The case of a former Delta school psychologist who pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography is another example of the insidious world of child exploitation and the Internet.
William Brook, a Point Roberts resident, is scheduled to be sentenced Feb. 27 in Federal District Court in Seattle. Brook was arrested last May as he attempted to cross the border from Tsawwassen into the American peninsula.
Prosecutors contend he downloaded and traded hundreds of images and videos, including those of very young children being raped.
Child porn is readily available in cyberspace for those who seek it, including those who are curious but aren't experienced in the techniques of collecting the material or connected with any pedophile groups.
Richard Frank, an expert on cybercrime at SFU's Department of Criminology, says it only takes a bit of time, and a little persistence, for those starting out to be able to track down child porn, however they run the risk of discovery with their IP addresses exposed.
He says there are a variety of resourceful methods used by offenders seeking to download or trade child porn, providing them with a sense of anonymity, although it's certainly not impossible for skilled and determined law enforcement agencies to track them down.
"There are a lot of smart people within law enforcement. Sometimes it does take a lot of effort but they are really good," Frank says. "Sometimes the bad guys are anonymous. Sometimes they think they are." He says one method those looking to access kiddie porn will try is to go at different times of the day to areas with web access, including Internet cafes, in order to avoid using their own IP addresses.
For a low cost, or even free, many will resort to using proxies, which can hide IP addresses. The risk of this method is those wanting to hide their address can't be sure who's on the other end, including law enforcement.
Another method is using a virtual private network, a subscription service that can make someone's address appear it's from another country. The risk, once again, is that material is being funneled through a service provider where police can start tracing logs.
Another popular option is using a Tor anonymity network, previously known as an Onion Router, a heavily modified browser that can be downloaded. Utilizing thousands of connected computers around the world, someone can connect to the hidden network, encrypting their data multiple times along the chain.
Tor is essentially a subset of the Internet, sometimes called the "Dark Web," that has many sites, including a huge trove of child exploitation. But it's not a perfect hiding place, evidenced by what happened to a massive service called Freedom Hosting, which contained scores of child porn sites. It was taken down by the FBI, which compromised it through a malware attack designed to identify visitors.
In this country, according to the Ministry of Justice, the number of cases and charges of child pornography processed by youth and adult criminal courts has been increasing.
In 2003/2004, there were 177 cases of child pornography with 543 charges. In 2008/2009, there were 395 cases with 1,277 charges.
For over a decade, Cybertip.ca has been collecting and analyzing tips received by the public regarding the online sexual exploitation of children. Cybertip.ca notes the number of online child sexual exploitation reports received has increased substantially from 179 in 2002/2003 to 7,913 in 2009/2010. Child pornography accounted for 90.2 per cent of the almost 40,000 reports between 2002 and 2010.
In 2009, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection released a report titled Child Sexual Abuse Images: An Analysis of Websites by Cybertip.ca. That report reinforced concerns regarding the scope and severity of child sexual abuse imagery.
Some of the report's key findings include: more than 82 per cent of the images assessed by Cybertip.ca depicted very young, prepubescent children under 12 years of age; 57 per cent of images were of children under eight years of age; more than 35 per cent of all images showed serious sexual assaults; and 83 per cent of the images were of girl children.
It should be noted Brook pleaded guilty to possessing child porn, but hasn't been charged with producing it, nor attempting to lure or engage in physical sexual abuse.
The likelihood of someone who collects pornographic images of children also taking the next step and attempting to lure, groom and personally abuse a child is not all that clear, but what is known is that
most involved in hands-on abuse are also collecting Internet child porn, says Bryce Westlake with the International Cybercrime Research Centre at the Surrey campus of SFU.
Westlake, who is a Ph.D. candidate conducting research focusing on sexual crimes committed online with an emphasis on child exploitation, noted a 2005 U.S. study for the National Center for Missing
and Exploited Children looked at so-called "dual offenders" who collect images as well as engage in physical abuse, finding some overlaps.
"It's kind of difficult to say how likely it is. The viewing of child pornography online is huge. It can be people who are not even necessarily interested in children but it's curiosity, but for someone who is actually attracted to children, it might actually be a way for them to try to meet those needs they have within themselves without personally victimizing a child," says Westlake. "It might be a situation where they supplement or it might be a situation where they are trying to get comfortable doing
something to a child of their own or a child in their care, so it can be a branching off point. You have a wide variety. Those who victimize children offline tend to also do online stuff, but it's not necessarily that everyone who is online is going the other way too, simply because that number is bigger."
Westlake says it's become easier with new technology such as digital cameras and camera phones to engage in child abuse and then post those images or videos online, increasing content on the Internet.
"You can have the one who's abusing offline who then goes online to find more and to trade. What you might also have is someone who doesn't have access to kids or is scared or nervous about doing anything like that, so a way for them to supplement this is by viewing the child online and saying, 'Well, I'm not actually hurting the child myself, at least directly.' So they justify it to themselves," Westlake says.
"Over time, there's a high possibility of desensitization, so what worked initially doesn't work anymore. Maybe they will try to be in the vicinity of a child who might be able to be abused and they slowly go towards that.
"So you can look at it both ways: it's either people who are exchanging stuff online are doing so because they are also abusing offline, or you can look at it as a starting point and branch-off point where it can spring to offline as well. Then you also have abuse online too, like chatrooms, and that can be a midway point too."
According to the U.S. Attorney General, many sex offenders don't have a criminal record or any police record at all.
