The Child Porn Pipeline
Part One: Russia and U.S. are bound in the illegal cyber-trafficking of child pornography
'What we have is a catastrophic human rights crisis going on. The magnitude would shock everybody.' - Children's advocate Grier Weeks
MOSCOW — A sickness is sweeping the world since the Internet made it easy for child pornography to be viewed and shared. The thousandfold increase in the number of photos of naked and sexually abused children available on the Internet is staggering. But it doesn’t stop there. The images are getting worse.
The children are younger. The sex is more violent, more hard-core. Pictures on the Internet show toddlers being raped. They show a young girl hanging upside down and gagged while being sexually abused. Children are forced to perform sex acts in “real time” — including one case in Western New York — while their live images are transmitted around the world via Web cams.
It is a catastrophic human rights crisis with thousands of children — some estimate as many as 100,000 — being victimized.
Virtually no country is exempt from this ugliness. But two nations — Russia and the United States — shoulder much of the blame, The Buffalo News found in a year-long investigation.
Here in Russia, where possessing child pornography is legal, no child is too far from the pornographer’s clutches.
Dmitry Burlak was just 13, hanging out with friends in front of an apartment building, when a dog bit his leg.
It wasn’t a particularly bad bite. It barely broke the skin.
Still, dog owner Valera Kovalev insisted the boys come back to his nearby apartment.
“He treated us to candies, chocolate and drinks,” Dmitry recalled. “And he asked us not to tell anything to our parents because he would have problems otherwise.”
Kovalev spent weeks luring the cute 13-year-old boy into his trap before slipping Dmitry and one of his friends, Misha, some kind of pills. After that, the boys agreed to pose nude for pictures that the 57-year-old man took and then sold and shared with the world.
That’s where the United States fits in.
No country has a bigger cyber network than the United States. And right now, it’s barely regulated. So it’s easy for child pornographers to rent space on American computer servers with no questions asked. And that’s what’s happening.
Russia produces the child pornography, and Web servers in the United States host the disgusting images so anyone — with Americans being the single biggest market — can see them for a price. In fact, nearly two-thirds of all commercial child pornography on the Internet — including images produced in Russia — is transmitted to the world through Web servers owned and operated in the United States, one study found.
A Web server is similar to a bookstore, but instead of selling books with hundreds or thousands of printed pages, it offers Web space that customers rent to post page after page of their material on the Internet. “The backbone of the Internet is [in the United States], and it’s being exploited,” said John F. Shehan, with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in Alexandria, Va.
“Both our countries look very badly,” said Maya Rusakova, director of Stellit, a Russian agency here fighting child exploitation.
For the United States, it gets worse.
America is also the biggest consumer of the illegal images that Russia and other Eastern European countries produce for sale, officials said.
“Russia argues that the American market drives the demand,” said Arnold E. Bell, chief of the FBI’s Innocent Images Unit in the Washington, D.C. area. “They’re right.”
Tens of thousands of American men from all walks of life — doctors, teachers and police officers, as well as school bus drivers, laborers and the unemployed — purchase child pornography made in Russia and elsewhere, recent Internet investigations have disclosed.
The numbers of those viewing paid or free child pornography are so huge that the U.S. criminal justice system isn’t equipped to handle all the cases.
“The feds are essentially triaging,” said Grier Weeks, executive director of the North Carolina-based National Association to Protect Children. “They are so overwhelmed. They are barely investigating a token percentage. They simply can’t even begin to investigate [all] the cases. It’s like asking the Mayberry Police Department to police all of us.”
Flint Waters, a U.S. law enforcement official tracking child pornography cases worldwide, agreed. “We are generating more leads than any existing law enforcement structure can respond to,” he said. “There’s just not the resources. We don’t have enough trained investigators.”
“What we have is a catastrophic human rights crisis going on,” Weeks added. “The magnitude would shock everybody.”
Explosion of child porn in the Internet Age
Child pornography used to be a dirty little secret that closet pedophiles shared with each other through the mail. But it exploded with the easy access and anonymity of the Internet, turning a small underground photo-swapping community into what authorities now say is likely a multibillion-dollar a-year industry.
Fifteen years ago, before the Internet, there were perhaps a few hundred children around the world victimized by child pornographers, said Stephan P. Lear, a postal inspector working with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
Today, Lear said, there are thousands of children — upwards of 100,000 — preyed upon by pornographers trading images on as many as 20,000 different Web sites. Some 1,700 of these sites sell the pornography, with monthly subscriptions costing as much as $100, according to the National Center. “There are more people making money off it than ever before,” said Don Daufenbach, national manager of undercover cyber operations for U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement. “Vast sums of money are to be made.”
In cases he’s investigated, Daufenbach said, as much as $1 million a month was being made. So who makes the money?
Russian officials acknowledge their country is the commercial center for this illegal activity, with organized crime behind some of the operations, but with individual freelancers also getting into the action. “After the collapse of the Soviet Union, everything changed in Russia,” said Senior Investigator Yuri Ponomarenko, whose office with the Moscow police handles child pornography cases. “Certain moral values were lost.”
The evidence — and the scars — of this burgeoning black market are easy to find here in Russia, where child exploitation appears rampant.
On a recent trip, a Buffalo News reporter and photographer visited a loading dock behind the cafeteria of Medicinsky College in St. Petersburg and saw dirty-faced youngsters — many 13 or 14 years old — arriving at lunchtime, gulping down free hot dogs and noodles provided by the Red Cross.
