Written by: TRESA BALDA; Daily Record
DETROIT — Child pornography isn't just more pervasive, it's getting even uglier.
Federal prosecutors here say they have witnessed the disturbing trend with the kids getting younger — toddlers and infants as young as 6 months old — turning up in photos and videos.
And the assaults are getting worse. It's not just still images of children in the nude, they say.
"There's a misconception in the public arena that these are mainly still images of children without clothes on. Well, the truth is that the majority of the pictures that are traded among these guys almost inevitably involve a child being either raped, or being forced to perform some type of sexual act on an adult or child," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Mulcahy, chief of the general crimes unit in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Detroit.
Child porn lovers live in your neighborhood
They aren't just creepy loners.
Seemingly normal people — doctors, coaches, authors, engineers, teens — are charged with possessing and making child porn, a $3-billion-a-year industry that the federal government has labeled the new silent child abuse.
Outed by their Internet activities, the accused stand before a judge, heads usually hung low, while their families sit in the back of the courtroom aghast at the accusations. And there typically is no criminal history to point to.
"There's this notion that it's the creepy neighbor who lives in the basement of his parent's house and downloads this stuff," Mulcahy said.
Far from it, he said.
There's another misconception about child porn, he added.
"It's not an eastern European problem, or southeast Asian problem. Half of the child porn traded in this country is made in this country," he said.
100,000 websites
Currently, there are an estimated 100,000 known child porn websites, according to Brigham Young University Women's Services. Child porn accounts for one-quarter of the $12-billion U.S. porn industry.
Fueled by the secret nature of the Internet, child porn has increased to the point where the federal government can't keep track of it all. The Justice Department conceded in a report issued in August that the growth of child porn is outpacing efforts to combat it.
"Tragically, the only place we've seen a decrease is in the age of victims," Attorney General Eric Holder said then following the release of the report, which promised to hire 38 prosecutors especially for child porn cases.
The Justice Department report says complaints of online enticement of children have more than tripled from 2004 to 2008, and complaints of child prostitution rose tenfold. Since 2006, more than 8,600 people have been prosecuted at the federal level on child porn charges.
Equally troubling, authorities said, is that not only are the kids getting younger, but the images are getting more graphic and violent. Children can be heard crying in some videos, they said.
Some legal and psychological experts think the trend is driven by the addictive nature of porn and its explosion on the Internet. The more users see, they say, the more they want.
"Normal sex acts don't excite them anymore," said Patrick Trueman, a former chief of the Justice Department's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section. "Now you're seeing the really extreme stuff, because once you've been through the still shots, that's not good enough."
Using social networking
In Michigan, a cyber crimes unit with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of the Department of Homeland Security has spotted another disturbing trend in recent months: Some people are using social networking to meet other child molesters. They're using peer-to-peer networks to molest kids in unison, with a remote audience participating.
For example, there's the case of Steven Demink, who a federal magistrate referred to as "a cyber predator of the worst kind."
Demink, 41, of Redford, Mich., is accused of manipulating women in three states into molesting their children and letting him view the sex acts via webcam or photographs, according to court records.
"This is the dark side of the Internet," said Brian Moskowitz, special agent in charge of ICE investigations in Michigan and Ohio. "There have always been people with a deviant sexual interest in children. It's now easier for them to do what they do."
And they're getting better at covering their tracks, said Moskowitz, who pointed out that today's child pornographer is computer savvy, some changing URLs every few days to throw the feds off track.
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