: "It is doctors, it's lawyers, it's cops, it's Crowns, and it's guys who live in their mother's basement and love Star Trek," she said.

While one might expect that offenders will begin taking steps to avoid having any identifying features and locations in their child porn videos, Det.-Insp. Howe said, they will be loathe to do so because the "story lines" they create -- a child who romps naked on the beach or is violated in a bathtub -- are essential to their product.

"By and large, the judicial system isn't very good at recognizing there are victims," Mr. Smith said. "It is often seen as a victimless offence."

Det.-Insp. Howe said that society, including the judiciary, must understand that because of its unique ingredients, Internet child porn is not a complete criminal act, but is rather "a crime in progress."

She described a 14-year-old victim she dealt with who had been persuaded by her 18-year-old boyfriend to pose naked for some photographs. The girl split up with her boyfriend soon afterward, and he created an Internet website devoted to the photographs.

The girl arrived at her school one day to find photocopies of the picture taped to all the lockers, Det.-Insp. Howe said. The mortified victim was plunged into depression and has since abandoned her goal of becoming a schoolteacher, since the photographs can, and probably will, reappear for the rest of her life.

Perpetrators circulate images around the world, Det.-Insp. Howe said, collecting and seeking out specific, horrendous images of rape and other abuse as if they were baseball cards. "They talk to each other, saying things like: 'I'll give you my whole Jordan series if you give me that Isabel picture,' " she said. "The Internet has given them a forum where they can normalize their interest. And this is in the same sandbox where your kids are trading audio clips."

Det.-Insp. Howe said that according to one survey of victims, 76 per cent of them reported that they first encountered the perpetrator in an Internet chat-room. Eighty per cent of perpetrators openly brought up sexual topics, and 70 per cent of them did not lie about their age. Sixty per cent of victims said that they felt "love" for the offenders, Det.-Insp. Howe added.

Part of the blame for inadequate sentences lies with prosecutors who are inexperienced in Internet child porn cases, Mr. Smith said. "We occasionally have Crown attorneys who pick up one of these files for the first time with insufficient guidance," he said. "Often, they do a good job. Sometimes, they don't."

Mr. Smith and Det.-Insp. Howe said that one of the key elements of the provincial strategy will be to educate parents that their children face a serious risk of falling prey to child abusers every time they log onto a chat-line.

"Once a pornographic image of your child is out there, there is no recall button," Mr. Smith said. "And once it has gone to one pervert out there, it gets traded to others. It is always going to be there. It is totally different from any other offence.

"These offences don't occur out there in the cruel world," he said. "They occur in your study or downstairs basement. I don't think the vast majority of parents whose children are being exploited have the foggiest notion until their child has been approached or there are photographs of the child on the Internet. . . . In a sense, it occurs in your child's bedroom, but in another sense, it is occurring in the whole world."

”Canada,” From the Database of the Protection Project, Johns Hopkins University, http://www.protectionproject.org/, downloaded 11 Feb. 2006.

Internal trafficking of both Canadians and foreigners takes place throughout the country. For example, organized crime groups traffic young native children, as well as women and children from Eastern Europe, between provinces for the purposes of prostitution and other activities. Minors have been trafficked on a circuit linking cities in Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and the western United States.

”Pronography is Linked to Abuse,” CBC Fifth Estate, 5 Nov. 2003.

Various studies have shown that between 35 - 50% of child porn collectors have a history of abusing children.

In the last three years 44% of the people arrested in Toronto for possessing child pornography have also been charged with or convicted of sexually abusing children. "Everybody we arrest says 'I don't do anything other than look. I would never abuse. I just do it for my own personal pleasure.' Well, I know that almost 50% of those people lie," says Detective Sgt. Paul Gillespie.

When the Landslide investigation broke in the U.S. in 1999 (see more), Texas prosecutor Terri Moore was anxious to find exactly who was buying the pornography. "The Holy Grail on the case was to get the list of subscribers that were buying this...because these are the people that could actually be paedophiles."

USING PHOTOS TO MANIPULATE CHILDREN

According to studies done by the COPINE Project in Ireland, the easy availability of child porn on the internet can fuel a paedophile's fantasies. It can also be used to start the cycle of abuse.

Their research shows that paedophiles will often manipulate young children by showing them pictures on the internet. It's a way to make them believe that sex with adults is acceptable. They'll also use the photographs to teach the children to do what they want. And finally they may use the images to blackmail victims for their silence.

THE PHOTO AS A CRIME SCENE

Detective constable Sue Burke says although it's difficult to look at all those disturbing pictures, there can be a payoff. "You know what? It's worth it when you find one of those kids. And that's the main focus. We've got to find those kids."

