Predator and Prey: The Internet’s dark corners
Online pedophile forums require legislative response, child advocates insist
“I’m a helper at a youth club that meets once per week and is attended by 10- to 14-year-old boys,” reads the anonymous online posting on a “boy love” chat forum, where thousands of pedophiles gather to communicate with each other.
“For the last two months, these two 10-year-old boys have been attending. They’re best friends and I like them both emotionally and physically. I want to spend more time with them outside the club.”
Afraid of drawing attention to himself and his desires, he asks for advice on how to get the boys alone.
Assistance quickly rolls in onscreen.
“Pharmaceuticals are your friend . . . GHB, ketamine, rohypnol,” says one reply, listing popular “club drugs” often used to assist in sexual assault.
“But be quick,” the anonymous online advisor concludes. “Ten (years of age) is getting pretty close nowadays to the change. Enjoy.”
Pedophilic impulses that were once isolating and stigmatizing have found community, social support and encouragement online, where men can easily access videos of children and share techniques for luring and grooming children.
The targets of pedophilic sexual desires are increasingly younger and younger, according to experts and research.
Messages on the “boy love” forums reviewed by the Star referred to children as young as 2 as objects of adult male desire.
“They’re trying to climb this ladder of immorality,” says Dr. Michael Bourke, chief psychologist with the U.S. Marshals Service. “They’re trying to say to their community, ‘Look, I win, mine are the youngest.’ . . . There’s a special place in hell for some people.”
In pre-Internet days, pedophiles had to keep their sexual predilections to themselves.
Uttering or acting on their preferences in public would have brought public scorn and, often, police charges.
Online, those with pedophilic fantasies are encouraged and enabled, says Bourke.
“The natural protective factor of guilt and shame that would stop them from pursuing it are mitigated by the people telling them that it’s normal. It’s gasoline on a flame. The Internet is enhancing those drives.”
It’s also easier to hide online, say police who monitor these chat forums but are often handcuffed in what they can do.
There’s nothing illegal about discussing sexual preference or how to subvert law enforcement with sophisticated encryption, says Toronto police Det. Paul Krawczyk, who heads the force’s child exploitation unit.
“This is the perfect area where they go and teach other how to hide, how to molest children, how to avoid being detected by law enforcement,” he said.
“It’s mind-blowing when you get a sense of how many people are out there that want to talk about this, who want to trade images, who want to abuse children.”
It’s a problem requiring a strong legislative response, says Lianna McDonald, executive director of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, whose staff routinely receive tips about “boy love” forums they pass on to police across the country.
The material includes live record- ings of children being beaten by adults, predators counselling how to abuse children and the “marketing” of children as sexual objects “for adults to use and abuse,” said McDonald.
Legislation targeting communications or recordings that advocate harm to children would be challenged as a threat to free speech, she admits.
“But when we apply these arguments with a child-protection lens it can be argued that privacy and Internet security rights are not absolute,” MacDonald said, citing other child-specific legislation, such as child-welfare laws across Canada.
“This would stop the open and public normalization of this behaviour, the establishment of such communities, and send a message to those Canadians participating in such activities that this is not okay.”
TOMORROW: Reflections of a convicted child-porn addict.