With a Proliferation of Horrific Allegations in the Headlines, Canadians Can Be Forgiven for Thinking That Child Molesters Are Everywhere. but What Is the Actual Prevalence of the Problem? in This, the First of a Four-Part Series, the National Post Explores the Extent of the Problem and the Ways of Dealing with It.
By Adrian Humphreys
National Post
October 20, 2007
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=75fc2bb1-4326-4ea3-8af7-b0e1256f850a&k=92299
A32-year-old English teacher from B.C. allegedly travels to Asia to have sex with young boys and shares pictures of the encounters over the Internet; a married 39-year-old Ontario man simply walks into the next room of his condominium to sexually abuse his toddler daughter and allow others to offensively examine her through an online camera.
Both appalling cases of child sexual abuse linked to Canada came to wide public attention this week: the first in the global hunt for Christopher Paul Neil, the Maple Ridge, B.C.,man arrested in Thailand yesterday, and the second, a father in St. Thomas, Ont., who cannot be named to protect the daughter he admitted in court on Monday to abusing.
They are, at the same time, both similar and markedly different, highlighting the range of the troubling issues of child pornography, pedophilia, child rape and Internet exploitation.
The allegations against Mr. Neil raise concerns over child sex tourism, the vulnerability of children in developing countries and student-teacher relationships. The other strikes closer to home — molestation of a biological daughter — and speaks to the impossibility of child protection when a father, not a deranged stranger, is the attacker.
Both cases, however, involve the use of the Internet to share with others — whom they do not know — damning evidence of an act one might think would be the darkest and most closely guarded secret one could hold.
At the same time, despite the ubiquitous links with the Internet, pedophilia has been around long before the abacus, let alone the computer.
Is there more of it today or does it simply come to public attention more often? Why are these sexual urges so powerful for some people? And what can be done about the sex offenders among us? So many issues swirling through a subject that disturbs so deeply.
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| B.C. FUGITIVE NABBED: Thai policemen present Canadian child-sex-crimes suspect Christopher Neil to reporters yesterday in Bangkok. Neil's arrest in northeastern Thailand was the culmination of a worldwide manhunt that began three years ago. Photo by Pornchai Kittiwongsakul |
"Every community in Canada and abroad has their problem with it," says Staff Sergeant Rick Greenwood, manager of the RCMP's National Child Exploitation Co-ordination Centre. "Do we have an epidemic or not?"
He asks but does not answer the question. Perhaps for good reason. As this week's cases suggest, it is impossible to accurately know the number of pedophiles in the world or in a city or even within a family. Few self-declare their inclinations, except perhaps to a priest, a judge or to other pedophiles. What we are left to study is the subset that unwillingly comes to police attention.
"It is unknown how many individuals have pedophilic fantasies and never act on them or do act but are never caught," says a study published this year by doctors at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
Canadian studies suggest that 19 out of 20 cases of child sexual abuse go undetected. U.S. government statistics say that 67% of reported sexual assaults involved children or adolescents as victims, with 34% being under the age of 12.
Statistics cannot keep up with the juggernaut of computer development, but some studies call into question the link between pedophilia and the Internet. And, indeed, the link between pornography and sexual assault. Dr. Paul Fedoroff, a psychiatrist at the University of Ottawa, says emerging evidence suggests the spread of pornography may be linked to a decrease in sexual offences rather an increase, as is often thought.
"Worldwide, the incidence of sexual offences of all kinds is decreasing and it started to decrease in the 1980s, which is when pornographic material became more available and about the time that the Internet began. It is about the only thing that people can think of that happened worldwide that might explain it," Dr. Fedoroff says.
National crime data from the United States for the year 2000 show that a computer was not involved in most reported cases of child pornography: photographs, magazines and videos were still more prevalent. When delving into scientific research on the subject, the language becomes crucial. "Pedophile" and "child molester" are not interchangeable terms, despite headline writers sometimes picking a word based only on which fits best on the newspaper page, except at a tabloid where "perv" seems to always fit best.
Child molestation is a criminal act, not a medical condition, experts say. A rule of thumb used by professionals is that child molestation, or child sexual abuse, is touching a child for sexual gratification by someone at least four years older. (The age issue excuses childhood games of "doctor" by curious age-correct playmates.)
Pedophilia, in the medical sense, is a diagnosis made by a psychiatrist or psychologist. The standard clinical guide, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, defines pedophilia as someone who is sexually aroused by or has sexual urges toward prepubescent children over a period of at least six months.
Even the term "child pornography" is frowned upon by child protection activists who say it masks the horror of what police are finding. They call it "images of child sex abuse." Pedophiles? They call them "young friends" and, of course, freedom of expression.