These ragtag kids are Russia’s street children, most of them abandoned by alcoholic or drug-addicted parents. Many, proudly holding up the glue pots they sniff to get high, are drug addicts themselves. Some support their addictions by working for child pornographers, said Katharine Zaretskaja, a social worker with Stellit, the Russian organization fighting child exploitation.
“We can see cars where the adults are sitting and the children will go to the cars,” Zaretskaja said. A few miles away, at the Child Infectional Hospital, Zaretskaja introduces Natasha, 14, a waif of a girl living on the streets before being brought to the hospital.
Yes, she says through an interpreter, she knows children who pose for pornographers. For herself, she says: “The main thing is, I avoid it.”
It’s a similar scene in Moscow, where city police point to a group of youths hanging out at the Metro train station at Ilyinsky Square. They wait for the pornographers the same way the prostitutes wait for johns. “It’s a popular spot,” Police Investigator Sergei Sokolov said.
Not all the victims, however, are abandoned street children.
Dmitry Burlak is one example.
Weeks after first meeting Kovalev — the man with the dog — Dmitry and his friend Misha were headed to a nearby river for a swim one hot summer day. Kovalev suddenly appeared. He insisted on joining them, Dmitry recalled.
As the boys swam, Kovalev snapped photographs. It all seemed innocent, Dmitry said.
But on the way home, Kovalev mentioned he packed a picnic lunch and suggested the three stop to eat. He then told the boys that, if they took off their bathing suits, they would tan evenly and their suits would dry faster, Dmitry said.
Kovalev, according to Dmitry, then gave the boys some pills. Misha and Dmitry didn’t know what the drug was but swallowed the pills anyway.
After that, it was as if the boys were being directed in a movie.
Kovalev told them to romp around. They complied.
He told them to perform sex acts upon each other. They did.
“It started as a game,” Dmitry recalled. “He kept taking shots and filming us. He gave us some tablets … and started taking more shots. He asked us to perform some [sexual] acts with each other. He filmed all of it.”
Economic desperation leads to child exploitation
Many point to the economic desperation that initially followed the collapse of the Soviet Union for fermenting the rise of child pornography in Russia and other former Soviet bloc nations.
Others point to the country’s weak child exploitation laws.
Until recently, the age of sexual consent in Russia was 14 — meaning adults could legally have sex with someone as young as 14.
Four years ago, Russian authorities raised the age of consent to 16, following a public outcry after police uncovered on the Internet a Russian-made sex video entitled “The Punisher.” In it, a man whips young boys and sexually abuses them.
The age of consent is still 14 in some other former Soviet bloc republics.
What’s more, it is still legal to own or share child pornography in Russia. “If you keep it in your house and show it to your pal or neighbor, it’s not a crime,” Senior Investigator Yuri Ponomarenko said.
Also, critics say, the penalty for distribution and production of child pornography is weak, with many offenders getting less than the maximum eight-year prison sentence. In addition, it’s unclear whether Internet distribution of child pornography is even covered under the law.
“It’s not enough,” said Larisa Efimova, head of the ArkCenter Safer Internet Program in Moscow. “The adults who perform [child pornography production] need to be punished in a stronger way,” Ponomarenko agreed.
But Russians point out pornography producers aren’t the only ones making money from the perverted images. Also profiting are the American Internet service providers and other Web servers hosting the material, as well as American companies administering subscription fees for these Web sites.
Sixty-two percent of child pornography — including material produced in Russia and other former Eastern bloc countries — was put on the Internet using Web servers in the United States in 2006, according to Internet Watch Foundation, an organization in the United Kingdom that tracks child pornography worldwide.
The United States, in fact, is the biggest host country, with Russia a distant second, the British study found, although many of the Web sites float back and forth between the two countries.
American officials say the United Kingdom numbers are somewhat inflated because of different definitions of child pornography, but the Internet Watch Foundation said its definitions are now in line with the U.S. Regardless, the United States acknowledges the role its Internet industry serves in hosting worldwide child pornography.
“It’s well-documented that the reason the U.S. servers are being used is the broadband width and the high capacity,” said Claude Davenport, a supervising agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Some countries in Eastern Europe just don’t have the [computerized] infrastructure.” Just as upsetting to some Russians, however, are the large numbers of Americans purchasing the images.
“There are few consumers within Russia,” said Ponomarenko, the Moscow police official. “This material, which probably is produced in Russia, is oriented toward Western consumers. There is a demand for it over there. If there is no demand, there will be no production,” he said.
“There are a lot of people who use child pornography in the U.S.,” added Rusakova.
Recent investigations bear that out. In one case, for example, authorities busted an Eastern European child pornography operation, known as Regpay, and found up to half the company’s 90,000 customers were from the United States.
U.S. officials, recognizing the role America plays in the Russian problem, help Eastern European law enforcement stamp out production mills such as Regpay.
“We have a responsibility for combating and eradicating it,” said Marshall Heeger, a federal investigator with the American Embassy in Moscow.
Russia appreciates the U.S. assistance, but suggests America do a better job attacking the problem on its own ground as well.
The moral issues creating the demand for child pornography in the United States must be addressed, said Pavel N. Gusev, editor-in-chief of a major Russian newspaper chain, who also serves on a panel studying Russia’s pornography laws.
“I think you should make the nation more healthy. It’s a problem of the nation,” he said of the United States.
Buffalo News reporter Dan Herbeck contributed to this report
e-mail: lmichel@buffnews.com and sschulman@buffnews.com
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