The Internet Connection

If you worry that more pedophiles are out there than before, you're not alone. Hardly a day goes by without news of an arrest -- for luring a minor, possession of child pornography, or, worst of all, an assault on a child by a sexual predator.

At the Child Exploitation Section of the Toronto Police, they deal with that reality every day.

It's an uphill battle, but there are also moments to celebrate. Like the arrest in August 2005 of 36 year-old Kenneth Symes, a church pastor and married man from Ajax, Ontario, who was charged with luring a minor on the Internet.

The minor in question wasn't a minor at all, but Detective Constable Scott Purches, a specialist in Internet luring. The detective had been communicating with Symes for four months in an online teenage chatroom, where Symes had never concealed the fact he was an older man.

"When he started to formulate a plan on how to meet is when it really moved from the realm of the virtual world to the real world," says Purches. "And simultaneous to that, he was becoming more sexually interested, asking about the experience my online persona had been involved in as far as sexual experience and things like that."

Symes pleaded guilty to two counts of luring a minor and was sentenced to 12 months in prison. He was released after serving six because time spent in custody before conviction was counted as double time.

He's just one in a growing army of predators, but catching them is just one of the problems confronting the unit.

Most of their time is spent analyzing the flood of pornographic images and videos on the Internet, most of it produced in the United States, Canada and Western Europe.

The head of the Child Exploitation Section, Detective Sergeant Paul Gillespie, says the producers are people who have worked themselves into a position of trust with children.

"The boyfriend, the uncle, the father, the doctor, the person who all of a sudden is willing to spend a whole bunch of time with a child."

Every day, in cramped quarters and using equipment that can hardly be called state of the art, investigators trawl the Internet, sorting through thousands of images of almost unimaginable depravity. They're searching for clues, any detail that might lead them to the children and their tormentors.

Most people wouldn't want to see these images, but Gillespie and his team have no choice. That's their job.

"To say that there's thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people around the world who are trading and producing these horrific photographs and movies of children being tortured and babies ... it's very hard to get a handle on," says Gillespie.

He believes the Internet has led to a huge increase in the amount of pornography.

"It has combined modern technology with an age-old problem. And it has allowed a number of these offenders to realize how many others are out there, other like-minded individuals."

The sheer volume makes it hard for the police, harder still because much of it is hidden in dark corners of the Internet. Beyond the reach of most surfers and search engines, only those in the know are invited to join what's become a kind of exclusive club for the depraved. It's here the investigators find the worst of the worst.

"I think a lot of people now are a little more educated, especially in Canada, as to how bad it is, but they still don't want to let their mind go there," says Gillespie. "They don't want to force themselves to realize it's not a 10-year-old frolicking on a beach naked. It's a baby being bound and gagged and tortured and crying until they pass out."

Such sights and sounds haunt even hardened investigators like Detective Constable Warren Bulmer, who says he'll never forget watching the rape of a 16-month-old baby.

"During the entire two or three minutes of video, he screamed from start to finish. And I will never, ever forget that sound. Because visually, you can look away, or you can picture something else that's going on, but you can't get rid of the sound. While that movie's playing it doesn't matter where you look in the room, you'll hear it."

Gillespie says that such atrocities have prompted a shift in priority at the Toronto unit ƒ{ from hunting down the perpetrators, to identifying and rescuing the victims, the estimated 50,000 children from around the world who have been abused.

The Toronto Police were one of the first to recognize that child pornography knows no borders. With help from Bill Gates at Microsoft, they've developed a tracking system for police forces around the world to use, in identifying abused children, no matter where they are.

"Their only cry for help is the fact that we watch the action and with our limited resources, do our best to try and make a bit of a difference," says Gillespie.

That international outlook led to one of the unit's most dramatic rescues.

Attention To Detail Pays Off

In February 2005, undercover officers in the Toronto Child Exploitation Section posing as online pedophiles received some unusual pictures of a young child -- unusual because there was nothing pornographic about them. They showed a boy of about 18 months wearing a diaper and posing on a sofa, or playing with a computer keyboard -- the kind of picture a proud parent might show to friends and relatives.

But Detective Constable Warren Bulmer was intrigued. Why would a pedophile send such harmless looking pictures? Bulmer suspected he was being checked out.

"I think some of the offenders are getting a little bit wise that if certain things occur during Internet conversations that in fact it could be an undercover officer," he says. "And some of them are just a little bit careful, maybe meeting you for the first time online."

Bulmer passed the test -- he was accepted into the club. Then the images became more graphic and more disturbing. The toddler was being raped on camera.

