Hunt down pedophiles live
The police can follow in real time on a map more than 4000 Quebec pedophiles who share images of sexually assaulted children in the depths of the web. But due to lack of resources, only a handful of these predators are arrested each year.
Result: some have been raging online for nearly a decade.
Result: some have been raging online for nearly a decade.
“I saw one last week who has been there since 2013. He hasn't been arrested yet because [the police] don't have time. »
Investigator Laval Tremblay of the Sûreté du Québec scrutinizes his computer screen. It is 10:41 a.m. on a Thursday in November 2021. Under the policeman's eye, red dots appear one by one on a map of the province. At first, there are only a handful.
But as the minutes go by, the map is covered in them.
Behind each of these points hides a sexual predator who, before our eyes and in real time, makes available to other pedophiles photos and videos showing naked, raped or sexually assaulted children. If Investigator Tremblay can see them in action, it is thanks to spyware set up by an American non-profit organization, the Child Rescue Coalition, offered to police everywhere in the world. The Sûreté du Québec is one of the few to use it in the country. She agreed to show it to La Presse in order to give an idea, very fragmentary, it must be specified, of the extent of the scourge of the sexual exploitation of children which is ravaging the Web.
A bit like a surveillance camera in a bank, the software monitors the actions of predators in the depths of the web and identifies the IP address of their computer, which makes it possible to locate them geographically. In the past year, in Quebec alone, the software recorded 4,477 IP addresses of different computers that shared child pornography images on the Web, half of them on the island of Montreal.
Child pornography, "it's 100% sure they have it," says Laval Tremblay.
Yet only a fraction of these criminals are arrested each year. Why ? The answer is simple. The police are overwhelmed.
In addition to the thousands of sex offenders identified by the tool of the Child Rescue Coalition, the teams specializing in the fight against the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet, such as that of Laval Tremblay, are literally overwhelmed by complaints and reports of child pornography crimes. Since the pandemic, their numbers have exploded. While the Child Rescue Coalition flushes out predators in the dark corners of the web, the reports received by the police mainly concern crimes committed on mainstream platforms, such as Snapchat, Facebook, Messenger or Instagram. And since these are complaints, the police must deal with them as a priority.
We don't have enough people. Me [the map], I don't open it until my boss tells me to. I shut down my computer, close my eyes and plug my ears, then I do my other files [related to complaints].
Laval Tremblay, Sûreté du Québec investigator
Laval Tremblay has been a police officer for 30 years, 10 of which exclusively fighting against the sexual exploitation of children on the web.
Investigator Laval Tremblay of the Sûreté du Québec scrutinizes his computer screen. It is 10:41 a.m. on a Thursday in November 2021. Under the policeman's eye, red dots appear one by one on a map of the province. At first, there are only a handful.
But as the minutes go by, the map is covered in them.
Behind each of these points hides a sexual predator who, before our eyes and in real time, makes available to other pedophiles photos and videos showing naked, raped or sexually assaulted children. If Investigator Tremblay can see them in action, it is thanks to spyware set up by an American non-profit organization, the Child Rescue Coalition, offered to police everywhere in the world. The Sûreté du Québec is one of the few to use it in the country. She agreed to show it to La Presse in order to give an idea, very fragmentary, it must be specified, of the extent of the scourge of the sexual exploitation of children which is ravaging the Web.
A bit like a surveillance camera in a bank, the software monitors the actions of predators in the depths of the web and identifies the IP address of their computer, which makes it possible to locate them geographically. In the past year, in Quebec alone, the software recorded 4,477 IP addresses of different computers that shared child pornography images on the Web, half of them on the island of Montreal.
Child pornography, "it's 100% sure they have it," says Laval Tremblay.
Yet only a fraction of these criminals are arrested each year. Why ? The answer is simple. The police are overwhelmed.
