A Matter of Priorities: Stopping
Perverts and Child Molesters
By Jim Day
In today’s world, sex offender registries are astoundingly long, and
shocking incidences of children being stalked and victimized by cyberspace
predators make the headlines and television newscasts 
almost
every day. Law enforcement officials are making significant in-roads in capturing
and prosecuting those who seek to harm children — and they are using the same
weapon: the Internet.
Arrests
of cyber predators who target children in Missouri have quadrupled from 2006
to 2007, from 26 to 105 cases, thanks in major part to the success of Missouri’s
Internet Cyber Crime Grant (ICCG) Program — a ground-breaking program advanced
by Senator John Loudon, (R-Chesterfield, Dist. 7). The current budget for
the program amounts to $1.25 million a year for salaries, training and equipment
for professionals who work to prevent Internet cyber crimes against children.
According
to Loudon, a myriad of technologies and tactics make it easier than ever for predators
to find kids to terrorize. “This grant program is an effort to give law enforcement
the tools to keep up with the innovations of these evil exploiters of
children,” he said.
Loudon
invited more than 90 top law enforcement officers, child protection advocates,
prosecutors and Internet service providers from around the state to participate
in the first-ever Missouri Summit on Online Child Exploitation last December in
Jefferson City. The group urged Gov. Matt Blunt to increase funding for the
successful program to $3 million for the 2008-2009 budget year.
The
group supports adding 45 cyber detectives to snare online child predators, stronger
child protection legislation, Internet training and education for state law
enforcement officials, and mandatory Internet safety education for Missouri schools.
St.
Louis County Police Captain Tom Jackson, one of the grant recipients and early
supporters of the program, said funds from the program have contributed to his
department’s recent increases in the number of individuals arrested in St.
Louis County for Internet sex crimes against children. “We are working as hard
and fast as we can to track these predators and put them in the penitentiary,” Jackson
said.
During
a recent 11-month span, his department made 50 arrests and referred 79 cases as
the result of the work of two investigators employed exclusively to investigate
cyber sexual crimes against children. The department now employs four
investigators, one funded by the ICCG program.
In
St. Louis County and across the state, law enforcement officers share many of
the same disturbing scenarios of cyber predators. Sexual predators download
child pornography from the Internet for sexual gratification and then share
those images with others. They also go online and lure young victims for sexual
acts through conversations in local chat rooms and network with other sexual
predators to learn new skills, tactics and techniques to lure children and
avoid detection.
“It’s
more common than I or anyone wants to believe, but it’s there,” said Jackson.
“They used to live underground and couldn’t talk to each other…now they have
access to children in their own homes.”
Their
lurid stories are graphic and disturbing, he said. Jackson described a conversation
with a man his department recently arrested after intercepting child
pornographic images of the violent rape of a 3-year-old child. “Rather than
being horrified by it, the man was aroused by it,” Jackson said.
He
mentioned another recent case that involved the arrest of a local high school information
technology (IT) employee who was looking at child pornography at work. He was arrested after another computer
technician noticed the images and notified police. The IT employee was
eventually arrested and jailed.
Possessing
and distributing child pornography is only the beginning of this horrifying problem,
Jackson explained. “These [perpetrators] have more access to horrible, horrible
pornography that feeds their desires to go out and actually molest children
themselves,” he said. “And the images are out there forever,” he added. “There’s
no way you can permanently remove them. It’s a crime that continually
victimizes a child until they become an adult — it’s so sad.”
Captain
Scott Will of the Maryland Heights Police Department also cites the ICCG grant
as a reason for much of his own department’s success in nabbing cyber predator’s
intent on sexually abusing children.
“I’m
convinced we’ve stopped the victimization of lots of kids,” he said, noting his
department arrested 47 individuals over a recent 16-month period, primarily in
Missouri. Two cases have gone to trial with successful convictions. “It is mind-boggling
the mentality some of these people have,” Will said. Investigations supported
by the grant money, he noted, “have helped open our eyes to the enormity of the
problem. We are just flabbergasted at the number of people trying to entice our
officers [mistakenly believing they are children] by sending pictures and using
web cams.”
There is no single, typical profile of these offenders, who include
all ages and diverse backgrounds, Will explained “I can’t tell you the number
of times we’ve gone into expensive homes and nice 
neighborhoods,
and in the secret of basements, this is going on while wives are upstairs
oblivious to this, and sometimes caring for children,” he said.
One
particularly disturbing case, he said, involved an individual who tried to
entice a St. Louis County undercover police investigator posing as a child to
participate in a sexual tryst with him and his 9-year-old daughter. “He showed
up with his child, holding her hand, and walked toward the undercover agent
before the arrest was made,” Jackson said. The man was jailed and convicted at
trial.
Will
described another child abuser his office dealt with and referred to another
police jurisdiction as an offender with “the highest number of child
pornographic images on the eastern seashore, with hundreds of thousands of
images.”
Both
Jackson and Will indicated the majority of the arrests from these kinds of
cases are the result of proactive investigations in which investigators work
online posing as children to interact with predators. Other cases result from
cyber crime tip lines and more traditional investigative means. “With the
proper tools to catch online predators,” Will said, “it’s like shooting fish in
a barrel.”
Both
Will and Jackson declared this type of investigative work, which they describe
as “epidemic,” demands more financial resources to build upon the program’s
success and to keep up with rapidly changing technology to stay ahead of the
criminals.
