Midlands Voices: Danger inherent in all child porn

6-30-2010 Nebraska:

The writer is a retired Nebraska State Patrol sergeant and creator of the Nebraska State Patrol’s Internet Crimes Against Children Unit.

I am writing in response to a June 20 Midlands Voices article, “Child-porn cases are not all alike.” As a 25-year veteran of law enforcement, I take exception to most of the statements by the writer — Mike Nelsen, a defense attorney.

From 1999 until my retirement last summer, I led the efforts against online child exploitation in Nebraska, including the manufacture, distribution and possession of child pornography. In addition, I am a past chairman of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s Internet Crimes Against Children task force. In this capacity, I have worked with many subject matter experts in this field.

Mr. Nelsen referred to “Arthur, a 55-year-old white male. He’s in a long-term marriage. He has a good job. His kids are grown and gone.” He described someone who matches the statistics of people I arrested in my 10 years of conducting and supervising these investigations.

The typical person we arrested for these crimes ranged from age 19 to 60, someone with good job, who was educated, etc. These people were not what we wanted them to be — a creepy, scary individual who fit a societal picture of a predator.

Mr. Nelsen then stated, “Arthur is probably not aware that he has violated a federal law prohibiting the reception of child pornography. If a zealous FBI agent (who may be surfing the Internet for real sexual predators) discovers Arthur’s habit, and he is indicted in federal court, he faces a mandatory minimum of five years in federal prison (with no parole).”

Mr. Nelsen thus excuses the behavior of Arthur as ignorance of the law and being the “victim” of an overzealous FBI agent. He minimizes the possession of “images” of children as young as newborns engaged in sexual acts with adults as a “habit.”

I doubt that Mr. Nelsen has interviewed children who have been molested and had their innocence ripped from them by a predator who did it for the “images.” “Arthur” chose to participate in this behavior while consciously knowing the ramifications if he were caught and convicted.

Mr. Nelsen cites one judge’s opinion. In it, Judge Jack B. Weinstein stated: “I don’t approve of child pornography, obviously.” But he added that those who merely view the images but do not purchase or sell them present, in his view, no threat to children. Said the judge: “We’re destroying lives unnecessarily. At the most, they (these offenders) should be receiving treatment and supervision.”

I vehemently disagree with this opinion, as do experts in this field. In November 2000, Dr. Andres E. Hernandez, director of the Sex Offender Treatment Program for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, presented the results of his study of child pornography offenders. This study, among other things, explored the correlation between child pornography offenses and child molestation.

Dr. Hernandez’s data indicate that the majority of the people in his study who were convicted of child pornography offenses actually molested significant numbers of children without detection by the criminal justice system.

I don’t believe that all people who possess child pornography are molesters. However, more and more children in our state have been victimized by people who also possess these horrendous memorials to the rape of a child.

Attorneys like Mr. Nelsen are quick to describe child pornography as “images.” This lessens the impact on the judge and jury of what their client really was searching for and downloading from the Internet.

Child pornography is not innocent images. It is the documentation and memorialization of the rape of a child. It is posted on the Internet for all to see and to endure for all time. These violent rape “images” are not of a child in a foreign land or a “virtual” child but a child we know — a neighbor, niece or nephew, our son or daughter!

Are these offenders our neighbors, co-workers and friends? Absolutely, and we give them free reign to our children while we’re unaware that they get sexual gratification, in the privacy of their own home, in watching five-minute videos of a 4-year-old being sodomized.

The views of people like Mr. Nelsen and Judge Weinstein are the reason I toiled over retiring and not keeping up the fight to protect our kids. One statistic Mr. Nelsen didn’t present is that the majority of child pornography in the world consists of unidentified children who have not been rescued from this abuse.

I pray that one of the “images” is not someone Mr. Nelsen knows. ..Source.. Scott Christensen