Internet porn violates our kids

By The Gazette Editorial Board

On any given day, an estimated 800 people in Cedar Rapids are downloading child pornography from the Internet.

Review our news pages for this month alone and you'll see stories on a 47-year-old Iowa City man sentenced to 30 years and a 78-year-old Cedar Rapids man given 10 years on child pornography convictions.

This insidious crime is considered by many child protection advocates to be the worst social abuse on the Internet. The production and online presence of this crime has exploded this decade. We ignore it at our children's peril.

And though law enforcement has stepped up its investigations and technical know-how, the problem is too massive for police without more assistance.

Since 2003, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) has analyzed 30 million of these images that depict sexually explicit activities involving a child. A recent NCMEC study found that people arrested for possession of child run the gamut in income, education level, marital status and age. Virtually all of them were men, mostly white and unmarried when they committed the crime.

Child pornography also leads to other terrible crimes against children - 40 percent are dual offenders, who also sexually abuse children. And the porn industry also is linked to worldwide child trafficking.

Investigators in Cedar Rapids and nationwide face a backlog of cases - up to a year or more - that is growing in part because digital storage devices' capacity is expanding so quickly, requiring more and more analysis time.

Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) officials want more money for more resources to fight this crime. “If you want to invest your tax dollars, let's do it in the protection of children,” DCI Agent Gerard Meyers told a Gazette reporter.

Hard to argue with that sentiment. But with severe state budget problems still facing us, more money is hard to come by. Reviewing priorities in the state's public safety spending budget might help. For example, about 120 DCI agents are devoted to policing the state's 17 licensed casinos. They've helped keep those operations clean. But might not some of that manpower be better spent investigating the worst child pornography abusers?

The private sector that benefits from the vast Internet must also take ownership of this problem and, in at least one instance, is doing that. Microsoft, with assistance from a Dartmouth College expert, developed and last year donated a new technology to NCMEC. Called PhotoDNA, it finds hidden copies of child sexual exploitation images.

It has the potential to disrupt the flow of these images that otherwise could circulate forever - revictimizing children again and again after their innocence was stolen and their lives forever altered.