In addition to the thousands of sex offenders identified by the tool of the Child Rescue Coalition, the teams specializing in the fight against the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet, such as that of Laval Tremblay, are literally overwhelmed by complaints and reports of child pornography crimes. Since the pandemic, their numbers have exploded. While the Child Rescue Coalition flushes out predators in the dark corners of the web, the reports received by the police mainly concern crimes committed on mainstream platforms, such as Snapchat, Facebook, Messenger or Instagram. And since these are complaints, the police must deal with them as a priority.
We don't have enough people. Me [the map], I don't open it until my boss tells me to. I shut down my computer, close my eyes and plug my ears, then I do my other files [related to complaints].
Laval Tremblay, Sûreté du Québec investigator
Laval Tremblay has been a police officer for 30 years, 10 of which exclusively fighting against the sexual exploitation of children on the web.
An avalanche of complaintsBy dismissing the tool of the Child Rescue Coalition, the SQ received, between April 1 , 2020 and March 31, 2021, 2006 reports of offenses related to child pornography that occurred in the province, mainly from web giants.
And the year 2021-2022 promises to be just as busy, if not busier. The police force already had, between April 1 and October 6, 2021, 1,234 reports. "It should exceed [the previous year] or be similar," predicts Lieutenant Marc-Antoine Vachon, who heads the investigation division into the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet at the Sûreté du Québec.
By way of comparison, there were 1,137 reports for the whole of 2019-2020. “Containment has meant that people are more in front of their computers and consume pornography because the social filter no longer exists. I also think that detection techniques are improving,” summarizes Lieutenant Vachon to explain the increase.
Of these thousands of complaints, the SQ redistributes some to municipal police forces. Then it treats those that are on its territory. Some overlap, others are discarded because they are too "borderline", the investigators are not sure that the victim is a minor, or that it is a case of sexual self-exploitation, sent to other teams. But there are still hundreds to manage.
In addition to the thousands of predators spotted by the Child Rescue Coalition.
"Yes, it's out of control, but at the same time, we can't do 12 searches a day, because that doesn't just involve the investigators, but also the technical units [who go through computers to extract the images], which serve the entire SQ," said Lieutenant Vachon, whose team includes 21 investigators, 3 chiefs and 5 coordinators for the entire territory covered by the provincial police.
Bill Wiltse, a former Oregon state trooper, is the president of the Child Rescue Coalition. After 8 years at the head of the organization which serves 10,000 police forces in 97 countries, the man has resigned himself. “When I left my police department, I naively thought that if we could get law enforcement to know that this technology existed, there might be enough arrests to end the problem
[of l sexual exploitation of minors on the internet],” he says.
But I've come to realize that law enforcement will never be adequately funded or staffed enough to really tackle this problem.
Bill Wiltse, former Oregon police officer and president of the Child Rescue Coalition
Before our visit to the Sûreté du Québec, Laval Tremblay had spotted the case of a man, on the map, about whom he was able to see enough personal elements in the files of his computer to identify him. “We know who he is and we know where he lives. We know what he's doing, but we just can't go get him [right now], because if we put him on the pile, we'll go there in a year,” he said.
“Does this bother me? Well yes, it bothers me, thunders the policeman. But it's been 30 years that I've been tired of not going to arrest people when you know they're hurting. At some point, you have to stop somewhere. »
His field of expertise is heartbreaking: “We know that 20% of these points, if we go into the house, we will save a child. »
Here is a striking example: Sylvain Villemaire, this psychoeducator from a secondary school in Montreal-North, sentenced last year for having "made deliver" from Africa an 8-year-old girl who had become his sexual slave, fell into the line in the sights of Montreal police thanks to technology from the Child Rescue Coalition. The man was sharing child pornography online.
It was an SPVM search of his home that revealed the existence of his victim.
Arrests that make a difference?Between April 2019 and March 2020, the SQ's online child sexual exploitation investigation division made 110 arrests for crimes of a child pornography nature. They rose to 128 in the following 12 months. The majority of suspects have been rendered harmless following reports.
A drop in the ocean? No ! replies Marc-Antoine Vachon.
