Counter Pedophilia Investigate Unit

Authorities from Italy to the United States arrested 10 people Thursday for allegedly capturing, viewing and disseminating images through an expansive international online pedophile network.

In addition to those 10 taken into custody in Italy, the United States, France and Portugal, 112 have been reported to law enforcement in those and other countries for “association with crime organizations (that were) producing and distributing pedophile material,” the prosecutor’s office in Florence, Italy, said in a news release. (more…)

Roman Catholic Church leaders unveiled an Internet teaching project on Thursday to help clergy around the world root out pedophiles in their ranks and protect children from potential abusers.

Ending a four-day conference on child abuse in Rome, Father Francois-Xavier Dumortier said the 1.2 million euro ($1.60 million) project would provide multilingual advice and access to research on pedophilia and how to respond to the problem. (more…)

Russian authorities have arrested two men on suspicion of running an online community for pedophiles, the Russian League of Internet Security announced on Wednesday. The website had more than 100 members.

The League said the owner and administrator of the website have been arrested, although no details were given about the time and place of the arrests. The website had roughly 130 members, most of them from Russia, although some were from Germany, France, Israel and former Soviet nations. (more…)

The League of Internet Security, a Russian public organization, said on Wednesday it had broken an international ring of 130 alleged pedophiles, in cooperation with police.

Two organizers of the ring, described by the League’s president, Konstantin Malofeyev, as the “largest in the history of Russian internet,” have been arrested.

“What is happening in the Russian internet now is an orgy,” he said during a news conference in Moscow. (more…)

Internet memes die hard. And for law enforcement in the southwest, Pedobear is the meme that just won’t go away. Authorities in New Mexico say the meme has been adopted by sexual predators targeting children – a claim being laughed off by blogs and Internet meme trackers who say Pedobear is a harmless joke.

Pedobear is a character made to mock pedophilia that first appeared on the Internet forum 4chan and subsequently spread throughout the Internet, according to Urlesque’s Meme Tracker. Pedobear’s image, a brown beady-eyed teddy bear is often photoshopped into otherwise harmless images online to add an element of implied inappropriateness for humor. Authorities aren’t laughing. (more…)

The sexual-abuse scandal at Penn State has raised awareness of pedophilia. How do these predators operate?

What is a pedophile?

It’s an adult with a sexual preference for prepubescent children (typically 13 or under) of either sex, though some prefer one gender. The term can be used to describe anyone who fantasizes about, is sexually aroused by, or experiences urges toward children, whether or not they act on them. (more…)

Adults can act out sexual fantasies with children in the virtual world of Second Life

Five years ago it seemed as if the whole internet might be swallowed by virtual worlds.

Imagine: you can change your age, colour and sex. Avatars can buy clothes, own houses purchased with money convertible to currency in the real world, and yes, have virtual sex with each other.

Eight million people inhabited one virtual world called Second Life. The possibilities for wrongdoing were very real. (more…)

Sexual predation on children and youths is back in the national spotlight since Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State football defense coordinator, has been accused of sexually assaulting multiple boys over 15 years.

It doesn’t take much imagination to understand the horrors and damage caused by sex offenders. And it’s hard to talk about the facts of any criminal behavior since misinformation is common and ideas contrary to misinformation are quickly associated as soft on crime. The nuances of any criminal behavior are complicated.
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Beyond the web we use every day there is a lawless underworld of child abuse and black marketeering that is difficult for authorities to investigate, Christopher Williams reports.

A rare shaft of light has shone on one of the darkest corners of the internet in recent days. A latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah, it is a place where rape and murder are openly advertised, and earthly authorities appear almost powerless to intervene.

This is the lawless world of darknets and specifically the Hidden Wiki, a site that isn’t on the web, that nobody reaches directly from Google and that can only be accessed using special tools. (more…)

About a year before a disabled 33-year-old Stagecoach man in 2010 founded a non-profit organization to help handicapped children, federal authorities said he produced his own child pornography with a boy he was babysitting, and shared the images on the Internet.

During an online chat in 2010 with a New York FBI agent — who was posing as a pedophile — Jeremiah Higley wrote he also had sex with minors, according to court records.

The agent had also downloaded dozens of child pornography from Higley’s account. Investigators said the images included Higley performing oral sex on a 6-year-old boy whom he had been babysitting in the home where he lived with his parents. (more…)