The officer studied the images in every detail. Was there anything that might tell him the identity of this child and where he was from?

Bulmer noticed a light switch in one of the pictures and recognized right away it wasn't a type found in North America.

In another image, he examined the computer keyboard held by the child and when he blew it up, spotted a manufacturer's name and keys with Spanish symbols.

A call to the company confirmed that this type of keyboard was only sold in Spain.

But Spain's a big country and police needed another detail to narrow down the search.

Bulmer found it in another image -- what looked like a ticket held in an offender's hand.

The Toronto Police sent their information to Spain via Interpol, where it ended up on the desk of Inspector Luis Garcia, the head of Madrid's Child Pornography Unit.

Garcia hadn't seen these images before and, shocked by the age of the victim, quickly opened an investigation.

He focused on a key clue -- the ticket discovered by Toronto Police. Examining the video, Garcia watched the ticket being given to the child and clutched in his tiny hand as he's being raped.

"It's a way of distracting the boy," he says.

But revealing that ticket was a huge mistake and turned out to be a key clue in the investigation. The Spanish police recognized it immediately as coming from Madrid's suburban train system. It helped narrow down the search because information printed on the ticket showed it was only valid for five stops on one line of the system.

Then Garcia noticed another detail on another image sent from Toronto -- what looked like a towel with lettering on it. When he enlarged the picture, he identified the letters A and Z, and a cross. The towel was from a hospital.

Turns out that hospital was called La Paz and served a community called Villalba, one of the five along the train line police were looking at.

Villalba was 40 kilometers from Madrid, a community of working couples and plenty of children. A perfect hunting ground for pedophiles.

Now police had somewhere to show the child's picture and quickly got results.

"The boy was identified first and then his family," says Garcia.

The Spanish police discovered the family had lived for a time in one particular apartment in Villalba, but had moved.

When they searched the apartment, they took photographs and immediately recognized it from the furniture. The sofa was the same one as in the images sent from Toronto. They'd found the scene of the crime.

The parents had rented the apartment from a man who had offered them something no working couple could refuse -- cheap babysitting.

But while they were at work, their child was being abused in unimaginable ways. That man also ran his own computer store, which police immediately put under surveillance.

And they began to wonder. Could he be the same man they'd been tracking on the Internet for some time? A pedophile who went by the online name of Nanysex.

So just two months after getting their first clue from Toronto, Spanish police had a possible suspect under surveillance. But they couldn't be sure it was him. He'd always been careful not to show his face on video

They asked Toronto Police for more help. Warren Bulmer began going through the videos again, this time, frame by frame and found what he was looking for in one of them. It was only four frames, a fraction of a second. But it was enough.

"The offender shows his face as he's abusing the child," says Bulmer. "And once we sent that video to Spain, that was ultimately the final straw."

It was the same man Spanish police had under surveillance. As soon as confirmation arrived from Toronto, they raided the computer store run by the suspect, Nanysex.

They found a treasure trove of evidence -- thousands of horrific videos and images. Nanysex was running a porn factory -- other children abused in the same horrible ways.

Inspector Garcia told W-FIVE that the parents had no idea what was going on because they trusted Nanysex and his friends.

"If you've never experienced something like this and you're living in a normal social environment, it's hard to believe it could happen," he says.

Three suspected pedophiles were arrested, including the ringleader who called himself Nanysex.

And police believe the group may have on the verge of expanding their operation. They found books about child care and application forms needed to open a day-care centre in Spain.

In all, seven abused children were identified and rescued, including the little boy who came to the attention of the Toronto Police ... untold others spared the horror of Nanysex and his ring of pedophiles.

It was the high point in Warren Bulmer's career, knowing the work he and his colleagues started in Toronto led to the arrest of Nanysex.

"I don't think we really have the time to sit and bask in it as much as we might think," he says. "But it becomes a confidence builder that no matter how small you think something is, even if it's just one or two pictures, you never know where that's going to lead you."

Victim and Offender

He was only four at the time, but Max -- not his real name -- will never forget what happened on a winter's night in 1993.

"That's in my head forever," he says. "No matter how old I get, it's still going to be there."

His parents had gone out for the evening and two teenage boys who lived nearby offered to look after him. As Max played video games in their living room, he was lured to another room and sexually assaulted by one of the babysitters.

"I was scared. I was petrified," says Max. "It's hard to tell other people about it when it's something you want to keep away from everybody. But when stuff like this happens, it has to be told."

W-FIVE can't reveal Max's real identity because he's still a minor. That's the law.

