The Hamilton Spectator
February 13, 2008
Dad, teen arrested in child porn raids

Susan Clairmont, The Hamilton Spectator

One guy is a dad.

The other guy is just 16.

Both live in Hamilton and are charged with possessing child pornography.

They are among our local contributions to Ontario's largest-ever child porn investigation.

Just after 7 a.m. Monday, the dad and the teen were arrested in their homes during raids carried out by members of Hamilton police and the OPP.

By the end of that day, 20 others were arrested in 15 communities across the province and 73 criminal charges were laid.

The dad, Jay Hutchinson, 24, is charged with distributing and possessing child porn.

The teen -- the only youth to be arrested in the sweep -- faces one count of possession of child porn.

Another arrest is pending in Hamilton.

Also arrested from this area are: Edwin Morris, 63, of Burlington; Michael E. Shipley, 31, of Milton; and Thomas Webb, 56, of Brantford.

Halton police say Morris was already under investigation by their child porn unit when the OPP became involved.

One woman, from Whitby, was charged in the raids.

And a Toronto man arrested for having child porn also faces two counts of luring a child, invitation to sexual touching and exposure to a child.

The multi-jurisdictional investigation began last month and quickly ramped up to include Internet users from London to Cornwall and as far north as Red Lake.

Most of the online investigation was done through the OPP's Project P child porn unit in Toronto (part of the Provincial Strategy to Protect Children from Sexual Abuse and Exploitation on the Internet) with municipal police applying for warrants and conducting raids.

Child porn investigators use special software and investigative techniques to trace the online images of child exploitation back to an Internet provider. Then police apply for search warrants to obtain street addresses for the Internet customers through their providers.

After that, police often use good old-fashioned surveillance techniques -- by sitting in plain door cars with binoculars -- to determine who is in a home using the computer at the time child porn is being downloaded.

To help make their arrests this week, Hamilton police called upon their former child porn investigator Constable Doug Rees, who left the service recently to join the OPP. He came back to assist the new investigator with writing warrants and executing the early morning raids.

"I was privileged to take part in the sweep," Rees said, "because of what it was and how big it was. To be the investigator in Hamilton for five years and not be part of such an historical event would have been disappointing."

Rees made the arrests alongside computer technicians from Hamilton police, members of Project P and the OPP's E-Crimes unit in Orillia. Computers in the homes of the dad and of the teen were seized and will be forensically examined.

That could lead to more charges. Rees says with the international nature of child porn, it is unlikely any of the children being abused in the images are from this area.

A computer was also seized from a third home. Police are looking at that hard drive and expect charges to be laid against a third person.

Though child porn laws apply to any exploitative images depicting a child under the age of 18, police don't often lay charges unless the victim depicted is clearly a child, says investigative journalist Julian Sher. That usually means a child who is prepubescent.

So a 16-year-old is unlikely to face child porn charges for looking at sexually explicit pictures of another 16-year-old, he says.

Sher, whose book One Child at a Time looks at the dark world of on-line predators, says child pornography investigations almost always begin online with someone -- a police officer, a computer repair technician, an employer -- finding sexually exploitative images of children on a computer. Less often, an investigation begins with someone disclosing the abuse of a child.

"This is not the trading of pictures," Sher says. "This is the rape and abuse of very real children."

Police categorize online images as "old" or "new," says Sher. The old images have often been floating around the Internet for years. And while it's illegal to download them or share them, police are less likely to go looking for the child who was abused in the images. When a new image is discovered by police, they take a two-pronged approach to their investigation -- get the downloaders and find the child.