As child porn activity grows, efforts to trap offenders do too

1-16-2011 Virginia:

Just six years out of high school, ____ ruined his life for a perverted thrill: He downloaded pictures of children being molested.

He knew what he was doing was wrong and illegal. He knew he was risking his rising Navy career. But he couldn't stop. Like many child pornography addicts, he organized his collection like a librarian arranges books, and his fetish grew more bizarre as time passed.

And like many offenders, ___ had a sense of relief when he was finally caught. Already dishonorably discharged, he's now serving 12½ years in federal prison.

"I'd just like to say that I'm entirely sorry for what I did," he said at his sentencing. "I never had any intention of harming anybody."

His mother wept quietly in the back of Courtroom 2 in Norfolk's U.S. District Court that day in early December. His father, who did his best to testify for his son, appeared stunned.

"Total shock," ___ said, describing his reaction upon his son's arrest.

They thought they had raised him right. He had never been in trouble before. They were excited about his career goal of becoming a chef.

___'s case is iconic of most of the growing number of child pornography cases in state and federal courts. The majority of offenders are white males, of all ages, with no criminal history or previous evidence of pedophilia.

Researchers and therapists say the lure of child pornography, which grips addicts as intensely as crack cocaine, targets no singular class.

Offenders' educational and occupational backgrounds vary widely: They are convenience store workers and college professors, enlisted sailors and naval officers, police officers, the homeless, and even the FBI's own.

While the number of offenses seems small compared with, say, drug and fraud cases, child pornography was the fastest-growing crime over the past six years in Virginia – up 218 percent from 2003 to 2009.

Nationally, the picture is more startling: a 2,500 percent increase in arrests in 10 years, according to the FBI. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which handles most federal child exploitation cases, has made 12,000 such arrests since the agency was formed in 2003.

U.S. Attorney Neil MacBride, whose office is handling more such cases each year, said child pornography was a dying industry until the Internet and peer-to-peer networks developed.

"It went from almost dead to now a growing epidemic," he said.

While the Internet has fueled the problem, increased law enforcement efforts have led to more arrests.

The problem is being attacked on several fronts by local, state and federal authorities and the military. Stopping it is one hurdle, but treating offenders could be even more difficult than catching them.

In a Peninsula office building, whose location the FBI wants kept secret, two agents troll the Internet looking for the worst of the worst child pornography offenders.

Agent Paula Barrows used to buy drugs as an undercover agent with the Illinois State Police in some of the most dangerous areas outside Chicago. She finds investigating child pornography more disturbing, but in a way more rewarding – maybe because she's a mom, too.

She's been doing this for nearly four years. The FBI mandates that she and anyone else assigned to child porn cases go through stringent psychological testing to make sure they can handle it.

"It's very graphic," she said of the pictures and videos she finds.

"They literally sicken you," her partner, Jack Moughan, said.

Together with agents from other federal agencies and local and state police, they operate a task force under a national program called Project Safe Childhood. There are similar ongoing federal efforts with names like Project Flicker and Operation Predator.

As a result of these joint efforts, more than 50 defendants were convicted in federal court here and sentenced to prison between March 2008 and August 2010, with prison terms ranging from one year to 40 years.

Some of the things they have discovered include: a father who dressed his toddler son up as a girl and filmed him in a sexual position; a sailor who searched for pictures of young boys being tied up and urinated on; and a Marine caught with 650,000 child porn images, some that can only be described as horrendous acts of bondage and bestiality. ..for the remainder of this story.. by Tim McGlone, The Virginian-Pilot