Those who are arrested, he says, "are all people around whom a social filter is created". “These guys, we won't leave them with children. Those people alone represent maybe 500, 700, 800 reports. I may have settled half of my reports with those arrests. So no, I don't feel helpless. »
"It's like that in almost all investigative niches," relativizes the police officer responsible for the investigation division into the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet of the Sûreté du Québec.
And the year 2021-2022 promises to be just as busy, if not busier. The police force already had, between April 1 and October 6, 2021, 1,234 reports. "It should exceed [the previous year] or be similar," predicts Lieutenant Marc-Antoine Vachon, who heads the investigation division into the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet at the Sûreté du Québec.
By way of comparison, there were 1,137 reports for the whole of 2019-2020. “Containment has meant that people are more in front of their computers and consume pornography because the social filter no longer exists. I also think that detection techniques are improving,” summarizes Lieutenant Vachon to explain the increase.
Of these thousands of complaints, the SQ redistributes some to municipal police forces. Then it treats those that are on its territory. Some overlap, others are discarded because they are too "borderline", the investigators are not sure that the victim is a minor, or that it is a case of sexual self-exploitation, sent to other teams. But there are still hundreds to manage.
In addition to the thousands of predators spotted by the Child Rescue Coalition.
"Yes, it's out of control, but at the same time, we can't do 12 searches a day, because that doesn't just involve the investigators, but also the technical units [who go through computers to extract the images], which serve the entire SQ," said Lieutenant Vachon, whose team includes 21 investigators, 3 chiefs and 5 coordinators for the entire territory covered by the provincial police.
Bill Wiltse, a former Oregon state trooper, is the president of the Child Rescue Coalition. After 8 years at the head of the organization which serves 10,000 police forces in 97 countries, the man has resigned himself. “When I left my police department, I naively thought that if we could get law enforcement to know that this technology existed, there might be enough arrests to end the problem
[of l sexual exploitation of minors on the internet],” he says.
But I've come to realize that law enforcement will never be adequately funded or staffed enough to really tackle this problem.
Bill Wiltse, former Oregon police officer and president of the Child Rescue Coalition
Before our visit to the Sûreté du Québec, Laval Tremblay had spotted the case of a man, on the map, about whom he was able to see enough personal elements in the files of his computer to identify him. “We know who he is and we know where he lives. We know what he's doing, but we just can't go get him [right now], because if we put him on the pile, we'll go there in a year,” he said.
“Does this bother me? Well yes, it bothers me, thunders the policeman. But it's been 30 years that I've been tired of not going to arrest people when you know they're hurting. At some point, you have to stop somewhere. »
His field of expertise is heartbreaking: “We know that 20% of these points, if we go into the house, we will save a child. »
Here is a striking example: Sylvain Villemaire, this psychoeducator from a secondary school in Montreal-North, sentenced last year for having "made deliver" from Africa an 8-year-old girl who had become his sexual slave, fell into the line in the sights of Montreal police thanks to technology from the Child Rescue Coalition. The man was sharing child pornography online.
It was an SPVM search of his home that revealed the existence of his victim.
Arrests that make a difference?Between April 2019 and March 2020, the SQ's online child sexual exploitation investigation division made 110 arrests for crimes of a child pornography nature. They rose to 128 in the following 12 months. The majority of suspects have been rendered harmless following reports.
A drop in the ocean? No ! replies Marc-Antoine Vachon.
Those who are arrested, he says, "are all people around whom a social filter is created". “These guys, we won't leave them with children. Those people alone represent maybe 500, 700, 800 reports. I may have settled half of my reports with those arrests. So no, I don't feel helpless. »
"It's like that in almost all investigative niches," relativizes the police officer responsible for the investigation division into the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet of the Sûreté du Québec.
We'd like that, remove all the guns from the street, but we can't. We would like that, take away all the drugs, we would like that, take away all the pimps… But you do what you can.
