The Child Porn Pipeline
Part Three: A child victim's story of betrayal and despair
'He gave us some tablets, started taking more shots of us ... and asked us to perform sexual acts' - child pornography victim Dmitry Burlak
MOSCOW — Dmitry Burlak, at 18, is a lost soul trying to understand who he is and how his past continues to haunt him. A sleek, denim-clad youth, with blond streaks in his shoulder-length brown hair, Dmitry is full of anger when he talks about Valera Kovalev, a 57-year-old man who, five years ago, stole his innocence, recorded it on camera and then showed it for the world to see.
As a 13-year-old boy, Dmitry says, he didn’t understand what Kovalev was up to. But today, the young man says if he ever sees Kovalev again: “We’d be prepared to beat him up.”
Sitting in a secluded booth at a Japanese restaurant in the downtown district of this city, and speaking through an interpreter, Dmitry says he’s telling his story because he wants to prevent other children from experiencing the horrors he endured — and the shame that will never end — after Kovalev befriended him, drugged him, took pornographic photos of him, and then sold the pictures on the Internet.
Dmitry could never bring himself to look at the pictures, but knowing the images exist keeps them fresh in his memory. He recounts the incident as if it happened yesterday.
“Sexual abuse usually has a beginning and an end,” said Elizabeth Donatello, a Niagara County assistant district attorney. “But when you add the component of pictures of the sexual abuse being published to the Internet, the abuse never ends.”
Just days after Dmitry was bitten by Kovalev’s dog in 2002, Dmitry and his friend Misha had a second encounter with Kovalev. The first time the boys met their new adult friend, he offered them candy and sweet drinks. The second time, Kovalev gave them cigarettes.
Misha tried smoking one down to the filter. He felt dizzy from the smoke; Dmitry took a couple of puffs and felt nauseous.
Come back to my apartment so your parents don’t see you red-eyed and smelling of smoke, Kovalev suggested.
When the boys arrived, the photography equipment was already set up.
“Could you help me? I am going to focus my camera,” Dmitry recalled Kovalev asking him.
As Dmitry awkwardly stood in front of the lens, Kovalev reached over, spilling a drink on the boy. Dmitry removed his wet T-shirt so Kovalev could dry it.
“He was showing me some pictures that were not precisely pornography but erotica,” Dmitry recalled. “He offered to make some shots of me. He said he would be happy to buy a cellular phone for each of us if we would come and pose for the pictures naked.”
That night, the boys refused.
"The real thing"
Men caught looking at child pornography often tell authorities that when looking at the images, they don’t view the children in the pictures as actual boys and girls. But they are actual children — like Dmitry and Misha, not computer simulations, or photo composites.
“These guys want the real thing,” said Stephan P. Lear, a postal inspector working with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in Alexandria, Va.
“Here at the center we have 1,100 victims identified, but there are easily 100,000 kids — maybe more. We don’t know who they are,” he said.
Statistically, most of the victims are girls, but plenty of boys are targeted also.
A majority of the children are under 13 years old and increasingly include toddlers and infants.
“We are seeing younger and younger [victims],” Lear said. “It’s every age kid you could imagine. Very brutal. That’s very common now.”
“These guys are raping infants and toddlers,” said Flint Waters, an investigator with the federal Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. “You can hear the child crying, pleading for help in the video. It is horrendous.”
Mental health experts say intensive counseling can provide a lifeline for some of the children, but that not all are resilient enough to recover from the sexual abuse and knowledge that their images remain indefinitely on the Internet.
The street children of Russia, already a step removed from society, become hardened by the sexual exploitation, unable to empathize or feel concern for others, or judge right from wrong, child psychology and sociology experts say.
Children like Dmitry, taken advantage of by trusted family members or other adults, suffer moral and emotional damage. “Some kids will recover from this and go on to lead a productive life. If they get appropriate, symptom-specific treatment, they can move on and get through life challenges,” said Stefan G. Perkowski, director of program services with Child and Adolescent Treatment Services in Erie County.
But for others, “intrusive thoughts just torture these kids,” said Kenneth N. Condrell, a clinical psychologist in Williamsville. “A lot of them end up in denial and will tell you nothing happened. They withdraw and become distant. They go into their own world. It is a horrible, horrible experience.
