On September 26, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held its seventh hearing on the sexual exploitation of children over the Internet. The hearing focused on the technology-based tools Internet predators use to exploit children.
Testifying on behalf of the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BoP), Dr. Andres Hernandez, director of the Sex Offender Treatment Program (SOTP), presented the results of his study of child pornography. The BoP houses approximately 12,000 individuals convicted of Internet-based child pornography crimes; the SOTP offers a voluntary treatment program for up to 112 offenders. “Over the course of my ten years of clinical work with federally convicted sex offenders in the SOTP, I have observed that in the course of treatment many child pornography offenders admit to unreported sexual crimes, many of which include multiple sexual contacts with the victim,” he said. Dr. Hernandez recently studied 155 men who were convicted of child pornography possession and/or distribution: “At the time of sentencing, 115 (74 percent) subjects had no documented hands-on victims. Forty (26 percent) had known histories of abusing a child via a hands-on sexual act. The number of victims known at the time of sentencing by the 155 subjects was 75. Following treatment, the inmates disclosed perpetrating contact sexual crimes against another 1,702 victims. Eight-five percent of the inmates were in fact contact sexual offenders, compared to only 26 percent known at the time of sentencing.” Dr. Hernandez said that his observations “indicated that these Internet child pornographers are far more dangerous to society than we previously thought.”
Kurt Eichenwald, a reporter for The New York Times, testified about his ongoing investigations of online child pornography, including his previous involvement with the Justin Berry case (seeThe Source, 4/7/06). Mr. Eichenwald said, “What I discovered was terrible. The online conversations–even those ostensibly set up to provide support to adults wrestling with their sexual attraction to children–provide a means for pedophiles to gain knowledge and assistance in making contact with minors in the real world…From these conversations, I learned of Internet radio stations and downloadable pod casts put together by pedophiles for other adults attracted to children…as well as an active social movement that purports to be pushing for the ‘rights’ of children to engage in sexual contact with adults.”
Mr. Eichenwald said that pedophiles “celebrated something called model sites, which I learned were the explosive trend last year in child pornography. By clicking on one of many web addresses posted in a discussion where no illegal sites were supposed to be linked, I ultimately found myself confronted by a page of images of pre-pubescent little girls…That site–which boldly, and I believe, falsely, proclaimed itself legal–was run by a company called Playtoy Enterprises. Playtoy attracted 6,000 members in six months, all of whom paid $30 per month processed by credit card companies and online payment systems. Since the publication of my articles, I have heard that Playtoy closed. But I discovered hundreds of such sites advertised on marketing portals for pedophiles; I am sure that many of them are still around.”
General Counsel of GoDaddy.com, a domain registrar, Christine Jones, testified that her company “routinely investigates and suspends sites involving child pornography and exploitation of children in many forms and degrees of severity.” Ms. Jones said that GoDaddy.com also investigates and routinely suspends websites involving child modeling, saying “We typically remove them even if we can’t find child pornography because our experience has been that the operators of child modeling sites tend to be associated, even if attenuated, with child pornography in some way.” She said that over the past year GoDaddy.com has investigated 1,200 unique customers last year but that the number of domains investigated each year is “much higher because the one unique customer may have many domain names in one account.”
Also testifying were Dr. Anna C. Salter, a psychologist at the Wisconsin and Iowa Departments of Correction; Phillip Jenkins, professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University; and Thomas Krwawecz, chief executive officer of Blue Gravity Communications.
The second hearing on September 27 focused exclusively on the Masha Allen case. Ms. Allen, who testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on May 3 (see The Source, 5/5/06), was born in Russia in 1992. When she was three, Ms. Allen was removed from her home due to physical abuse and placed in an orphanage. Two years later, she was adopted by Matthew Mancuso, a divorced, single man from Pennsylvania. Mr. Mancuso adopted Ms. Allen for the purposes of sexually abusing her; he posted photographs of the abuse on the Internet and was arrested in 2003. The agencies responsible for the adoption process failed to thoroughly investigate Mr. Mancuso and did not conduct any post-adoption visits.
Keith Wallace, chief executive officer of Families Thru International Adoption; Jeannene Smith, founder of Reaching Out Thru International Adoption; Richard L. Baird Jr., president of Adiago Health; Carol Eiferman, social work supervisor of Reaching Out Thru International Adoption; Serguei Dymtchenko, a former Russian adoption official; Marlene Seamans-Conn, former executive director of Reaching Out Thru International Adoption, testified regarding their respective roles in Ms. Allen’s adoption.
Mr. Jared Rolsky, board member of the Joint Council on International Children’s Services and Trish Maskew, president of Ethica, Inc., testified on the need to develop consistent and ethical standards for international adoptions.