“Some
regions are underserved and don’t even have forensic examiners,” Jackson said.
“We need to supply all of our [cyber
crimes] task forces around the state with available, trained and funded
examiners.” He added, “if we had three forensic
examiners, we would probably be working at twice the pace.” Forensic examiners
are specially trained to dig images and documents out of the deleted files of
computers, along with other evidence.
For
Senator Loudon, this is a problem with many dynamics which he is fighting on
many fronts. “I realize that government is limited in how much it can do,” he
said. “At the end of the day, it is up to parents to watch what their children
are doing at home and with their friends in their homes. I joined the effort to
open a St. Louis office of the National Coalition for the Protection of
Children and Families because, sadly, addiction to pornography is as big a
problem for the churched as the un-churched.”
Thanks
to Kerry Messer (President of the Missouri Family Network), who pushed the
State Legislature to outlaw the mere possession of child pornography before
most states understood the connection between child porn and child sex crimes,
these investigations can identify, arrest, and lock away child predators before
they claim more victims.
“The
reason why the funding issue for law enforcement is so important,” says Messer,
“is that law enforcement can only go as far as their budget allows. Senator
Loudon understands the biggest disturbing fact about this kind of crime right
here in Missouri, today – that no one knows how big the problem is, how many
predators are stalking our children and grandchildren, how many new criminals
are being created every day by a run-away porn industry, nor how many of
Missouri’s 600,000 children have been victimized to date, or how many will be
violated all across the state – tonight.”
Messer
fully supports Senator Loudon’s efforts. “We must make this funding effort a
priority. Law enforcement must not be financially encumbered while the State divides
up a 23 billion dollar budget. By protecting tonight’s victims, investigators
save many times over the financial burden of helping those same children when
the criminal goes unchecked.”
Conclusion
Folks,
as I mentioned earlier in this article, the current budget for fighting
Internet predators is $1.25 million dollars. The Governor has recommended
bumping up the budget to $1.5 million for 2008-2009. Senator Loudon, law
enforcement officers and child protection advocates have requested that the
budget be increased to $3 million. As you read this article, the budget is
being reviewed in the House and will be in the Senate for review in April.
The
governor’s proposed budget for 2008-2009 is 23.1 billion dollars. The three top
areas funded out of the General Revenue Fund are K-12 Education, Higher
Education and the State welfare system. All three of these areas have HUGE
budgets and shifting $500,000 from each of them into the Internet Cyber Crime
budget would not seriously affect any of them.
Here’s
another idea. St. Louis is home to some of the top Fortune 500 companies in
America. These are companies making billions of dollars. I’m talking about
companies like Anheuser-Busch, Nestle Purina PetCare,
Boeing, Ameren UE, Emerson Electric, Graybar
Electric, Express Scripts, Enterprise, Monsanto and the list goes on. If just
10 of these companies chipped in $100,000 each that would account for
two-thirds of the needed 1.5 million to increase the Internet Cyber Crime
budget. Make that 15 companies and no one has to touch the K-12, Higher Ed or welfare
budgets at all.
The
bottom line here folks is a matter of priorities. I would think locking up those
who prey upon innocent children to satisfy their perverted sexual desires would
be high on everyone’s list. If not, then they need to reevaluate their
priorities. Finding a measly 1.5 million dollars in a 23.1 billion dollar
budget, or asking a few multi-billion dollar companies to step up to the plate
to help protect children from being molested – possibly their own children –
should be a no-brainer.
I
encourage our readers (and everyone you know) to contact their State
Representatives and Senators and show them this article. Tell them they need to
reallocate some of the dollars slated for K-12, Higher Ed and welfare to
increase the budget for fighting Internet cyber crimes against children. If
they tell you they’ll have to increase taxes, politely tell them “NO, you don’t
have to increase taxes – the money is already there. This is a matter of
transferring money from one budget to another. This is a matter of priorities.”
Folks,
this should not be about ‘politics.’ This is a matter of fighting back against
some of the vilest, sickest, human beings on the face of the Earth - people who
are on the Internet searching for (and unfortunately often finding) little
children and teenagers to molest. We need to stop these people and put them
behind bars.
As
far as asking the companies listed above to get involved, send them a copy of this
article, too. Call them and explain the situation. Companies
make donations to worthy causes all the time and preventing children from being
molested by perverts (and possibly murdered) is – to say the least – an
extremely worthy cause. If the company isn’t sure how to contribute, tell them that
they can contact State Representative Allen Icet the Chairman
of the House Budget Committee either by calling him at (573) 751-1247 or by emailing
him at allen.icet@house.mo.gov. Allen will be more than happy to help them and
work out the details.
I
want to end this commentary by addressing those who are surfing the Internet in
an attempt to find a child or teenager to satisfy their sexual desires. YOU CAN
STOP DOING WHAT YOU ARE DOING. Jesus Christ of Nazareth can and will help you
turn your life around. As horrible as this sin may be, it is not an
unforgivable sin. You can – through Christ – over come your desires and stop
this behavior.
If
you do not stop, getting caught and going to prison will be the least of your
worries. Jesus Himself in Matthew 18, verses 6 and 7 gives the following
warning: “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me,
it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he
were drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe unto the world because of
offences! For it must
needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!”
(KJV)
Yet,
our Lord is a God of redemption. He is willing and able to help you if you
will just turn to Him. Pick up the phone right now and call a minister and
make an appointment to talk to him.