From there, those pedophiles who act on their urges engage in a wide range of specific criminal acts, from possessing child pornography and voyeurism to exhibitionism and a disturbing plethora of physical contact, from caressing to devastating penetration.
The experts further dissect online pedophiles. Studies divide them into five categories including: The Stalkers, who use the Internet to meet children; The Cruisers, who use chat rooms for sexual pleasure without contact; The Masturbators, who act privately to child pornography online; The Swappers, who network with other pedophiles and trade tips, images and even children.
The fifth category encompasses those who combine these behaviours. That is a lot of room for police, the courts and the public to consider when they hear of yet another arrest of someone in their city on "kiddie porn" charges.
If counting offenders or potential offenders is difficult, perhaps the impact is best looked at from the other participant in these transactions: the children.
The spread of child pornography over the Internet may not be making more pedophiles, but it is making more victims, says Dr. Peter Collins, a forensic psychiatrist at the Centre for Addiction and Men-tal Health and an associate professor at the University of Toronto.
Staff Sgt. Greenwood agrees: "Pedophiles have always been around but now they have a new
and powerful tool, a way to communicate, to counsel and comfort each other," he says. "It speeds up everything."
Historical ly, pedophiles swapped material on hard-to-duplicate 8-mm film, photographs printed in basement darkrooms and foreign magazines that took years to widely circulate. The emergence of new faces was a slow and exciting process to those searching for such material.
Digital cameras now allow original pornography to be created with ease and shared at an unprecedented speed. A new set of pictures of a "fresh" child being victimized can circle the globe in seconds. Computer hard drives can store more pictures and video than any library of dirty magazines could hope to contain. It creates in some an unquenchable desire for more and different material, police say. That may fuel a need to offer unique or more shocking images.
"It is our impression that the age of children appearing in new child pornography is reducing," says a report by the COPINE Project, led by Dr. Max Taylor of University College of Cork, that has assembled a library of abuse images.
The level of sadistic activity depicted also seemed on the rise, it found. It is by focusing on the victims that the issue is best addressed, and there is not enough being done to rescue the children, say resource-strapped police and child advocates.
"Interpol has identified thousands and thousands of children who are being victimized from images and photos but the reality is, only a handful have actually been rescued. And that's what it's about: rescuing children," says Mark Hecht, a University of Ottawa law professor and legal counsel to Beyond Borders, a Canadian organization working to protect children.
It took the combined efforts of police in several countries to identify a man alleged to be Mr. Neil, after police found and unscrambled images of abuse with an abuser's face digitally obscured by a swirl.
And it took an undercover officer with Toronto police posing as a fellow child molester to make contact with the St. Thomas father and then work with provincial and local police to intervene. In both cases suspects were arrested directly because of the Internet, causing one to ponder: Is the Internet a child molester's best tool or a police officer's greatest weapon?
Pedophiles are asking the same question and looking for answers for an entirely different reason, says Staff Sgt. Greenwood. "The Neil case is generating all kinds of debates within the [pedophile] community. It is a tight-knit community and they follow the cases carefully and look to learn from them," he says. "What went wrong? How was it done?"
Assuming a message for child molesters and pornographers to stop will fall on deaf ears, a simple lesson might be to stop sharing their pictures, activists say.
The St. Thomas father was a member of an online child porn-sharing network that was dismantled by police in a head-line-grabbing bust. He saw the news on the arrests and knew it was his colleagues who had been penetrated by police. When the remnants of the chat group reemerged, however, he went right back to it, only slightly modifying his online nickname.
After pleading guilty to two sexual assault counts and several child pornography charges he is set for sentencing in December. In the meantime, the prosecutor wants the judge to look at the pictures police found. His lawyer is objecting.
The current upheaval in Mr. Neil's life from the unswirling of a face in pictures from Asia is clear whatever the outcome of the sex charges against him in Thailand and a possible extradition request from Canada. Why did the dad go back to the site that had only recently been compromised? Why would someone leave a digital swirl as the only barrier between anonymity and prosecution?
"There is certainly an element of excitement that comes from the risk factor of sharing the pictures. Part of the sexual high comes from conning people, fooling people. There is some thrill seeking involved," says Rosalind Prober, president of Beyond Borders.
"It is a crime of impulse control, similar to addiction. It also a case of networking on the Internet and finding a community and getting away with it for a bit and then getting sloppy. They're getting away with it for so long they feel immune. It also shows how brazen these people are and how weak our system is for protecting children."
Ms. Prober then voices what is, perhaps, the public's greatest fear: "It is really only the dumb ones that the police manage to catch, those so sexually obsessed that they take risks that expose them.
"The smartest and most sophisticated ones are very much out there."
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MONDAY
In the second part of the four-part series, Inside the Mind of a Child Molester, and does it take a community to cure this problem?
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