Paedophiles are now raping children on live webcams. At least when six-year-... (Had, Child, Jessica, His, Internet)-NEWSMONSTER

Paedophiles are now raping children on live webcams

Heartbreakers

Written by Danny Penman

At least when six-year-old Jessica was in her cage no one could hurt her. She often dreamt of being rescued but nobody ever came.

A victim of child abuse, she was a very tradable ‘item’ and terrible photographs of her were being seen by thousands of paedophiles across the Internet. And when she wasn’t being abused and photographed, she was usually kept in a small barren cage in a cellar.

Thankfully for Jessica, a British police officer was determined to track her down and put the abuser behind bars. Sergeant Paul Griffiths, a detective for Greater Manchester Police, had infiltrated a paedophile gang and came across the pictures of Jessica.

“It was sickening,” says Griffiths. “You always feel a deep disappointment that another child has fallen prey to an abuser. In Jessica’s case it was far more disturbing because of the severity of the images.”

It was clear to Griffiths that she was being so ill-treated that she could be killed at any time. Perhaps she was already dead. Griffiths moved fast. He contacted his colleagues in police forces around the world, showed them the images and set in train one of quickest and most effective investigations into online child abuse ever undertaken.

One of Griffiths’s Interpol colleagues in Germany was the first to respond. He had discovered a collection of 300 photos of Jessica but did not know who the child was or where she was being abused. Many of these newer pictures were indescribably awful. In many, her face was streaked with tears.

In some, Jessica was holding a picture of a young blond girl in her hand. Griffiths discovered this was a coded message to paedophiles all over the world. It meant that if they wanted to see more pictures of Jessica then they should send photographs of the blond girl to the paedophile network putting out the images.

Although such pictures are appallingly distressing they are nevertheless valuable to the police. They are, after all, photographs of a crime scene. To a skilled detective they can provide crucial clues that allow victims to be traced and perpetrators put behind bars.

“Some paedophiles are careless,” says Paul. “They just don’t know what they are doing and so leave a trail of evidence for us to follow. Often little things can be very valuable. Such things as the type of handle on a door or the way wallpaper is put up can give us clues.”

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Paul had an inkling that the photographs had been taken in North America. The furniture in the background of the photos, a Pokemon bedspread, the clothes Jessica occasionally wore, all suggested America. But where exactly?

Their first big break came when Paul’s Interpol colleagues in Canada discovered a handful of pictures of Jessica with her abuser. Although it was only a profile shot, it was enough for them to recognise the paedophile if only they could locate him.

They then noticed that Jessica was wearing an orange wristband in some of the photos. These were issued by a chain of amusement parks found in five US states. Very quickly they had another break when they unearthed a picture of Jessica in her Brownie uniform. When these photos were enhanced they discovered part of her troop number. Raleigh in North Carolina was the most likely location.

In other photos Jessica wore a green dress, which turned out to be part of a school uniform. Crucial features had been obscured by the abuser but it gave them another clue – the uniform was worn by girls from only two schools in Raleigh, one was a Catholic junior girls’ school.

The officers were ecstatic but now they had to face the awful question: “Was she still alive?”

When officers from the FBI arrived at Jessica’s school their hearts sank. She was off sick and had been for several days. Although only 33 hours had elapsed since the search for Jessica had begun, there was a very real risk that she had already been killed by her abuser.

The officers raced to the family home where their suspicions soon fell on Jessica’s father, Burt Thomas Stevenson, a software engineer and pillar of the local middle-class community.

“I’m very impressed you got here,” he smirked as he opened the front door to the FBI agents. “So what do you want to know?”

The reason for his arrogance soon became all too apparent. He had skilfully encrypted all of the data and pictures on his computers with a seemingly unbreakable code. The case looked insoluble.

But the police soon discovered Stevenson had made a small technical error that enabled them to unlock his computers. When they delved into his computers a horrific drama unfolded.

Stevenson had hired a hitman to murder his two sons and torture his wife to death. And as his wife died, the last thing he wanted her to see were the pictures of him abusing their daughter.

Once his family was out of the way Stevenson would have free and unfettered access to Jessica. It was clear that the only thing he cared about in this world was the freedom to abuse his daughter and to share his photographs and fantasies with paedophiles all over the world.

The police immediately moved Jessica and her family to a safehouse before carefully laying their case before Stevenson. His arrogance crumbled in an instant. Stevenson pleaded guilty to the child abuse charges and to “commissioning murder for hire”. He was duly sentenced to 100 years in jail. In all likelihood, he will spend the rest of his life behind bars in prisons where paedophiles are routinely beaten-up and frequently killed.

“I was elated when I heard the abuser had been caught,” says Griffiths. “I was also delighted that we had proved the concept of organised international cooperation to help identify the victims of online child abuse.”

But this is just one victory in a war which is escalating at a terrifying speed.

Last year, according to the Internet Watch Foundation, crimes such as those inflicted on Jessica increased four-fold in Britain. Commercial sites which sell the worst pictures imaginable are also booming, with the trade now believed to be worth hundreds of millions of pounds a year.

“These are not pictures of 21-year-old women posing in school uniforms,” says Sarah Robertson, spokeswoman for the Internet Watch Foundation, the industry body that combats the trade. “These are truly nasty photographs showing the worst kinds of images imaginable. People refer to it as child pornography but that implies that it is in someway consensual. It is not. It is child abuse.”