Each photograph is a crime scene. In Britain, police Inspector Terry Jones of the Manchester police force used a single image from a porn collection to find a video on a Japanese web site. In the video's background they noticed a chocolate bar ad in a TV show. By narrowing down the times and places the ad ran, they arrested a man who was sexually abusing little girls in southern England.

Out of the thousands of victimized children on the internet less than 500 worldwide have been identified so far.

THE INTERNET AND CHILD PORN

Child porn sites and newsgroups offer ways to network with other offenders who often swap messages with each other. Some people offer their own children to other paedophiles or post details about the children they have already abused.

On-line chat groups are also an easy way to connect with children for sex. According to a study by Microsoft, 80% of children have computers in their home and 25% of them had already been invited to meet a stranger that they'd chatted with on-line.

Paul Krawczyk, a Toronto detective constable, has been specially trained by the FBI to catch paedophiles at their own game. For instance in one case he assumed the identity of 13 year-old girl in a chat room.

When the exchange with an adult man grew provocative and moved in the direction of sex, he agreed to meet his 'date' in a pre-determined location. Instead of a 13 year-old girl, the man - a married professional with children of his own - found himself arrested by a squad of police.

Costa Rica

”Costa Rica,” The Protection Project, downloaded 9 Dec. 2006.

The most predominant issue reported in Costa Rica is the rising sex tourism and the trafficking of minors. Sex tourism has become increasingly lucrative in the Caribbean. Costa Rica, with more than 300 brothels in San Jose alone, has come to rival Thailand and the Philippines as one of the world’s leading destinations for sex tourism. Recent media reports claim that more than 3,000 girls and women are in prostitution in San Jose alone. Among others, the industry serves thousands of North Americans, who travel to Costa Rica each year as sex tourists.

As central America’s leading tourist destination, Costa Rica is also believed to have the region’s largest child prostitution problem. Commercial sexual exploitation of children in Costa Rica could involve as many as 5,000 sex tourists every year. Most children who enter prostitution do so before their 12th birthday, and 82 percent of them were sexually abused at home before they turned to prostitution.

Officials recently arrested five men, who were involved in the so-called Costa Rican Association of Pedophiles, for sexually exploiting four children. The children, who were given cocaine and marijuana before being exploited, were to receive 5,000 colones (US$21) as payment for having sex with the pedophiles. After the men’s arrest, the children were returned to their families, who live in the poorest sections of San Jose.

Nearly a year after being arrested, three people were found guilty of aggravated pimping of minors—in this case, six girls ranging in age from 12 to 17 years—in a brothel, which they ran in their home. The girls were poor Costa Ricans and Nicaraguans.

Thailand

“'Most wanted' paedophile arrested,” BBC News, 21 Aug. 2001.

Thai police and US investigators have arrested an American man sought in connection with an international child pornography ring.

Eric Franklin Rosser, 49, an internationally renowned concert pianist, was captured in the Thai capital, Bangkok, as he went to a language school where he was training to be a teacher.

Last year, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) placed him on their most wanted list of fugitives.

Police said he returned to Thailand two months ago on a false passport, despite jumping bail last year when he faced trial for possession of child pornography and lewd behaviour.

"I'm not the evil man everyone thinks I am. I love Thailand, that's why I am back here again," Mr Rosser said as he was led in handcuffs into a police car.

Mr Rosser is wanted in connection with numerous offences including the production of a videotape in Thailand allegedly depicting him having sex with an 11-year old girl.

Jumped bail

Mr Rosser was detained by Thai authorities in February last year after a police raid on his apartment uncovered hundreds of explicit images of children.

But he disappeared after being released on bail.

Mr Rosser has been indicted by a US federal jury in Indianapolis in March on six counts of producing and distributing child pornography.

A US embassy spokeswoman in Bangkok said they would be seeking his extradition.

The BBC correspondent in Bangkok, Jonathan Head, says Mr Rosser's recapture will be a relief to the Thai authorities after letting him escape.

Thailand has in recent years been trying to clean up its image as a haven for paedophiles by moving against the leading figures in child sex rings.

Confession

Mr Rosser, a pianist who once played with the rock star John Mellencamp, taught the children of wealthy Thai families.

At the time of his initial arrest, he denied allegations that he ran an operation sending child pornography around the world.

But in an extraordinary confession, he admitted involvement in some sexual acts with children.

He pleaded for sympathy saying he was a child masquerading in a man's body.

