By Mark Buttler
Herald Sun [Australia]
March 14, 2007
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,21377430-661,00.html
Fifty people have been jailed and six have taken their own lives after Victoria's biggest child pornography swoop.
Operation Auxin, a nationwide crackdown on cyber perverts, identified more than 180 suspects who had hoarded up to 12,000 sickening images each, according to figures obtained for the first time by the Herald Sun.
All were men. Victoria had the highest number of suspects of any state during the inquiry.
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Among them were a policeman, school principal, child-care centre director, youth worker, a prison guard and a priest.
Men aged 36 to 45 were by far the most represented group in the September 2004 raids.
Police are preparing for another major offensive on child porn with the state's first unit, created within the sexual crimes squad, dedicated solely to fighting the scourge. It is already zeroing in on offenders.
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| Tough job: Det-Sgt Campbell Davis at work trying to catch Victorians who view child pornography on the internet. Photo by Jon Hargest |
Report: Filth trapped
Those arrested in Auxin were not linked to one another, their only connection being a foreign child porn site from which they were buying images.
One offender had a collection of 12,000 images and movie files he had downloaded from the site based in Belarus.
Thirty-six Victorian suspects scooped up in Auxin are still to face court.
Almost all of those arrested had no sex-offending record.
Det Sen-Sgt Chris O'Connor, of the sexual crimes squad, said any suicide was tragic but the Auxin deaths showed the extent to which someone's life could be ruined by being caught with child porn.
He said the men who had killed themselves would have agonised over their secret being exposed.
"The majority were people of good social standing," Det Sen-Sgt O'Connor said.
"They don't think about what they'll be giving up (if caught)."
Most of those snared were easy to track and convict because they had used credit cards to buy from the porn market at the centre of a massive international inquiry.
Det Sen-Sgt O'Connor said he would class most of those caught as "rubbernecks" unlikely to progress to sexually assaulting children.
But he said it was their interest and willingness to pay for such material that financed an industry inflicting unspeakable cruelty on children.
"Without the rubber-neckers, the market would be diminished. There is a psychology that it's only an image," he said.
He said he was happy with the sentences magistrates had handed down to offenders.
But there was another class of offenders who were harder to detect because they took more care to conceal their activities.
The new internet child exploitation team's head, Det-Sgt Campbell Davis, said police did not have intelligence about organised internet pedophile rings.
"But logic tells us there's got to be," he said.
Det-Sgt Davis said a Melbourne girl, just 15, used a hotmail account to prostitute herself on the internet from home.
Four men were later charged with sexual penetration of the girl.
Others had made and exchanged pornographic pictures of themselves in exchange for alcohol and cigarettes.
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