main page

THE KIDS AREN'T ALRIGHT

April 15, 2007May 3rd, 2007
Babylon, P.Q.
Write a comment on this article !
Babylon, P.Q. : Archives

The kids aren't alright
Jamie O'Meara
jomeara@hour.ca

Thomas Reedy was a Texas nurse driving a pair of $80,000 Mercedeses. [Note: We will save the discussion of whether or not "Mercedeses" is actually a word for another occasion.] Between September 1997 and August 1999 he made $9,275,900, though it wasn't because the bedpan business was booming. Reedy had a lucrative little sideline he called Landslide, a web portal, which was serving upwards of 100,000 paying customers in 60 countries. What made Landslide special, and so phenomenally successful, was the volume of traffic directed to child sexual exploitation websites (one site, Child Rape, picked up 1,277 registrants in a single month).

When Landslide was finally shut down in 2000, police around the globe were supplied with the names, addresses and credit card numbers of tens of thousands of people suspected of viewing or perpetrating child sexual abuse. Canada alone accounted for some 2,300 names. One of the bigger fish grabbed by his gills was Pete Townshend, guitarist for The Who, who admitted to having visited a child porn site during the course of "research" for his autobiography. (Townshend was himself sexually abused as a child.)

Pete Townshend got off with a "caution," or warning, though his name was placed on the U.K.'s Violent and Sex Offender Register for five years. Reedy, on the other hand, got 1,335 years in prison (though he's eligible for parole after 1,330... okay, maybe not).

As renowned Montreal investigative journalist, TV producer and author Julian Sher reveals in
Become a member
his latest book, One Child at a Time: The Global Fight to Rescue Children From Online Predators (Random House Canada), the Landslide case was just the tip of a vast child porn berg floating in the middle of an ocean of underground chat rooms and websites.

Like Sher's other non-fiction works - most recently the co-authored biker books The Road to Hell: How the Biker Gangs Are Conquering Canada and Angels of Death: Inside the Bikers' Global Crime Empire, as well as the award-winning "Until You Are Dead": Steven Truscott's Long Ride Into History, a highly recommended personal favourite of mine - One Child at a Time does not indulge itself. Sher doesn't overpaint the picture, nor does he dawdle on the way to his point, which makes for a spirited, quickly paced read. And as always, his research is impeccable.

Beginning with the story of "Jessica," a six-year-old tortured and raped for years by her software engineering father, One Child at a Time describes an era in which child sex predators moved freely, internationally and largely without fear of capture... less than 10 years ago. Sher takes us around the world, introducing us to the frontline computer crime scene investigators and special police units that hunt online pedophiles - like Toronto cop Paul Gillespie, who solved the Jessica case in 33 hours, and in so doing set in motion, with the help of one Bill Gates, the creation of Canada's Child Exploitation Tracking System (CETS) - while replaying a riveting array of actual cases.

"I've always been fascinated by crime that holds a mirror to society," explains Sher. "The biker gangs tell us a lot about our worship of the outlaw, but also how far a society is willing to go to crack down on organized crime. This book, in many ways, pushes that to the limit, because there is nothing more integral to the way we live now than the Internet, and this is really the new face of crime in the 21st century."

Sher acknowledges the difficulty in telling the story of crimes that, by their very nature, one doesn't necessarily want to get into descriptions of. "I would argue it's the task of journalists to shine a light in the dark places people don't want to go. But, unlike most of the other stuff I've written, where I could often go into detail - because it's relevant to the case or the guilt of the offender, it's part of true crime - here we consciously decided we would not... Because it was so horrific."

Even then, it's a pretty harrowing read. And as the author, Sher wouldn't have had the luxury of separating himself from his subject matter, though, apart from the preservation of his sanity, there were certainly other good reasons not to get overly close.

"It's illegal to download or view child pornography even in the guise of research, as Pete Townshend found out," he says pointedly. "I myself have, as a journalist, filmed drug users, followed around bikers, been with militias and gang leaders, so there's a certain time where you have to follow or observe some criminality in order to get the story. This was different. There was no way I wanted to participate, or condone, or in any way share in the abuse of children.

"And if you're clicking to download, even under the so-called guise of 'better understanding,' you are participating in the crime and the abuse. I made sure that the only child pornography I ever viewed was in the presence of a police officer in a police station, and even then it was limited.

"It absolutely scars you," he adds, pausing. "Keep in mind that one out of five of them are under three years old. It's just so horrific and depressing that you can't keep it out of your mind, and it does affect how you see people and how you see children."