Last December, the FBI put him on their most wanted fugitives list, which includes Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden - wanted in connection with the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

The FBI has been increasingly focusing on crimes against children in the past few years, including those related to internet pornography and international travel to abuse children.

United States

“Chris,” Myths of Porn, downloaded from http://www.oneangrygirl.net/chris_stark.html, 13 Jan. 2007.

Christine literally never had a choice – she was born into prostitution. She was used in a familial prostitution ring during her childhood, teen years, and as a young adult. Her abuse included several systems of prostitution, including live sex shows, pornography, domestic trafficking, and brothels. Stripping was part of the training she endured as a girl to season her to a lifetime of abuse. Reprinted by permission.

I was born into a family-run prostitution ring, which amounted to being delivered as a baby into a life of sexual slavery. The sexual abuse I suffered began when I was a toddler and extended into my early twenties. The men who used me - my father, his father, my father’s uncles and various friends of theirs - were extremely well-organized and knew exactly how to sexually torture women and girls into submission. The men who prostituted me, known as pimps and handlers in everyday parlance, used brainwashing techniques along with sexual torture to create and maintain control over women and girls whom they then sold in systems of prostitution, especially pornography.

The unspeakable injustice I and others like me suffered in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, when pornography was more covert and men needed to have Mafia and other fraternal connections to access this “underground world”, can now be found in a matter of minutes on the Internet. When I pull up pornographic websites on my computer I find the first twenty-odd years of my life on display: splayed, trussed, raped, bruised, and chained. I see myself in the faces and poses of the women and girls for sale on my computer screen, I see myself when I was a sex slave, a girl child bred to be a prostitute, bred to make money for men.

Prostitution ring pimps and handlers season young girls for prostitution by teaching them to associate their bodies, and thus their self-worth with sexual objectification. This includes stripping clothes off the girls’ bodies, teaching the girls how to move their bodies in sexually suggestive ways, dancing, pouting and other characteristics associated with striptease. These men also teach girls to pose for pornography shots in typical pornographic poses, which often overlap with stripping postures.

My father and other men involved with the prostitution ring taught me to this at a young age. They weaned me from stripping in front of one man to a slightly larger audience of three or four and then to an audience of ten or so in a bar. I stripped in a tavern on the bar top in front of a group of men who cheered and clapped and laughed and drank their beers. When I passed this “test” the pimps felt I was prepared to strip in front of a camera or to a larger audience of men, which turned out to be live sex shows with other women and girls.

When they taught me to strip I felt humiliated and confused and afraid. I thought I did something wrong and felt like I was bad inside. I was constantly afraid that I would accidentally expose “the secret” of the prostitution ring and that my mother or my animals or I would be hurt or killed. And I thought that people could see how bad I was, that I was a whore, which is what the men laughing and training me beforehand called me: little whore.

As my childhood progressed and the men continued to rape and sell me, I created personas that carried out and endured certain aspects of the abuse. My father and other men dressed me up in wigs, costumes, and gave me different names. For instance, I was Candy when I was used in pornography and Chrissy when they made me strip in a show. Prostitution ring pimps and handlers encourage dissociation by giving girls and women stage names, costumes, wigs and heavy makeup. Changing the names and appearances of prostituted women and girls is a widespread pimp tactic, which also helps to protect the pimps from prosecution if the pornography were to be found. The creation of multiple identities is also a response to objectification and sexual violence by the girls and women who take on different names and costumes in order to function as a different person when up on stage.

In an attempt to get me to participate in the making of pornography the men involved in the prostitution ring, and especially my father, told me I was a star and an actress like the girls and women in the movies. My father compared me to girl actresses in Hollywood. For instance, he would compare my physical features to Brooke Shields. His comments and constant objectification of my body frightened me. My father clearly saw himself as the owner of me, his whore daughter, and his pimp mentality and obsession with my weight and appearance negatively affected me even when he was not using me in prostitution. My father was obsessed with me, with making me into a product that he could sell to other men. Because my father raped me in the house, there was a thin line between incest, prostitution, pornography, and being made to strip and pose for his entertainment in the home and other men’s entertainment outside of the house. As a girl I so closely related doing something “bad” with being watched or filmed that I felt as if I were on camera nearly all the time.

The prostitution ring men told me I was better than the other women and girls used in the ring. When I did things the right way I was praised, and when I cried and refused to comply I was punished. They seasoned me to the rapes by presenting the sexual abuse as if it were consensual, when in fact I lived in a nearly constant state of terror and shame. They told me what a good “sexer” I was when I was little and what a good fucker I was when I became a pre-adolescent. Older girls and women under their control showed me how to arch my back and “perform” sexually while being assaulted and made into pornography. I was a sexual commodity, groomed, seasoned and taught how to be raped and how to be a sexy plaything for men. This was my childhood. It was my life, and because I cannot escape the memories of it now, it is still my life.