Marc-Antoine Vachon, Head of the Investigations Division into the Sexual Exploitation of Children on the Internet at the Sûreté du Québec
“The police are behind in a lot of things in life, but if there's one thing we're not behind, it really is child pornography on the internet. And I'm not just talking about Quebec. I work with police officers all over the world and I tell you, these aggressors, we are all ahead of them, and we all know where they are. There are many more police officers on the Internet,” adds Laval Tremblay.
Despite the horror he faces on a daily basis, the investigator remains a philosopher. “It's a bit like a policeman doing radar on the highway. While he writes his ticket, sometimes he passes another one at 135 km/h. The policeman thinks to himself: “I will catch him another time.” That's what policing is. Sometimes you have to make choices. »
“The Government of Quebec is making a huge effort,” observes the police officer, who says he has met every Minister of Public Security since 2012. “Each government has provided large budgets to support us. But it's like everything,
if we had twice as much, we would make twice as much. »
"It's a little discouraging when you look at the numbers, because they're quite high," notes Bill Wiltse. But according to him, the situation in Quebec is only “a symptom of the seriousness of the problem in the world”. “It's just too easy for these people to do what they're doing, feeling like they're doing it anonymously. So they keep doing it,” he says.
On the ground, Mr. Wiltse shows a certain weariness. “A lot of investigators we talk to [around the world] tell us they're underfunded. They do the best they can with the resources given to them. »
Hope and SolutionsThe Government of Quebec has announced a lot of money to fight against the sexual exploitation of children in recent years, and the police forces have made major crackdowns. But the police can't do everything, warns an expert.
Marc-Antoine Vachon, Head of the Investigations Division into the Sexual Exploitation of Children on the Internet at the Sûreté du Québec
“The police are behind in a lot of things in life, but if there's one thing we're not behind, it really is child pornography on the internet. And I'm not just talking about Quebec. I work with police officers all over the world and I tell you, these aggressors, we are all ahead of them, and we all know where they are. There are many more police officers on the Internet,” adds Laval Tremblay.
Despite the horror he faces on a daily basis, the investigator remains a philosopher. “It's a bit like a policeman doing radar on the highway. While he writes his ticket, sometimes he passes another one at 135 km/h. The policeman thinks to himself: “I will catch him another time.” That's what policing is. Sometimes you have to make choices. »
“The Government of Quebec is making a huge effort,” observes the police officer, who says he has met every Minister of Public Security since 2012. “Each government has provided large budgets to support us. But it's like everything,
if we had twice as much, we would make twice as much. »
"It's a little discouraging when you look at the numbers, because they're quite high," notes Bill Wiltse. But according to him, the situation in Quebec is only “a symptom of the seriousness of the problem in the world”. “It's just too easy for these people to do what they're doing, feeling like they're doing it anonymously. So they keep doing it,” he says.
On the ground, Mr. Wiltse shows a certain weariness. “A lot of investigators we talk to [around the world] tell us they're underfunded. They do the best they can with the resources given to them. »
Hope and SolutionsThe Government of Quebec has announced a lot of money to fight against the sexual exploitation of children in recent years, and the police forces have made major crackdowns. But the police can't do everything, warns an expert.
The Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Public Security, Geneviève Guilbault, announces the release of nearly 100 million to fight against the sexual exploitation of minors, in Quebec, on June 15.
More moneySince 2020, Quebec has multiplied funding announcements, both for the police and for victims of sexual exploitation. Among them: Minister Geneviève Guilbault announced last spring the creation of a new integrated team to fight child pornography, bringing together investigators from the SQ and the main police forces in the province. Money has also been allocated to the Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions for the hiring of prosecutors specializing in sex crimes. The government also set up, earlier in 2021, a committee of experts whose mandate will be to propose measures to “prevent and counter child pornography on Quebec websites”.
Important net strikesAlthough the numbers are small compared to the number of offenders, the police have made a record number of arrests in recent years. In November 2021, in one of the largest police interventions in the fight against the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet of the decade, 26 men from different regions were arrested for accessing, possessing and disseminating child pornography. The salvo mobilized 270 police officers. It was piloted by the new integrated team to fight against child pornography set up by Quebec. Significant fact: as part of this survey, predators were targeted on websites or discussion groups, in particular thanks to detection tools such as the Child Rescue Coalition map.
