Human Trafficking Watch

Police arrest 121 in child porn raids - Europe- msnbc.com:

Spanish police arrested 121 people in the country’s biggest-ever crackdown on child pornography, seizing discs containing millions of video and photo files shared by a network that distributed them in 75 countries, authorities said Wednesday. Two of the suspects produced pornographic material themselves using members of their own families, police said in a statement. Those arrested came from all kinds of backgrounds, including pilots, salespeople, porters, taxi drivers and bank employees, it said.

The AP is reporting that 55 men were arrested after an eight-month-long investigation into an online file-sharing operation:

Fifty-five men, including a former sheriff’s deputy and at least one attorney, were charged with possessing child pornography following an eight-month investigation, authorities said Tuesday.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles said the suspects used peer-to-peer networks to exchange graphic images and videos, then stored the files on their computers.

All were charged with possession of child pornography. Some had been charged with additional offenses, such as production of child pornography and committing crimes while registered sex offenders.

This is a bizarre story in that the perpetrator, Jeremy Noyes,  allegedly was attempting to convince a New Zealand woman to raise her daughter as his sex slave. The FBI was tipped off by a classmate via a Web site and then a former girlfriend confirmed the allegations. However, the FBI can’t confirm the mother and daughter exist.

Noyes wanted them to move in with him and that “his long term intent was to assemble a ‘family’ of female sex slaves that would begin with” the woman and her daughter.

“Noyes intended to impregnate (the 4-year-old) when she was between the ages of 8 and 14 and then continue to breed the future offspring that would result from his plan,” Noyes’ classmate told the FBI. “Noyes intends to buy a farm or an island where he could put his new society together.”

The FBI investigation said it found women who corresponded with Noyes online and, in turn, the child-sex images in his e-mail account earlier this month.

I’m always astounded when women are willing to deal in child porn and even more so when those women involve their own children. I can only hope the women who sent him the images don’t actually have children. Hopefully the images will lead to their arrests also.

27-year-old Philip Thompson pleaded guilty to child porn charges and was sentenced indefinitely to prison in Britain, using a wait-and-see approach to how long he’ll actually serve. His lawyer made excuses for him:

Lawyer Brian Russell said Thompson had cooperated with police since his arrest in February.

“This is really a young man who has fallen into that stereotype of a rather sad and lonely teenager who spends too much time in a darkened room in front of a computer screen,” Russell said. “He has not had much life experience to get himself mature.”

Immature? I hope there aren’t a lot of people buying into that line of thinking when it comes to child porn trafficking online. Calling Thompson a stereotype insinuates that child porn is something acceptable if you only know the circumstance. In addition, Thompson is 27 years old, not a teenager.

It is these situations that make me wonder how some defense attorneys sleep at night. At least the judge had a reasoned opinion of him:

Judge Michael Taylor gave him an indeterminate prison sentence, saying he must prove he is not a risk to society before he can be released.

He told Thompson he was “somebody who is prepared to go to extreme lengths to feed your lust. You are a very dangerous individual indeed.”

Indeed.

It appears that many children have been rescued from a large, worldwide child porn ring. What was interesting about this story was the admission by law enforcement that this ring was sophisticated technically and socially.

In all, more than 400,000 pictures, video files and other images showing children engaged in sexual behavior were produced, advertised, traded and distributed globally in the online pornography ring, according to U.S. and international authorities. The sting, which started in Australia, also netted accused pornographers in England, Canada and Germany.

Some victims were as young as 5 years old. Others were preyed upon for innocent characteristics such as wearing their hair in pigtails.

Authorities won’t say how they eventually broke through several layers of encryption, background checks and other security measures the pornographers used to protect their online user group from being accessed.

The highly sophisticated porn ring was run like a business, FBI Executive Assistant Director J. Stephen Tidwell said Tuesday, with the lewd images used as currency instead of cash.

“This is beyond a quantum exponential leap for us to see folks that have gone to this much trouble to produce this kind of volume of horrific exploitation of children,” Tidwell said in an interview. “But with 400,000 [images] we’re going to be at this for years, trying to find the victims.

I believe the future of child porn is even more layers of security to protect the perpetrators. Australia’s Courier Mail has an excellent and detailed article about the police operation, including some details about the victims. These children were raped and abused by people closest to them, further proof that trafficking is not just for sleazy underworld figures. It could be happening in anyone’s neighborhood.

Two years later, the Queensland-driven global police sting rescued more than 20 children from a life of sexual abuse and netted 22 members of The Group.

“These men were leading bizarre double lives, and being part of this network was more important than their real-life existence,” Det-Insp Rouse said.

The men were arrested last month in simultaneous raids in Australia, the US, Germany, Britain and Canada. Two Australians were arrested, including a federal public servant in Townsville, who is an alleged ringleader.

More than 100 online users who bought child pornography were arrested worldwide, and four commercial sites, including one that showed more than 40 children being sexually abused, were shut down.

Update 03/18/2003 8:00 PM

Presca Ahn of Yale posted a comment where she copied a letter to Brent Bozell, whom I quoted below. Please note her comment related to the events of the evening in question.