”Huge crowds at US porn convention,” BBC News, 13 Jan. 2007.

Thirty thousand people have gathered in the US city of Las Vegas for the annual convention of the pornography industry.

The scale of the Adult Entertainment Expo reflects the huge growth in a business which is said to be bigger than Hollywood and worth $57bn (£29bn).

Estimates of its annual contribution to the US economy range from $12bn-$20bn.

One of the reasons for its recent success is the pioneering use of new technology - video on the internet and use of moving images on mobile phones.

The BBC's Guto Harri in Las Vegas says it is easy to be embarrassed at such a show, with explicit films, intimidating toys and hundreds of half-naked actors on display.

But the scale and seriousness of the convention is not that different to a more mainstream gathering because pornography is big business, our correspondent says.

Adult entertainment model Jasmine Mai told the BBC: "The adult industry is bigger than every professional sport combined. It's part of life - it's mainstream now."

'Innovations'

Embracing new technology has been critical to the industry's development, and has allowed people to access it more easily and more discreetly, bringing in new customers.

Adult entertainment helped determine the dominance of VHS over Beta, it was crucial in the development of video on the web, and is now pioneering moving images on mobile phones.

There are an estimated 200 pornographic films shot in the United States every week. Improving production and distribution methods has helped to cut costs.

Our correspondent says many people regard pornography with disgust, but mainstream entertainment has and will continue to benefit from the technical innovations of the shameless people who are in Nevada this weekend.

Testimony of Rosa, 14, before U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, downloaded from Polaris Project, http://us.oneworld.net/external/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.polarisproject.org%2Fpolarisproject%2Ftrafficking_p3%2Ftrafficking.htm, 4 Dec. 2006.

When I was fourteen, a man came to my parents' house in Veracruz, Mexico and asked me if I was interested in making money in the United States. He said I could make many times as much money doing the same things that I was doing in Mexico. At the time, I was working in a hotel cleaning rooms and I also helped around my house by watching my brothers and sisters. He said I would be in good hands, and would meet many other Mexican girls who had taken advantage of this great opportunity. My parents didn't want me to go, but I persuaded them.

A week later, I was smuggled into the United States through Texas to Orlando, Florida. It was then the men told me that my employment would consist of having sex with men for money. I had never had sex before, and I had never imagined selling my body.

And so my nightmare began. Because I was a virgin, the men decided to initiate me by raping me again and again, to teach me how to have sex. Over the next three months, I was taken to a different trailer every 15 days. Every night I had to sleep in the same bed in which I had been forced to service customers all day.

I couldn't do anything to stop it. I wasn't allowed to go outside without a guard. Many of the bosses had guns. I was constantly afraid. One of the bosses carried me off to a hotel one night, where he raped me. I could do nothing to stop him.

Because I was so young, I was always in demand with the customers. It was awful. Although the men were supposed to wear condoms, some didn't, so eventually I became pregnant and was forced to have an abortion. They sent me back to the brothel almost immediately.

I cannot forget what has happened. I can't put it behind me. I find it nearly impossible to trust people. I still feel shame. I was a decent girl in Mexico. I used to go to church with my family. I only wish none of this had ever happened.

”US 'worst' for online child abuse,” BBC News, 20 July 2006.

More than 50% of online images of child abuse reported to an internet watchdog can be traced to the US, a report says.

Investigations by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) found nearly 2,500 US sites containing illegal images.

The IWF study also said that some sites that contain the illegal content remain accessible for up to five years despite being reported to relevant authorities.

In April the US Attorney General proposed changes in the law to tackle the problem.

The proposals by Alberto Gonzales included new laws that would require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to report images of child abuse.

In June a Technology Coalition comprising Microsoft, Time Warner AOL, Yahoo, Earthlink United Online and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) also announced plans to tackle online child abuse in the US.

The IWF, which is based in the UK, said that the reason why the US hosted the majority of illegal content was because the country has the most ISPs and the most web traffic in the world.

Worst offenders

The new figures from the IWF are a snapshot of online child abuse content around the world.

The foundation relies on web users reporting illegal content to its website or hotline. Other countries including the US run similar services.

In the first six months of this year the IWF received more than 14,000 reports of suspected websites, a 24% increase on the first six months of 2005.

"The increase in reports processed could be attributed to a number of factors, including public intolerance of child abuse content online combined with increased awareness of our role in combating it," said Peter Robbins, chief executive of the IWF.