The "crisis of the day"One of the main challenges in the fight against the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet, according to Bill Wiltse, president of the Child Rescue Coalition, is that of the sustainability of the financing of the teams fighting against child pornography. “Unfortunately, governments are subject to what might be called the crisis of the day. The media say: we have a big problem in this sector. And often, police managers will redistribute their resources within their organization to tackle this specific problem. It's kind of an ever-changing landscape and so they have a really hard time justifying the continued allocation of resources to a particular type of crime [like child sexual exploitation],”
More moneySince 2020, Quebec has multiplied funding announcements, both for the police and for victims of sexual exploitation. Among them: Minister Geneviève Guilbault announced last spring the creation of a new integrated team to fight child pornography, bringing together investigators from the SQ and the main police forces in the province. Money has also been allocated to the Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions for the hiring of prosecutors specializing in sex crimes. The government also set up, earlier in 2021, a committee of experts whose mandate will be to propose measures to “prevent and counter child pornography on Quebec websites”.
Important net strikesAlthough the numbers are small compared to the number of offenders, the police have made a record number of arrests in recent years. In November 2021, in one of the largest police interventions in the fight against the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet of the decade, 26 men from different regions were arrested for accessing, possessing and disseminating child pornography. The salvo mobilized 270 police officers. It was piloted by the new integrated team to fight against child pornography set up by Quebec. Significant fact: as part of this survey, predators were targeted on websites or discussion groups, in particular thanks to detection tools such as the Child Rescue Coalition map.
The "crisis of the day"One of the main challenges in the fight against the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet, according to Bill Wiltse, president of the Child Rescue Coalition, is that of the sustainability of the financing of the teams fighting against child pornography. “Unfortunately, governments are subject to what might be called the crisis of the day. The media say: we have a big problem in this sector. And often, police managers will redistribute their resources within their organization to tackle this specific problem. It's kind of an ever-changing landscape and so they have a really hard time justifying the continued allocation of resources to a particular type of crime [like child sexual exploitation],”
SPVM police officers specializing in the fight against the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet go to the residence of a suspect, in Montreal, in November 2020.
The police can't do everything“It takes a village to tackle this problem. You can't expect law enforcement to do everything," says Bill Wiltse, whose organization has started working with all kinds of entities "that aren't law enforcement agencies. law, but which [the Coalition believes] may have an impact on the problem". There is talk of childcare groups as much as financial institutions, "to help them detect when someone might be sending money for such purposes." Another possible solution is that of public awareness, believes Mr. Wiltse. “If people understood the type of information you saw [on the map shown by the Sûreté du Québec], most would just be furious. But it's difficult when there are so many other noises in the media. People don't realize the seriousness of the problem to say, “You know what?
This is absolutely unacceptable and something must be done.” »
The police can't do everything“It takes a village to tackle this problem. You can't expect law enforcement to do everything," says Bill Wiltse, whose organization has started working with all kinds of entities "that aren't law enforcement agencies. law, but which [the Coalition believes] may have an impact on the problem". There is talk of childcare groups as much as financial institutions, "to help them detect when someone might be sending money for such purposes." Another possible solution is that of public awareness, believes Mr. Wiltse. “If people understood the type of information you saw [on the map shown by the Sûreté du Québec], most would just be furious. But it's difficult when there are so many other noises in the media. People don't realize the seriousness of the problem to say, “You know what?
This is absolutely unacceptable and something must be done.” »
GABRIELLE DUCHAINE
THE PRESS
https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/enquetes/2022-01-10/l-autre-epidemie/traquer-les-pedophiles-en-direct.php
THE PRESS
https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/enquetes/2022-01-10/l-autre-epidemie/traquer-les-pedophiles-en-direct.php