It's designed to protect young victims. But that same law often prevents victims like Max from doing what they often want -- and need -- to do. Speak out and tell their stories of ruined childhoods.

"Even though it's happened to me, I just don't want it to happen to anybody else," says Max. "It's just something that hurts and it's indescribable. When I was younger, I used to beat on my Mom and, now, looking back, I feel so bad because I didn't mean to. But it's something that happened because I was rebelling against what happened to me. I've been in and out of behaviour schools. Nothing's worked. I'm not in school anymore cause they can't handle me."

Max believes his troubles can be traced all the way back to the assault, an assault that imposed a kind of life sentence on him.

Charged with that assault were twin brothers, Stephen and Junior Spencer. Stephen pleaded guilty, but the charges against Junior were dropped. Since then, both brothers have piled up a string of convictions involving children

"Jail's nothing to both of them," says Max. "They've gone in, they've come out, they've gone in, they've come out. And they think it's a joke. It's life. They've ruined people's families, ruined children's lives."

Stephen Spencer recently moved to Ottawa, and Junior is finishing a five-year sentence for producing child pornography.

"He sees nothing wrong with having sex with kids," says Detective Constable Stefan Mueller of the Toronto Police Child Exploitation Section who has been tracking Junior Spencer's career.

Mueller believes this attitude may be typical for some pedophiles.

"I think that's what it's all about for them, that in their own minds they justified the fact that kids are sexual objects and they should be allowed to do whatever they want with the children."

If that's hard to believe, reading what Stephen Boone has to say may be even harder.

Now living in Winnipeg, he's been convicted three times for sexually assaulting children, some as young as eight years old.

Boone insists it's the children who want to have sex with him.

"Children would like to be sexual if they were allowed to," he says. "They're just politically repressed, repressed to the point where it actually kills them, to the point where it's almost fanatical. It's like a religion. You're not allowed to say it could be possible that some children like sex and would have sex if they could."

He doesn't see children as victims. "Because they tend to be open. Children seem to be so amazingly open to that experience. That is what causes the problems for me. People see children who take an interest in me as unnatural and suspicious."

If Boone is convicted a fourth time, he could be declared a Dangerous Offender and put in jail indefinitely.

While that's kept him from re-offending so far, he argues that the morality of sex with children depends on how you define sex.

"I have never tried to make a baby with a child," he says. "If you define sex as purely procreative, I haven't tried to sex a child. If you're asking me if I've been sensual with a child, or with children, or with adults in various contexts with the collective sort of approval, or with the understanding of the children's intent, I have been sensual. I will go as far as that."

Trying to navigate the mind of a pedophile is what Dr Julian Gojer does for a living.

He teaches psychiatry at the University of Toronto and is one of Canada's leading experts in deviant sexual behaviour. He believes there is no scientific explanation as to why a person is a pedophile. They are just born that way.

"It's like saying you or I are born gay or heterosexual," he says. "We can't change that."

Dr. Gojer also believes pedophilia can't be cured.

"If you're going to look at it from a treatment perspective, it's like diabetes. Can we cure diabetes? No. You can manage it, and I'd say pedophilia is a condition that can be managed but not cured."

Stephen Boone is being managed by means of a court order restricting his movements. He's refused psychiatric help, refused hormone therapy that would control his urges.

And he admits that steering clear of children -- as he's been ordered to do -- won't be easy.

"You try limiting yourself, your personal life to not having children around you," he says. "Just try it. Just try going for a walk, going to the grocery store. Do anything at all and see how many children you come across. It's impossible."

This creates a dilemma for the men and women whose job it is to protect our children from the likes of Stephen Boone.

"What are we supposed to do with these people?" asks Detective Sergeant Paul Gillespie of the Toronto Police Child Exploitation Section. "Some would say let's lock them up. Some would say it's not fair, and I certainly agree, you can't lock them up forever. But I just wish we would build a better support system and a better way of enforcing compliance. These are our children that we're playing with. We shouldn't be using them as bait to see whether or not these guys are going to be able to control themselves or control their sexual urges."

Pedophiles and the Justice System

One of the tasks at the Toronto Police Child Exploitation Section is checking up on people convicted, or charged, with offences against children to make sure they stick to their conditions of release.

It should be routine, but it often turns out to be an exercise in frustration. In many cases, conditions of release or bail are changed by the courts, but the police aren't told.

"This is ridiculous," says Detective Constable Stefan Mueller. We have to have a say in the bail variations. There's got to be a hearing."

You're not supposed to be out walking around and going around and do whatever you want, but that's what it's come down to," Says Detective Ian Lamond.

