–updated–
The sexual exploitation of children on the Internet is a $20 billion industry that continues to expand in the United States and abroad, overwhelming attempts by the authorities to curb its growth, witnesses said at a Congressional hearing on Tuesday.
The witnesses, who testified at a hearing of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, part of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, said that sexual predators were preying on victims as young as 18 months by using instant messaging and Web cameras to meet, lure and digitally stalk children and to share pornography.
Internet technologies have the capacity to drive a wedge between children and their families, they said.
“Online predators befriend adolescents,” said Dr. Sharon Cooper, a pediatrician at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was one of the witnesses. “They become closer to them than some family members are.” – Child Sex as Internet Fare, Through Eyes of a Victim
I’m going to tell you a story.
It’s complicated. It’s unpleasant. But it’s also important. So, I’m going to talk about things I don’t talk about anymore.
It’s about a victimized boy named Justin Berry, and a Bush official in Homeland Security who is a pedophile. It’s about the Justice Department doing nothing with a list of 1,500 names that Justin handed them. It’s about a Homeland Security department so inept they didn’t even know they had a pedophile in their midst.
Early last night we found out that Bush’s Deputy Press Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security is a seriously deranged man who knew that what he was doing was wrong and coached someone he thought was a 14 year old girl to hide their illicit communications. Believe me, this isn’t something that comes on a
man in later life. It’s with him from the start. Doyle is divorced, with children. It makes me shudder.
It’s quite amazing that the story about Brian Doyle broke the same day that Justin Berry was on Capitol Hill, with Kurt Eichenwald, talking about sexually exploited children and the pedophiles who corrupt them and what can go wrong on the web. That I’ve seen first hand.
Since going to blogging in late 2005, I’ve not done any stories on the dangers I’ve previously uncovered over many years of researching sexuality and relationships, something I don’t do anymore, because I’ve learned all I ever care to know. It started well over 15 years ago, when I began interviewing men and women about relationships and marriage, as well as giving advice on relationships. I then went further, interviewing many people in the sex trade, as well as in the world of soft core web pornography, where I went to cover politics the way Hugh Hefner did in print. In fact, though you’ll have to take my word for it as there was never a study done at the time. I was likely the very first female editor covering politics on the web when the adult industry discovered the internet.
I was online in 1997-1998, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal hit, writing editorials and doing surveys on cultural issues and sexuality, Clinton and Monica, Susan McDougal and Ken Starr, which were tearing the country apart. It was quite an education, hearing from thousands of men every day. I worked as managing editor and ended up getting good dirt on this brand new industry, which was the first enterprise to make money on the web. We were covered in the Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report, USA Today, you name it. Eventually, I wanted to try to explain pornography to women, why men use it even when they have a great relationship, and back in 1997 it was a medium controlled by women for the first time in history. I was there when it took off, even if the site I worked was based almost exclusively on pictorials when I began working there. I left long before it turned raunchy.
I walked out because one day I was handed a photo layout of a stripper on a grade school playground in broad daylight. I refused to publish the pictures and the accompanying story, but the owner overruled me. I walked that day. However, I was told the photos and story went up behind the pay firewall, where it’s safe to show whatever the corporation wants without getting in trouble. I wrote a book about it all (a long time ago). But that’s how web porn works. The juicy stuff is behind the pay wall. I can’t imagine what goes on today.
As a former Miss Missouri, during all my research, having a squeaky clean image had it’s advantages, believe me. I also researched the 900 line phone sex trade. I was poised to write another book on phone sex lines and the “secret lives of men” for women, when 9/11 happened. I had hoped to help educate women and parents on the facts of life as they exist in the netherworld of phone sex and web porn. It’s a seedy world filled with people who can’t control themselves and don’t care who they hurt, just so long as they don’t get caught. But after 9/11, I walked away from that research and focused back on politics, letting what I’d learned about our culture, sexuality and the changing world of liberation speak for itself, as far as I could take it.
It’s a joke to hear “experts” talk about porn and the darker side of sexuality, most of whom have never done the front line research. Diane Sawyer investigated hard core porn for one year and a half, something I cannot imagine. But you can’t talk about it unless you’ve done the time. Once you do you ever forget it.
Watching Justin Berry today brought it all back. I knew what he’d done. I knew the scars he was hiding. I’d seen the damage in others before.
Then when the news hit about a pedophile living and breathing inside our own Homeland Security department, I had a sort of meltdown. I put up the breaking story, then took a moment to think about it all. It’s not a comfortable subject to contemplate when you know the gory details.
Today, Justin Berry told a story of how he had given Bush’s Justice Department the names of over 1,500 people who he’d had sexual experiences with over the time he ran his web porn site. To this day, the Bush Justice Department has done NOTHING. That’s right, nothing. Joe Scarborough covered that tonight on his show. I didn’t watch it all, but he said he was going to give out the phone number for the Justice Department so parents could demand action. I hope they do because no one has been paying attention and this has been going on since 1997.
However, I simply cannot get my head around the fact that the Bush administration has taken no action at all.
Via Child Sex as Internet Fare, Through Eyes of a Victim:
>Child exploitation investigators in the Justice Department came under fire from lawmakers at the hearings, who questioned whether officials had responded too slowly to leads provided by Mr. Berry. These included clients’ names and credit card numbers, which could presumably help investigators identify children entangled in the online pornography industry. The department denied that contention.
[...] “Justin Berry stepped forward at a time the government did not know he existed,” Mr. Eichenwald said. “He is, to experts’ knowledge, the first such teenage witness to ever turn over this kind of vast evidence to the government.”
Still, he added, “important data offered to the government by Justin has, even at this late date, not been collected and has only been reviewed by me.”
The last line above is incomprehensible.
But at least Justin Berry got his time in front of the Senate.
I just shook my head. Congress doesn’t know the half of it. Justin is just one boy with a monster list of 1,500. It boggles my mind that those people are still out there, preying on the web and seducing more children.
If pedophiles won’t inspire Bush’s Justice Department to move what will?
George W. Bush and Michael Chertoff have had a raging pedophile in Homeland Security for months, even years before Chertoff came on board, but no one knew? Frankly, I don’t understand how this is possible. The man used his government phone and his AOL account. He was sloppy, which pedophiles all are eventually, because they want to get caught.
Meanwhile, on a different subject, two air marshals pleaded guilty to smuggling cocaine into Sin City, Las Vegas.
Nothing shocks me anymore about the abject incompetence of the Bush administration, but yesterday was some day. Tom Delay resigned in disgrace. We found out that Bush’s Justice Department ignored 1,500 pedophiles and an eye witness who could identify them and their acts, likely enough to land them in jail, maybe even uncover more including the network that hides these criminals. An active pedophile who is the deputy press secretary of Homeland Security was arrested for seducing a young 14 year old girl, who was really an undercover agent.
The criminal negligence of the Bush administration in ignoring and not aggressively finding and prosecuting pedophiles goes beyond anything I could have before imagined.
Wake up, America. Do you know who your child is talking to on the web? President Bush, his Homeland Security and the Justice Departments not only don’t know. They don’t even seem to care.
This post has been edited and links added.
