Child pornography fight gets new weapons

By Robert Travis Scott, The Times-Picayune
November 15, 2009, 6:15AM

Trapped in a nightmare of unrelenting sexual molestation and torment by her stepfather, a 12-year old central Louisiana girl tried to console herself by writing about her distress in a spiral-notebook diary.

"If you are reading this help me I really need your help," she wrote last year in a desperate three-page entry. "I am really scared with fear in my body. ... I try to pray about it but it never goes away."

The girl's ordeal finally ended when State Police, using new computer software, discovered the stepfather's criminal practice of trading sexually explicit images of children through the Internet. After officers arrested the stepfather in connection with the material found on his computer, they found the girl and her notebook, leading to additional charges and a conviction for child molestation.

The case is one of an increasing number of arrests in Louisiana and nationwide resulting from breakthroughs in software that can monitor the digital-age trafficking of images depicting child sexual exploitation and rape.

Although the story demonstrates the software's great potential and the very real possibility of rescuing abuse victims, the frustrating truth is that the technology finds many more criminal targets than law enforcement officials can afford to arrest and prosecute.

"We have the key, but we are barely using it," said Heather Steele, president of the Innocent Justice Foundation, a nonprofit group fighting child pornography.

Centered in cyber-forensics labs at the offices of the Louisiana attorney general and State Police, special investigative units can detect computers throughout Louisiana that are exchanging sexually explicit images of children online. During a recent typical month, the systems identified more than 5,600 such Internet computer addresses in the state.

Investigators say they lack the staff and resources to conduct the forensic analysis and prosecution of more than a fraction of those perpetrators. They are doubly frustrated because a substantial number of those who collect sexually explicit images of children also pose a threat as child molesters.

"I think we're all discovering that, when we're working on these child porn investigations, we not only are finding the illegal images, but we're finding perpetrators who are actually molesting children," said Toby Aguillard, a detective with the Tangipahoa Sheriff's office who formerly headed Louisiana's task force on crimes against children. "It's a tool that we never had before."
Cases exploding

The 176 arrests for Internet crimes against children reported by state and local agencies in the most recent fiscal year represented a 180 percent increase from the previous year. Nationwide arrests last year in cases related to sexually explicit images of children rose 27 percent and were nearly double the number in 2005, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Although many of the images originate in foreign countries, such as Russia and Thailand, the main producers are in North America, where people have easy access to the key components of sexually explicit filming and distribution: cameras, video equipment, computers, software and broadband Internet services.
More than 90 percent of sexually explicit material of children is produced in settings in which a single person -- usually a man with a video camera in his home -- is recording the images of nudity and sexual abuse of the child, Steele said.

While the public's attention is drawn to high-profile stories such as the captivity ordeal of Jaycee Lee Dugard in California, the more prevalent reality is that a widespread outbreak of child exploitation crimes is taking place daily in homes rich and poor across the country.

"The problem has absolutely exploded with the advent of the Internet," said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "These offenders do not match society's stereotypes. They're doctors and lawyers and teachers ... every walk of life."

The problem is widespread in Louisiana, too.

"It's not just in big city New Orleans," said Chad Gremillion, the top child exploitation detective for the State Police. "It's in small towns. It's in every single town in Louisiana, every single parish in Louisiana, every community."
Possession of child pornography is a state and federal felony offense with a five-year minimum prison sentence, and these targeted computer users are breaking additional laws by linking up in shadowy cyber networks to buy, sell and share the material online.

State Police officers point out that every picture exploits a child, every video shows a crime scene. The damage to the victim is repeated as the videos circulate on the Internet, where they may never be fully extinguished. And the images are far more insidious than the general public assumes, they say.

According to a congressionally financed Internet sex crimes study in 2003 by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, 99 percent of collections of sexually graphic material involving children seized by police contain pictures that go beyond nudity; 80 percent have images of child rape and 21 percent include images of child torture. More than half the images are produced in the United States, also the largest consumer market for the sordid products.

Since that study, the situation has grown worse, law enforcement agents say. With alarming frequency, the victims in the pictures are babies, toddlers and grade-school kids.

Many of these children are being abused violently in images depicting bondage, sadism, torture, rape, bestiality and sexual humiliation, Allen testified in a recent judicial sentencing commission hearing. Offenders tell investigators that the growing demand for very young children is because they cannot yet talk.

Sources on the Internet even offer step-by-step training guides of how to rape a child while leaving minimal evidence.

"That's how twisted these people are, that they are making tutorials of how to molest your child," Gremillion said.

Connection with child abuse seen

There's definitely a connection between sexually explicit images of children and child sexual abuse, said David Wolff, an assistant district attorney in Jefferson Parish who formerly was chief of the parish's family violence prosecution unit.

Every arrest of a child pornography trader holds the possibility of uncovering a crime of molestation and saving a child victim, like the central Louisiana girl who cried alone with her diary.

State and federal authorities say about a third or more of child pornography arrests lead to evidence of child sexual abuse, although the actual number of abusers could be higher because many children and adult relatives keep their dreadful secrets to themselves.

Current laws and new technologies provide a well-lighted pathway to reach those silent sufferers by cracking down on sexually explicit images of children, but law enforcement agencies' limited resources are overwhelmed by the avalanche of this specialized criminal activity.

"We're way outnumbered," said Mike Johnson, deputy director of the High Technology Crime Unit for the Louisiana Department of Justice. "I have over 5,600 cases I could open, but I just don't have the manpower."

The process of finding the owner of the computer, compiling enough information to get a search warrant, making the arrest, analyzing the computer data and preparing the case for prosecution can be intense.

"As it stands now, we have four investigators and 10 forensic examiners," said the Crime Unit's lab supervisor, Corey Bourgeois. "Four investigators can't do 5,600 subpoenas."
Initial interviews of the suspects during the raids might last a few minutes to a few hours, during which extraordinary confessions have been made, state agents say.

In one such interview, Gremillion said a 30-year-old man confessed to a pattern of acquiring videos of escalating cruelty, and that he had been driving around his town thinking about kidnapping, raping and killing a child.

Gremillion and other state agents said they had interviewed suspects who had thanked officers for arresting them because they were losing self-control and feared they might molest a child.

An arrest on pornography charges might trigger a relative, partner or neighbor of the suspect to report a molestation.

"Sometimes it just knocks down a wall so these people can come forward," Johnson said.

In the case of the girl with the diary, agents found her notebook. One of her entries was titled "Every Night" and included a description of how her stepfather would routinely fondle or rape her, or masturbate while staring at her in bed.

She described her options: tell her mom; run away; tell police; try to fight him. Each alternative carried risks or consequences that overwhelmed her, and so she kept her terrible secret to herself.

"I don't want to stay I want to go I want to go far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far away from him," she wrote.

Children feel trapped

That feeling of being trapped is common among abused children, those who assist victims say. Shame, fear, isolation and mistrust are the main reasons few children speak up about their abuse, a factor that can complicate an investigation.

Once the evidence is gathered from the home, the computer is brought to a forensics lab, where analysts must pick through the images looking for evidence of child pornography, determine times of file transfers and verify whether the pictures are of underage children. They also determine whether the collector has any homemade material involcing children.


The work takes a psychological toll on the investigators. They receive individual and group counseling through their agencies to deal with the mental and emotional impact of viewing the videos, which often include sounds of children crying out in pain and protest.

"I hear screaming in my dreams," one state investigator said.