USA Today interviews child porn collector

Kevin Johnson, a USA Today reporter, interviews a man serving time for child pornography offenses.

The man's arrest uncovered

...the single-largest cache of child pornography — up to 1 million images — recovered in Florida history and one of the largest recent seizures in the nation.

This is a lot of child porn, by any measure. There was a time when collecting child porn was hard work because collectors needed to make contact with those who could provide the images. Now, however, the Internet and peer-to-peer software make collecting astoundingly fast and easy. So fast and easy that the reporter's wide-eyed astonishment at the size of the collection seems naive. The article does not report how many distinct images were found and how many repeats were in the collection.

State and federal authorities said such vast repositories of images are becoming increasingly common in exploitation cases across the U.S. Once celebrated as important law enforcement victories, the large seizures and the labor-intensive analysis required of each photograph and video are now complicating the search for victims pictured in the images and others who may have been physically abused by suspects.

Law enforcement will continue to find enormous stashes of illegal images, not because the collectors are that much more evil than pre-Internet collectors were, but because it can be done so easily. A collector who keeps everything is going to have a large collection.

In an estimated 75% of child pornography cases, actual physical abuse by the suspects is likely going undetected, said Michael Bourke, chief psychologist in the U.S. Marshals Service's Behavioral Analysis Unit. In a 2014 study of 127 child-pornography suspects with no known history of "hands-on'' sexual abuse, 5% admitted during traditional questioning to the sexual abuse of at least one child. Yet when investigators introduced tactical polygraph examinations to assist interrogations, another 53% of suspects admitted that they engaged in physical sexual abuse of children, according to the study co-authored by Bourke.

Relying on polygraphs as a tool to expose truth is odd when polygraphs are not allowed to be used as evidence in court...because polygraphs are unreliable, even when they are called tactical polygraph examinations. Using polygraphs as an investigative aid is nothing new.

Although the offender in the Florida case has denied any involvement in physical abuse, Bourke, who has spent years researching child pornography cases and interviewing offenders, said traditional interrogation methods and the enormously time-consuming review of large seizures are not proving effective enough in identifying those suspects who have crossed into physical abuse.

The Florida offender, contrary to Bourke's facile assumption that he has committed hands-on crimes, continues to deny any such activity. That doesn't stop the reporter from dropping fat hints that the man is hiding a history of hands-on offenses.

Research shows that using child porn can reduce the incidence of child sex abuse but the reporter ignores those studies.

Likewise, he ignores the fact that Michael Bourke was co-author of the firmly debunked Butner Study which tried to sell the idea that those who look at child porn have a long list of hands-on victims.

Perhaps instead of examining the million images for evidence of child sex abuse of which they imagine the collector to be guilty, the investigators should investigate the clear evidence of child sex abuse contained in some of those million images.

It is important to know that putting people in prison for possessing, receiving, or distributing illegal images does nothing to reduce the availability of child porn.

Those million images? Still freely available on the Internet.