Boy, 4, girl 12, rescued in child-porn sweep

TIMOTHY APPLEBY

In one appalling detail, the Ontario-wide child pornography sweep that culminated yesterday in 31 arrests was different from most such investigations: a four-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl were rescued from homes where they had been abused and photographed.

But in another respect it was business as usual for the Ontario Provincial Police child sexual exploitation unit, which led the joint probe: At least two of the 31 people arrested, who included three minors and a 60-year-old man, had been convicted before of possessing or distributing child pornography.

Repeat child-porn offenders are all too familiar to police.

"We arrest them one year, and five, six years later we get them again," says Staff Sergeant Frank Goldschmidt, who co-ordinated the latest roundup, the largest of its kind in the province.

"And the repeat offenders I find are worse - younger children, material showing children with sex and violence."

Patrolling the Internet for child pornography requires a combination of sophisticated software and smart undercover sleuthing. But as OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino said yesterday in announcing the charges, police "feel challenged in our ability to keep pace with the pervasive use being made of [Internet technology] by those who seek to victimize children."

Several recent cases underline the complexity of the battle.

When Peterborough, Ont., repeat child pornography offender Stephen Bauer was handed an unusually tough prison term of almost four years late last year, a factor that disturbed the sentencing judge, Madam Justice Michelle Fuerst, was that one of his laptops contained a pirated version of a sophisticated encryption program called EnCase, supposedly used exclusively by police and the military. Equally devious was the ploy of Canadian pedophile Christopher Paul Neil, 33, run to ground in Thailand and jailed last year after posting Internet pictures that showed him abusing young boys, his face obscured by a digital swirl that German experts were able to unravel.

Detective Paul Krawczyk of the Toronto Police sex-crimes unit recounts arresting one child-porn consumer on three different occasions.

Each time, he deployed different techniques to hide his collection.

"And if we get him a fourth time it'll probably be different again."

Compounding the difficulties for investigators, Det. Krawczyk says, is the transparency of the prosecution process.

"They go through court and they get full disclosure, so they learn exactly how we caught them the first time."

Despite the risk of criminal charges and the life-wrecking disgrace that often accompanies them, there is no sign of declining demand for child pornography, most of which is produced not in Eastern Europe or South Asia, police say, but in North America.

Before this week's arrests, the provincial joint-forces unit that combats child pornography, comprising 18 police forces that work closely with the OPP, had since August, 2006, laid 1,983 charges against 634 people.

In the same period, the OPP's in-house task force laid an additional 392 charges against 144 people, about 5 per cent of whom were repeat offenders.

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