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 Original Post

For quite a while now, I have been putting together a post about pornography. It’s one of the principle reasons for this new blog, since it seems so out of place next to a review of Microsoft Office 2007 or an article on weak computer security. I have been wanting to show the link between human trafficking and the porn industry. I went through several drafts in my head and have been doing tons of research online (no, not that kind) to discover that it’s nearly impossible to grasp what is going on with this industry. That’s because the porn industry is about perception and who communicates that perception to others.

Just like the optical illusion drawing of the two faces / goblet, porn is described by many as this natural, healthy expression of free speech performed by consenting adults for other open-minded adults. However, the more you learn about the actual reality going on behind the scenes, you start to see the goblet along with the two faces.

My epiphany related to porn was around five years ago when I started reading about sex workers in Europe who were used as fodder to get fast and cheap images used on free porn sites. Nothing is really free and free porn certainly costs somebody. Since pornographers are not philanthropists, somebody is paying somewhere. You have to wonder where the vast plethora of free images come from. Did all of these women, young girls, and boys suddenly decide to pursue a career in the adult industry?

I am fascinated by the complete lack of regard for the sources of pornographic content. The American defenders of the pornography industry long ago changed perception of what was once an embarrassing, underground activity to something that had to do with free speech. Obviously, this was a smart tactic because it made the issue of pornography about the porn consumer rather than the content providers. As a free speech issue, stupid liberal academics now defend porn as some kind of entitlement for all Americans; meanwhile, they willfully choose to remain clueless about how the industry continues to make record profits and who is used and discarded as part of the process.

Brent Bozell’s excellent column last week regarding Sex Week at Yale accidentally showing a rape fantasy film demonstrates my point about liberals and porn:

The Yale Daily News reported that at about the same time Newsweek was putting its saucy story on the presses, the organizers of Sex Week at Yale were throwing a porn-movie screening in the law school auditorium. Hardcore pornographer Paul Thomas was invited to show films and have a question-and-answer session (and plug sales for his Vivid Entertainment DVDs). Unfortunately for Yale, Thomas brought footage of graphic rape fantasies and the labeling of a woman as a “slut” who “deserved” violent sexual degradation.

Oops. Apparently, when you run Sex Week, you don’t think of pre-screening anything. After all when does the concept of “inappropriate” porn arrive with this crowd? Everyone wants to be “cavalier,” because anything less makes you Jerry Falwell. But there’s a force at Yale far more powerful than Christianity.

Enter the feminists at the Yale’s Women Center, who were not pleased. Presca Ahn, who is the “fellowship coordinator” there, declared: “In porn, sex is not a normal, healthy part of normal, healthy lives; it’s fetishized, exaggerated or embellished. Porn isn’t honest. We need to talk honestly about it: It hurts women.”

The film clips were abruptly ended, and the session went right into the Q&A. Sex Week coordinators made it very clear to the Yale Daily News they do not support the practices displayed in the film. Colin Adamo, Sex Week event coordinator, called the screening a grave mistake. “We really dropped the ball on this one,” he said. “No one watched the movie before Paul showed it to the audience.”

Unsurprisingly, that was not the pornographer’s opinion. The Daily News reported that Adamo described the images as sexually unhealthy and disrespectful to women. But the pornographer’s response “insinuated that he was a prude and just needed to watch more porn, Adamo said after the screening.” Thus the solution to having any moral qualms about pornography is to drown yourself in more pornography.

No one in this controversy asked: Where are the grownups? Isn’t there a one questioning his return on the annual $45,000 investment in “education”? Where are the administrators? Is there anyone at Yale who can provide students with a more rational voice than a hardcore pornographer? This whole controversy gives off a whiff of the inmates running the asylum.

To expect the Ivy League to reflect traditional values is to dabble in fantasy. But it’s a sad cultural signpost when it’s considered a prudish traditional value to object to films that seek to encourage men to build fantasy scenarios about violent sexual assault.

And that is really the point. This is a cultural problem. So much so that rape fantasies are part of mainstream porn. How many of these fantasy films are actual rapes? Many former adult stars have written about how they were forced to perform much of what they did. Many claim that drugs are used to keep the women agreeable. We come back to my original point: nobody questions where the content comes from. Sex Week at Yale was all about the end-users and their fantasies. The faculty were shocked that a rape video was even conceived by their invited guests. I was surprised they were surprised. But then again, they were responding to criticism from a liberal organization and that put them in a tough spot.

I do realize there are many people who voluntarily give themselves up to be in porn, whether it’s amateur, self-published or somebody who really wants to do it for the money. However, I firmly believe that the number of willing volunteers in the worldwide porn industry pales when compared to those who ended up there from unfortunate circumstances, desperation, manipulation, or outright slavery. I’m still looking for studies to back up my assertion, but there seems to be a serious lack of academic research into content providers and porn. Imagine that.

So you might say to me something about consenting adults using pornography to enhance their sex lives and that there’s nothing wrong with that. In theory, I agree. But the fact is you never know where the individuals in the porn come from. As happened to me, I saw the goblet and now I can’t help but see it even when I’m concentrating on the two faces. Look past the selfish consumers of porn to see what this industry does to its participants.