Cracking down on child pornography
<p>Deputy County Prosecutor Joshua Studor discusses his role in the prosecution of child pornography offenders in the North Idaho area as part of a forum presented by the Christian Community Coalition at the Kroc Center on Thursday. Studor was joined by Criminal Investigator Paul Farina for the forum and the two gave attendees an in-depth look at the issue of child pornography, along with advice for how families can help their children stay safe on the internet.</p>
COEUR d'ALENE - Local authorities provided a look Thursday into their world of apprehending and prosecuting sex offenders.
Paul Farina, a criminal investigator, and Joshua Studor, a deputy county prosecutor, spoke to about 50 people who attended the monthly meeting of the Christian Community Coalition at the Salvation Army Kroc Center in Coeur d'Alene. Farina and Studor work together in North Idaho, and in the last year, 15 cases of child pornography have been tracked and prosecuted due to their efforts. Farina began the forum by discussing "peer-to-peer" websites that are often used by offenders to exchange graphic images.
"What we found is that there is a huge problem now with people trading child pornography (on peer-to-peer websites)," Farina said. "Our whole focus, really my job, has almost full-time been (investigating) child pornography, which is a daunting task."
Farina added that child pornography offenders "work well in this kind of environment," which is online through a network of computers, and said it was also important to clarify exactly what child pornography is.
"When I say children, I say infant to 8," Farina said. "This is a whole culture. These people like that age and this is their thing."
Over the course of his investigations into child pornography, Farina has encountered what he calls "a whole subculture" of people who have an addiction to images of children in that age range.
"No matter what we say and the counseling they get, they are still attracted to children," Farina said. "We have this culture of bad people that are on the Internet."
This "subculture" of offenders are not the 'men in vans approaching children' typically associated with sex offenders. Rather, according to Studor, they come from a variety of walks of life and cannot simply be picked out of a crowd. They use a series of code-like search terms on the peer-to-peer websites in order to trade and acquire child pornography.
"In these cases that we get we find hundreds and hundreds of images," Farina said. "It's not like they are accidentally downloading one image."
"They are searching for it actively," Studor added. "They are interested in this subject."
The focus of the forum then switched to how families can play a role in preventing their children from falling prey to online sex-offenders. Farina told attendees about a website called Omegle, which enables users to video-chat or text-chat with other random users.
When he learned of Omegle, Farina and a colleague used one of their investigative computers to get on the site posing as a 13-year-old who was out of school for the day due to illness.
"And within two minutes he (the online predator) wants us to send him a picture," Farina said. "That's how fast it happens."
Farina encouraged attendees to be more involved in their children's Internet use and to actively check the content their kids are browsing through on any of the devices they have access to.