"They know that we don't have the resources to go check them every day," says Detective Constable Paul Krawczyk. "So they know the chances of getting caught are slim to none."

Just keeping track of pedophiles is hard enough. Getting them locked up in the first place is even tougher.

"I can simply say I'm way past frustrated," says Detective Sergeant Paul Gillespie. "The fact that child abuse itself is not dealt with properly. These are children that are destroyed. Their souls are destroyed. They'll never live up to their full potential. Their lives are wrecked. And that someone might do this out of pleasure and go to jail for one or two years or one or two months, I don't understand it."

No one knows that better than Max. Assaulted when he was a child, he makes a point of turning up every time his former babysitters, Stephen and Junior Spencer, are in court on another charge.

"The victims need to be heard," he says. "It's hard to get closure on something when you have no say in anything because of age. They need to have something where the courts, or a lawyer, or something will talk to the victim and figure out what's gone on and use that against them."

Even more heartbreaking for the victims and frustrating for the police are the light sentences being handed out by the courts.

Believe it or not, 42 per cent of people convicted of some sort of sexual offence against a child never see the inside of a jail cell. And when it comes to child pornography, 70 per cent of those convicted get off with a conditional sentence, probation or a fine.

"It's very apparent to me there are some judges and justices in Toronto that are just way too sympathetic," says Detective Sergeant Paul Gillespie. "And maybe they just don't understand the problem. And they're not that often that willing to look at the images that we have to present in court. They often don't want to see them or they don't want to see all of them. I don't get it. These are crime scene photos of torture of children. And would that child be something else, perhaps an animal, I suggest people would be all over it.

But for some reason, if it's an unknown child, it's not our problem. And it's a big dilemma."

Among judges, Ray Wyant, the Chief Judge of Manitoba's Provincial Court, is seen as something of a renegade.

Once a month, he goes on the radio to take calls from listeners. He thinks it's important for judges to stay in touch.

And what he's hearing about jail sentences disturbs him enough to take the unusual step of speaking out publicly through W-FIVE.

"I think the perception is in the public that sentences may be too lenient in certain cases," he says. "And I'm concerned that public confidence in the system may be eroded from that particular view."

That concern also troubled politicians in the House of Commons in Ottawa, who recently brought in a mandatory minimum jail term for possession of child pornography of 14 days.

"It's better than what we had," says Detective Sergeant Gillespie. "It's a start. My own personal opinion, the fact that we even had to go down that road of introducing mandatory minimums says something about our whole system. Why did it have to get this far? Why are judges, why is that discretion taken out of their hands? Because they obviously were not dealing with this the way that society thought it should be dealt with."

The light sentences may have something to do with how the crime has been sanitized.

Take child pornography for example. In most cases, plea bargains are worked out in the backrooms between lawyers, meaning the victims aren't heard from and the evidence isn't seen.

Even when cases do come to trial, judges often choose not to look at the evidence. It's simply too disturbing.

In Manitoba, a crusading Crown Attorney, Mick Makar, is working to change that.

He says it's not enough for prosecutors to simply describe what's in the pictures and videos.

He's tried and he remembers one particularly disturbing example.

"The adult male was a very large male," he recalls. "The little girl was laying on a bed and she was very thin. And when he began to force intercourse on her, obviously causing her to be in pain, she pulled a little sucker out and put it in her mouth to comfort herself when it occurred. So how can I describe that orally in front of a court? I can't."

Working with police, Makar helped develop what's called the Integrated Child Exploitation Project (ICE for short).

As part of that project, judges and lawyers are provided with video monitors and are now required to see and hear the evidence for themselves."

Manitoba judge, Ray Wyant, believes this allows judges to full understand the nature of the evidence, but has it affected the length of sentences?

"I don't know whether it has or not," he says. "I certainly can't comment on whether or not other judges feel they've been affected in a particular way by seeing the images. I can simply say it's evidence that's there. It's real evidence. It's the best evidence. Why not see it?"

The problem is that this type of program doesn't exist in most other provinces. So judges don't have to look and often choose not to.

But those on the front line, like the members of the Toronto Police Child Exploitation Section, have no choice.

Paul Gillespie has been at it since the unit was formed five years ago.

Five years that feel like a lifetime.

"I'm not quite sure how much longer I'm going to be able to do this," he says. "I don't do as much viewing as I used to. I have a wonderful team and they do a terrific job. The fact that we on a daily basis now pull dozens and dozens of new full-length movies of babies having their diapers removed and being raped. How many times can your heart break before you just can't do it anymore?"