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New book hails police combating online child sex abuse and cyber predators

By Victoria Ahearn

TORONTO (CP) He's written extensively on biker gangs, police corruption and wrongful conviction cases, and reported from violence-plagued regions in Baghdad, Somalia and South Africa.

But Montreal-based investigative journalist Julian Sher says his latest project, a book about online child sex abuse, was ''by far the most unsettling.''

''I was shocked, and I want to shock people, into knowing that 40 per cent of the pictures that are being seized now are children under five, and 20 per cent are children under three,'' Sher said in an interview to promote ''One Child at a Time.''

''So it has nothing to do with sex, it has nothing to do with pornography. This is outright torture, rape and abuse of children so I wasn't prepared for that and I don't think most readers are. I wasn't prepared for how widespread it was, you know, how easy it was to access.''

''One Child at a Time'' can be a tough read for some, admits Sher, as it outlines true cases of horrific child sex abuse and exploitation through videos and images on the Internet, including cases involving infants. It doesn't get graphic, though, and it provides a fascinating insight into how professional crime fighters, including those in Canada, track down suspects and rescue victims.

In the early 1990s, agencies and police units in Canada, the United States and the U.K. struggled to cope with the crimes, writes Sher, due to miscommunication, overwhelming amounts of evidence, and a lack of resources, technical sophistication and manpower.

Now, they're able to infiltrate online pedophile groups, hack their software programs, scour global databases and trace the tiniest of clues in pictures.

''This is real 'CSI,''' said Sher. ''This is real Canadian cops and American cops looking at images, finding the smallest clue in a little book in the background, a little telephone book, a necklace or a bracelet, digging into the pictures, finding out the smallest clue that will lead to the rescue of children or the trapping of these predators.''

Sher started writing the book in 2004 and decided fairly early on that it would be more an homage to the heroes, the detectives who venture outside their comfort zones to understand how the predators' networks work. Among the champions mentioned frequently in the book is Paul Gillespie, former head of the Toronto police Child Exploitation unit.

Sher, too, went outside his comfort zone in writing the book when he viewed some ''disturbing images'' at police stations.

He didn't download or look at child pornography, though, ''1. because it's a crime, 2. because I'm just revictimizing the children, even if I'm studying the picture,'' said Sher, who now wants to do a followup book on child sex tourism.

The true crime writer also met with child predators and read some of their material but didn't delve too deeply into their world because, as he puts it, ''you don't have to sniff cocaine to understand a drug cartel.''

In all his research, Sher discovered that 70 to 80 per cent of the victims are known to their predators. In one case cited in the book, online pedophiles were swapping pictures of a young girl being sexually abused and held in a cage. It turned out the abuser was her father, who let her play outside and go to school every day, and nobody in the neighbourhood had a clue.

''These are not strangers ... these are doctors, lawyers, politicians and they're committing a crime on the Internet that's in everybody's home,'' said Sher, adding whatever definition you have of an online predator is wrong.

Sher thinks the book is ''fairly uplifting'' because it shows that ''police are actually turning it around, you know, the police are using the same technology that the predators have been using, against them.''

He said we need to look at the Internet as a playground and neighbourhood where, ''if you see a series of muggings you don't go out and shut down the park, you just put up more lights and get authorities involved,'' he said.

But as with any growing threat, there's still more work to be done.

In Canada, where Sher believes police are doing the most path-breaking cyber predator work on the globe, there's an ''appalling blindness'' and ''severe misunderstanding'' about the issue on the part of some judges, he said.

As well, convicted sex offenders who have been released from jail in this country are not obliged to notify authorities if they're travelling abroad for less than 14 days _ something Sher would like to see changed.

Sher also wants to see an RCMP image database for crime cases involving cyber predators.

And for all the work the crime fighters are doing, they'll never completely win the technological war, said Sher, because the predators are resourceful, resilient, they can hide easily online, there are more of them than there are police _ and they never retire.

''Even in the Toronto porn squad, the lead detective, two of the other senior detectives have left the squad just because that's what police do _ they move on, they get promotions, they retire,'' said Sher, who has two children in university.

''Predators don't retire, predators don't get promotions and transfer to another crime, police do.''

Sher hopes parents will read the book so they'll ''stop fooling themselves about what their children could be exposed to on the Internet'' and start street-proofing their kids online.

He'd also like older teenagers to read the book because, as he discovered, 10 per cent of child porn images that are being found now in the U.S. are self-produced, mostly by teenaged girls.

Key law enforcement figures cited in the book recently asked Sher to sign copies for their children who can't read yet ''so that when they grow older they'll know what their fathers did to rescue other children.''

Child predators should also read it, said Sher, because ''they should be told that they're not invincible, that they are being taken down,'' and so that they might seek help.