http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Williamson_Linda/2006/03/19/1494856.html
Linda WilliamsonSun, March 19, 2006
Hunting monsters
We're great at catching child-porn criminals -- and terrible at punishing them
Child pornography is, by definition, a world of dirty little secrets. The vilest of worlds, the most horrifying of secrets.
Most of us will never have to glimpse this world, unlike the iron-willed police officers we dispatch to plumb its depths.
But every one of us is in on the most distasteful secret of all -- the open secret of a Canadian justice system that treats the pornmongers' crime like, pardon the expression, child's play.
Last week's astonishing announcement of the breakup of an international child porn ring -- some 40 people arrested in Canada, the U.S., Australia and England -- came like a bolt of bright light out of a dark cloud; some hopeful news in the face of a very bad situation. A little like Prime Minister Stephen Harper's surprise visit to Afghanistan, if you ask me.
In both cases, we can feel proud that Canadians are making a difference on the front lines in a battle against a monstrous evil, and that our official resources are behind them. In both cases, too, those resources have long been lacking, and still are.
Last week's porn bust is just the latest example of the brilliant work our police -- and by "our," I mean big kudos to the Toronto Police child exploitation branch -- have made in this field. Armed with the very latest in technology, they're constantly figuring out ways to trap those who hide in the shadows of cyberspace.
This particular bust showcased the finest in police work, from the quick action of Edmonton cops who acted on a tip that led them to catch a man in the act of distributing child porn on his computer -- to the wizardry of the Toronto crew, who pioneered a way to track child porn consumers through the webs they weave on the World Wide Web.
Police were able to pose as child-porn traders themselves in chat rooms that specialized in the unthinkable -- including live videos of men sexually abusing their own children, a.k.a., "molestation on demand." I'll spare you further details. Suffice it to say these creeps weren't chatting about the artistic merits of Nabokov's Lolita.
The point is, time and time again, with innovations like the Toronto squad's partnership with Microsoft in creating software to track pedophilic pornographers, our police beat the bad guys. They're not only battling hard on the front lines, they've infiltrated behind enemy lines in a high-tech war.
Our courts and legal instruments, by comparison, are stuck in the past. For years, our child porn laws were in limbo due to esoteric arguments about freedom of artistic expression and whether "works of the imagination" can be illegal.
Meanwhile, the twisted multitudes who crave real, hardcore images of real children -- including babies -- being raped were building an empire online: Some 20,000 new child porn websites pop up each month, the CBC reported last week.
We have figured out how to catch these monsters. Where we fail is in figuring out what to do with them after they're convicted.
Canada's maximum penalty for trafficking in child porn is 10 years. It has never been used. Jail terms are rare -- the usual sentence in a child porn case is house arrest. (By contrast, in 1999, a U.S. child porn distributor was sentenced to 1,335 years in prison.)
On Friday, Edmonton's Carl Treleaven, who pleaded guilty to helping run the chat rooms at the centre of this worldwide child-sex-video ring, was sentenced to just three and a half years in jail -- even though the judge called him a "danger to society" and the volume and depravity of the images he traded "unprecedented."
Pathetic. Yet this was the toughest sentence ever imposed in Canada for distributing child porn! One Edmonton cop called it a step forward.
Treleaven, a self-described child porn "addict," will be free again in a matter of months. Some step forward.
If we're so good at catching these vermin, why are we so bad at putting them away?
Prime Minister Harper, I hope you're listening.
Makes one want to throw up.......