McEntee: Child pornography - A ubiquitous problem with horrific consequences - PART-1

2-24-2010 Utah:

Over the course of a month, Peg McEntee spent days and nights interviewing and riding along with investigators from Utah's Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force as they traced, tracked down and confronted suspected producers and consumers of child pornography. She will report on the problem, and law enforcement officers' efforts to stop it, in four columns between today and Feb. 28. A warning: The columns include explicit descriptions of sexual abuse.

The children may be 8, 10, 12 years old. Or they may be infants in car seats, too young even to lift their heads up, being sexually tortured in a variety of ways by grown men.

This is happening right here, right now, all over Utah.

Some force drugs or alcohol on the children. In one case, two six-year-old girls were forced to huff paint before being violated.

"No innocent child should have to deal with that, ever. Ever," says child pornography investigator Coy Acocks. "You see what's causing a child to cry, and this is a young child being penetrated by a large object, and the pain that's going with that, and she's directing that pain with her cries."

A child's physical injuries can be awful -- Capt. Jessica Farnsworth told me she once saw a little girl who'd been ripped open .

On a computer screen, she said, "the visuals are terrible, but the sound is even worse. And their eyes. ..."

I thought I knew something about child pornography when I arranged to shadow Utah's Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. After a long conversation with Farnsworth and Capt. Rhett McQuiston, it became clear. I knew nothing.

Nothing about the men -- and most are men -- who watch their computer monitors for hours, days, to feed their addiction to the sexual abuse of children. About the children's faces, contorted with pain and terror and videotaped live.

Most of all, I knew nothing about the smart, unbelievably dedicated cops who track down and arrest those pedophiles.
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Technology encourages the problem » Photographs of child porn used to be sold through the mail. The Internet changed that. Photos gave way to videos that anyone could produce with a camera, a predator (who may double as the producer) and his prey.

Those who wanted the videos could join chat rooms and later, peer-to-peer networks that didn't need servers or other electronic hosts. And, like lots of stuff on the Internet, most of it can be downloaded for free.

"The real challenge is not the commercial site, but the apparently millions of people around the world who are sexually interested in children," says Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "In peer-to-peer, membership-only groups, one prerequisite is to provide new content that no one has seen before."

Which translates into an ever-growing number of providers constantly searching for new victims and new scenarios.

Their numbers, and the amount of child pornography produced, is nearly impossible to quantify because of the secretive nature of the industry.

Allen offers this: Last year, more than 10.5 million images and videos were reported to Allen's organization, up 22.5 percent from 2008. And there's another problem -- many of those images are duplicates, circulated time after time in what represents the endless re-victimization of the children.

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Only a fraction are caught » In January, I spent many hours with ICAC leaders and case agents who employ every investigative tool at their disposal to search for users and makers of child pornography, and those who seek their own victims.

Every day, the task force fights a computer-to-computer (some would say mind-to-mind) battle with users who can be found most anywhere, from the most squalid apartment to mansions in the hills.

At best, McQuiston said, law enforcement has located only a tiny fraction of the offenders. They can be intelligent and highly sophisticated with computers; many are just plain careless.

"Every once in a while they beat us," Farnsworth says. "Most of the time we're picking up the fruit that's fallen off the tree."

Meantime, here and around the world, the images and videos have become ever more vile.

The psychological damage can be profound. Still, a surprising number of the victimized children who get the specialized treatment they need do heal enough to live out their lives.

But for many of the men whose lives are consumed by child porn, watching ultimately isn't enough. The porn grows old, even boring. They need live children.

So they go hunting. ..Source..