The recent conviction of the comedian Chris Langham and the cautioning of the Who’s Pete Townshend shows that those who access the nastiest images are no longer the stereotypical dirty old men in raincoats.

Some of the images that Langham downloaded even caused a member of the jury in his court case to cry. And the problem is so widespread that BT estimates 60,000 attempts are made every day to access websites depicting child abuse. Many of these will be made by seemingly ordinary people.

The Internet Watch Foundation, a self-regulating industry body which was set up to ‘police’ the Internet has closed down many UK websites which trade in illegal pictures. They do not, however, stop individuals from accessing illegal foreign websites. This means that many illegal British sites have simply moved off-shore. One of the worst offenders is America. Over 60 percent of the nastiest websites are based in the US and a further third in Russia. Even if the British police and organisations like the IWF alert the authorities in both countries, all too often precious little is done.

“There are major problems over jurisdiction,” says Sarah Robertson of the IWF. “A website can be hosted in the US and then move to Russia the next day. The pictures may have been taken in a third country and the people who run it may be in a fourth country. It’s extremely difficult to deal with.”

But why is not the viewing of illegal sites prevented by Britain’s Internet industry? From next year, people will be prevented from viewing illegal sites by sophisticated software built into Britain’s part of the Internet that automatically blocks access, even if they are hosted abroad. But this begs the question, why has it taken so long? And how many more children must suffer before the new rules come into play?

Even so, the increasing speed of technological development on the Internet means that paedophiles can increasingly evade the IWF and police. While the authorities have virtually eliminated the hosting of child abuse websites in the UK, a newer and even murkier menace is emerging. So-called peer-to-peer networks, which work like isolated and impenetrable versions of the internet, are being used as secret vehicles where vast numbers of videos and photographs are swapped.

In September last year, officers from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre, which spearheads the police campaign against Internet child abuse, successfully infiltrated just such a network based in Buxhall, Suffolk, and arrested its leader Timothy Cox. Cox, who styled himself as ‘Son of God’, was found to possess over 75,000 indecent images. His network may have had up to 700 members, including 200 in the UK.

Photo sharing, social networking and online games sites are paedophiles’ latest haunts. Abusers choose a child avatar, a computer generated character that they have complete control over, which they then use to groom their victims whilst online – ready to pounce if they should succeed in meeting up with them in the real world. Officers from CEOP have taken to ‘patrolling’ such online games but it remains to be seen how much of a deterrent this will be.

To satisfy their insatiable hunger, many paedophiles are now abusing children and streaming the webcam footage live over the Internet. Paedophiles can even send sadistic instructions to the abusers and watch them carried out in real time. At the moment this degree of depravity is thankfully very rare but it is growing in popularity. It cannot be long before commercial sites run by the likes of the Russian Mafia get in on the act.

Although organisations like CEOP and the Internet Watch Foundation do their best they are swimming against an ever rising tide of internet child abuse. Both organisations have to obey the law, which can limit their effectiveness, at least in the short term. They cannot, for example, hack into and sabotage websites. Nor can they create dummy paedophile websites to trap abusers.

Over recent years a new breed of computer hacker has stepped into the breach and begun to target paedophile websites in a manner police can only dream about. Using sophisticated software, they now routinely sabotage illegal sites. The Daily Mail traced one of these ‘ethical hackers’ to the home counties.

“The Internet liberates us,” says Merlin. “But it allows child pornographers to ply their trade. We decided that this had to stop so we started knocking out child porn sites until they gave up.

“It has now got to the stage where many sites are only online for a few hours at a time. This stops most people but, of course, the hardcore still have enough time to download what they want. That’s about as far as you can realistically go. It’s certainly better than the authorities seem to achieve.”

In Canada, a hacker called Brad Willman who goes by the name of Citizen Tipster has gone even further. He hid a ‘Trojan’ – a piece of software that can track internet users – inside child abuse images. This allowed him to follow paedophiles, wherever they tried to hide.

The hacker has already put Ronald Kline, a California Superior Court judge behind bars. His investigations have also traced child predators across Canada, the United States and Russia. Some of the suspects included foster parents, social workers and other justice officials. Numerous prosecutions are pending around the world as a result of Citizen Tipster’s work.

Let us hope that hackers like Merlin and Citizen Tipster will continue attacking the paedophiles in ways that the authorities are unwilling or unable to do. For unless they do, more and more children like Jessica will continue to suffer.

At least Jessica’s tale had a happy ending of sorts. She is now living a normal life with her mother and brothers in a safehouse in a different state. On the wall of the offices of the FBI in Charlotte, North Carolina, hangs a drawing of a little girl with a big smile. Underneath in Jessica’s handwriting are the words “Thank You”.

Although Jessica is now free, the hundreds of images of her bruised and abused body have sadly become one of the most popular paedophile ‘collections’ on the Internet. The paedophiles are doing their best to ensure that Jessica’s torment is never ending.

Jessica’s story is told in “One Child at a Time” by Julian Sher.
Toddler Ben Needham disappeared over 15 years ago and mum Kerry still prays for his return.
We won't give up on Madeleine say McCanns

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written by peter jarvis, December 19, 2007

this is one of the most horrific stories I've ever read.

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