“The children are living in hell. They have all lost a sense that they live in a safe world. They now feel vulnerable. They think that if this could happen, anything could happen.”
"Started out as a game"
Dmitry and Misha’s parents grounded them for coming home late the night of the cigarette smoking incident, so it was about a week before Kovalev ran into the boys again.
That was the day Kovalev suddenly appeared as the boys went for a swim in the river.
Kovalev was ready for the boys that day. He packed a picnic lunch. He had his cameras.
“While we were eating and drinking, he was taking shots of us,” Dmitry recalled. “Then he took out the video camera. He said we should take off the bathing suits if we want the sun tan to be really even and for the bathing suits to dry out faster.
“He kept on making shots and filming us and he remembered that he had promised to present cellular phones to us. And he gave us some tablets, and he started taking more shots of us…and he asked us to perform some sexual acts.”
Looking back on his encounter, Dmitry says he doesn’t know why he and his friend did as Kovalev suggested.
“It started out as a game,” he said, adding that the drugs Kovalev gave them may have had something to do with it. Later that night, Dmitry felt uncomfortable.
“When I was at home, my parents suspected something was wrong. I think they felt my state was different and they started asking me questions. I did not say anything to them. I went to bed.”
The next day, the boys returned to Kovalev’s apartment.
“He said the film was great. He invited us to see, but we were embarrassed to view it,” Dmitry said. “He gave 500 rubles to each of us. He said he had to show the film to someone and if he approved, he could sell it and buy [us] cell phones.” Two days later, Kovalev invited the boys back to his home to pick up their cell phones.
Dmitry’s and Misha’s parents, already suspicious, demanded to know where their 13-year-old sons were getting money and phones. The boys recounted their experiences with Kovalev.
Police were contacted.
Kovalev was arrested.
"My mother told me later the police discovered a lot of child pornography in his apartment and some of it was violent,” Dmitry said.
His mother also told him that police said Kovalev sold their pictures to Internet Web page operators.
Dmitry’s relationship with his family, and his view of himself, haven’t been the same since.
Inadequate resources
As Russia and other former Soviet bloc countries try to halt the expansion of Internet child pornography, these countries face a crisis among their abused children.
There is inadequate counseling and no facilities for sexually exploited children, but many of the boys and girls, authorities said, end up in drug treatment wards at local hospitals.
Yet some of the places designed to help children — orphanages and child rehabilitation centers — are among the places where child pornographers stalk.
Children living at a rehabilitation center in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, for example, were approached in the evening by pornographers, who brought them to a studio to be filmed, according to Olha Shved, a sociologist with the child advocacy group ECPAT International’s Eastern European office.
Eight children posed for the pornographer for about a month until the director of the rehabilitation center learned what was going on after questioning where the children were getting money from, Shved said.
In another instance, young girls at a modeling agency were photographed with hidden cameras in changing rooms, showers and bathrooms. The pictures were sold and placed on the Internet, Shved said.
“We don’t know how many will be punished,” she said of the defendants in the modeling agency case, which is making its way through the court system.
Dmitry’s future uncertain
Dmitry’s abuser, Valera Kovalev, was found to be mentally unstable and confined to a psychiatric hospital, according to Senior Investigator Sergei Sokolov with the Moscow Police Department.
Dmitry’s parents were angry at their son for not being “clever enough” to know what Kovalev was up to, the teenager said. And after the neighborhood learned of the incident, the family moved, Dmitry recalled. He ended up leaving his parents while still a teenager, working in a neighbor’s tavern, and sleeping in a room at the back of the bar.
Today, Dmitry remains estranged from his family. He also remains uncertain about his own sexuality, acknowledging that he felt abused and shamed by his past, and further victimized by the belief that his family lost respect for him. In the void, he said, he became sexually promiscuous.
“This takes a toll on your psyche. It may affect your sexual attitudes,” he said.
As for his friend, Misha attends college and is working, but Dmitry says they are no longer close.
Dmitry went on to study acting at a neighborhood studio theater, and now works for a company that organizes parties for different organizations. He also works as a clerical assistant for a law firm.
He says he’s still confused about his future, but one thing he’s sure of: He hates child pornography. “It can affect the psychology [of a child] and be a bad experience,” he said.
Buffalo News reporter Susan Schulman contributed to this report.
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