Of the reports, nearly 5,000 contained images of child abuse.

Of these nearly 2,500 were traced to the US and more than 730 to Russia.

One site was first reported to the IWF in 1999. Since then it has been reported to the foundation a further 96 times.

CHILD ABUSE CONTENT
USA: 51.1%
Russia: 14/9%
Japan: 11.7%
Spain: 8.8%
Thailand: 3.6%
South Korea: 2.16%
UK: 0.2%
Other: 7.5%
(Source: IWF)

The IWF said that it had reported the site to the authorities in the countries where the website was hosted on 20 separate occasions.

However, the website "hopped" between the US and Russia every couple of days making it difficult to trace and shut down.

As a result it was still accessible to offenders, the IWF said.

A further 8% of 287 websites contained child abuse images remained accessible for between one to five years despite being reported by the IWF to relevant authorities.

Public reporting

The report also highlights the worst offending countries for hosting commercial and non-commercial child abuse content.

Non-commercial content is shared between offenders using tools such as free online photo albums or message boards to distribute pictures.

The US was found to host 57.7% of commercial images of child abuse and 49.5% of non-commercial.

Russia hosts a further 28.1% of commercial content, and Japan 14.6% of non-commercial.

Other countries that feature in the list include Spain, Thailand and South Korea.

The report said that the UK did not host any commercial sites containing images of child abuse and was responsible for 0.2% of non-commercial sites.

Any sites reported to the IWF that are hosted in the UK are removed within 48 hours by UK ISPs.

"That only 0.2% of child abuse content is hosted here is a testament to the public's help in reporting suspicious websites and to all our partners," said Mr Robbins.

The IWF is funded by the EU and UK internet industry, including ISPs, mobile operators, internet

"Thomas Reedy," CBC Fifth Estate, 5 Nov. 2003.

Thomas Reedy was born in a small town in central Texas. Like many teenagers, he has said that he dreamed of becoming a rock star, but ended up studying nursing and worked in several hospitals before he taught himself how to program computers in the early ‘90s.

Thomas Reedy and his wife Janice owned Landslide Productions and grew rich advertising child pornography.

Reedy quickly saw the financial possibilities in computers and set up an Internet adult porn business. It was lucrative for him, but he soon realized he could make even more money by tapping into the child pornography industry. So that’s what he did. Reedy called his company Landslide Productions.

His wife, Janice, worked as the company’s bookkeeper. She, too, was considered a computer whiz. They began dating in 1996, and when they married a year later, they were both on their third marriage.

LANDSLIDE PRODUCTIONS

For two years, Landslide Productions took in almost $10 million. The couple lived in a $500,000 house on the outskirts of Fort Worth, Texas, and both drove Mercedes sports cars. During the raid on their house in 1999, police found dozens of computers and several servers which, once analyzed, led them to a list of 300,000 customers in 37 states and 60 countries. The Landslide website made the Reedys millionaires. Subscribers to Landslide paid $29.95 each to access the child porn websites. The month before the couple was arrested, their company made 1.4 million dollars. The Landslide web site advertised child porn sites. Subscribers paid $29.95 to enter.

Thomas Reedy did not actually produce the child pornography himself. He acted as the middleman, providing a website to advertise material that was being published by other people, called webmasters, in countries such as Indonesia and Russia.

Authorities in the United States say Reedy never believed he was doing anything wrong and never thought he would get caught. His own email address was Houdini. His downfall began in April of 1999 when several people complained about coming across his site and noticing child pornography. He blatantly advertised what he was selling on his web page: “click here for Child Porn,” it said.

THE COURT CASE

In court, Reedy and his lawyer argued, among other things, that the foreign webmasters were responsible for publishing the material, not Reedy, and therefore he was not responsible for its content. The jury did not agree and they found him guilty on all 89 counts for which he was charged, including conspiracy to distribute child pornography and possession of child pornography.

In August of 2001, a judge sentenced him to 1335 years in prison. His wife, Janice, who was convicted on 87 counts, received a sentence of 14 years. Reedy’s lawyer appealed Thomas’ sentence calling it harsh, and a judge recently reduced his time to 180 years behind bars.

Ironically, prior to their trials, Texas prosecutors offered Thomas and Janice Reedy a deal. Thomas Reedy was offered a 20-year term and Janice was offered a five-year term in exchange for helping authorities convict the actual people who were providing the child pornography. The Reedy’s believed they had done nothing wrong and declined the offer. Their cases went to trial and they were convicted and sentenced.

Thomas Reedy and his wife, Janice are now serving their sentences in prison.

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