Child porn - our secret shame

The terrible thing about Nathan Gaunt's job is that it's a growth area. He is a cyber psychologist, dealing with men who delve into the vast world of the internet to find sexual images of children.

Which is putting it nicely. Some of these images are so horrific they defy belief. Baby rape, for example, is common and relatively easy to find on the net, when you know how, and if you actually want, to look.

Most people do not. But there are plenty who do and who distribute, trade and obsessively hoard images such as this - and they are here in clean, green New Zealand.

It is such a growing problem that the organisation for which Gaunt works, the Safe treatment programme for sexual abusers, is setting up a group just for online child abusers.

And make no mistake, he says, it is abuse. There is no such thing as just looking, when each ghastly image represents the abuse of a real child.

The abusers come in all shapes, sizes and ages, and span all professions. Gaunt will not reveal details of his clients but throughout the world online abusers come from all walks of life. Heterosexual and straight, married and single, with and without children.

Some may indeed "just look", but others buy and sell, some have already abused children "hands-on" and others may go on to abuse children "hands-on".

Some have just a few images. Others are collectors with huge libraries on their computers, painstakingly catalogued.

In New Zealand at any one time there are 20 or 30 cases of online abusers before the courts and others under investigation.

But even if it may seem as if there is a child abuser under every rock, when Time magazine last week asked the question: "Is New Zealand a haven for paedophiles?" it was wildly exaggerating, say the experts.

New Zealand is no more a haven than Australia or America or any other country. The trouble is, the exact extent of the problem is not known anywhere.

The paedophile haven question was raised in the South Pacific edition of Time in connection with Operation Falcon, one of an increasing number of international sting operations nabbing online child abusers.

The FBI supplied several countries with lists of suspects caught out by their credit cards buying and distributing images from child pornography sites in Belarus.

The police here have been criticised for making no arrests so far, unlike Australia where hundreds of people have been investigated, nine of whom have committed suicide.

It was claimed in Parliament on Thursday that the police had officers ready to investigate more than 70 Operation Falcon names but then called them off without explanation. But Vince Cholewa from Internal Affairs is angry at the Time article which he says was written by an Australian reporter and is "Kiwi-bashing".

Operation Falcon is a police operation and DIA will not comment specifically, but Cholewa bristles. "That's just unnecessary crap for people who work really hard and do a really good job."

Steve O'Brien is one of them, a member of a nine-strong team of censorship compliance inspectors, a unit monitoring and tracking people deep in the underbelly of the internet. There you can find channels actually called "baby rape" and you may find 30 people distributing images. "Now, within that channel of 30 people you'll find possibly half a dozen Americans, half a dozen Canadians, a few English, maybe an Australian, maybe a New Zealander. It's the New Zealander we're going after."

Nine years on, O'Brien remains disgusted by what he comes across. "If you actually saw some of the pictures, I mean, saying that you've seen baby rape conjures up certain images. If you actually see the images it's 100 times worse. It's pretty damn sick."

Gaunt says the internet was designed to be uncontrollable but no one anticipated it might be put to such use. It is easy to access and for some the lure is irresistible.
Gaunt has seen people who have gone online and looked at mainstream pornography, deviated slightly to the fringe, then gone into areas which are objectionable. "Often people will tell me they're aware they've crossed the line but just don't really remember where that was."

Offenders often think that because the material already exists and is available they are not doing wrong. The challenge is to make them realise the victims are real.

"We often say to people, 'Would it be okay to stand in a room and watch a child being abused?' No. 'Would it be okay to stand at the back of the room?' No. 'Would it be okay to look through a window, across the street, how far do you have to get away?"'

Some of the image-gatherers will graduate to abusing children but others argue that viewing stops them from going on to actual abuse.

John McCarthy, director of the Safe programme, says that though there is no study showing evidence of a causal link between looking at child porn and sexually abusing, the literature points that way.

Certainly there is an association between looking and trading in child porn and committing abuse.

A United States study of two groups - one of child molesters, the other of convicted child porn traders - found three-quarters of the child porn traders had also committed a hands-on offence. The molesters had about nine victims each, the child porn traders had more than 30 each.

McCarthy says that one of the emerging problems in New Zealand is that although Internal Affairs actively seeks online abusers, who are charged under censorship laws, it is a police matter to further investigate "grooming" potential child victims or possible contact with children, which is essential when assessing the risk a person poses. But he says the police do not have enough dedicated resources for further forensic examination of computers.

Another to pinpoint poor resourcing is Ron O'Grady, president of End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes' International, and board member of the New Zealand group.

He says New Zealand is no more a haven for paedophiles than anywhere else, but Operation Falcon has shown up some of our deficiencies, and that there are far too few specialised people working full time. He suggests the credit and the shame of New Zealand is that we have a cutting-edge team at Internal Affairs but a stretched police force which simply does not have the facilities.

The law has also hampered agencies' ability to deal to online abusers, but is changing. For example, Internal Affairs inspectors cannot get a search warrant if they suspect someone merely possesses child pornography.

That is about to change. And sentencing will toughen up, with amendments before Parliament increasing maximum penalties for distribution to 10 years in prison and for possession to five years.

Getting laws changed is all very well but they are no use without resourcing to enforce them, O'Grady says.

Online child abuse should be taken as seriously as murder."With murder, death takes place. With child sexual abuse with violence, that is a slow death. And it's something that a child remembers every day, even when they're adults."

Experts say the harmful aspect of the internet is that it allows paedophiles to reinforce each other's inclinations.

Ask forensic psychologist Nigel Latta how many people are out there online child-abusing and he says "craploads".

The internet is a gateway not just to child pornography but to fetishes of all kinds. Everyone has fantasies they may be uncomfortable about, but seldom act on them. The internet has given voice to them all in a big anonymous pot of human consciousness.

And that is not really a good thing, Latta says. He believes the negatives of the internet may one day outweigh any positives and the world would a better place without it. But "the monster's out of the box".

Pageant pervert

Shane Allan Harris filmed child beauty pageants at the beach and at gymnastic events, zooming in on the groin area.

But the images were discovered only after Internal Affairs was tipped off by Canada that a New Zealander was making child sex abuse images available on the internet.

This week, the 33-year-old Timaru man with previous convictions for indecent assault on children, became the 155th New Zealander to be convicted of distributing child sexual abuse images following Internal Affairs' investigations. They tracked him to his home, took away his computer and found seven electronic movies and 49 pictures, mostly of adult men sexually abusing children.

Harris has been jailed for eight months. Internal Affairs says what was most worrying was Harris' belief that his collection and distribution of child sex abuse images caused no harm. Each month an average of more than two New Zealanders are convicted of distributing child sexual abuse images. The sentencing of Harris was the third in two weeks.