Azov/Spade Compendium
Pedophobe of the Year: Paul Krawczyk, Toronto Police
Posted by Bernie Najarian on 2014-January-4 19:41:52, Saturday
Pedophobe of the Year – Paul Krawczyk, Toronto Police
by Bernie Najarian (revised) Jan. 3, 2014
Every year, The Advocate, a leading gay periodical, names a ‘Homophobe of the Year.’ The ‘dishonoree’ who receives this designation must not only be a dyed-in-the-wool despiser of gays or gay expression, but must also be notably effective in disseminating homophobia to the world.
This year’s winner of the ‘Phobie’ is Russian president Vladimir Putin. His award is well deserved. The thin-lipped, beady-eyed android has passed a law that bans truthful discourse about gay relationships. In effect, the law attempts to re-isolate gay youth into traditional self-hating desperation. Meanwhile, in the social climate Putin has fostered, muscle-building thugs lure gay teens in from the internet to torture and humiliate them on camera. The gangs behind this activity have almost complete legal impunity. They often represent themselves as fighting pedophilia.
Which brings us to the topic of pedophiles. The heavy sludge of social fear and loathing that once clung to gays is rapidly being dissolved away in the Western world, and is being electroplated directly back onto the minor-attracted – not just the lawbreaking members of the group, but also the law-abiding. We now have the creepy satisfaction of being able to say that ‘our haters are more hateful than yours’ in the vast schoolyard of sociopolitics. At a time in history, however, when hundreds of people a day comment on the internet that we should all be killed, anally raped and genitally mutilated, how could anyone truly stand out as our equivalent of the Homophobe of the Year? Who could we fairly call the Pedophobe of the Year?
Before I answer this question, I have to clarify the context. I’m not here to defend or excuse people who break the law, even if the law in one jurisdiction or another is imperfect. My concept of a ‘pedophobe,’ here, is that this word cannot be used to describe someone who is simply hostile to the concept of intergenerational sex involving minors. The Pedophobe of the Year has to be someone who is also unreasoningly hateful toward completely law-abiding minor-attracted people (including people who act as law-abiding at a given time, but are vulnerable when laws or their interpretations change with retroactive force).
I know that the word ‘pedophobe,’ like ‘homophobe,’ has etymological problems: it literally means ‘fearer of soil,’ while ‘homophobe’ means ‘fearer of the same.’ “Paedophobe,” a spelling one never sees, means ‘fearer of boys.’ Despite these linguistic annoyances, I think we all understand what these words are getting at.
My investigations have revealed that there is one person on this planet who truly stood out as a pedophobe in 2013. This year, he has caused more needless grief for law-abiding minor-attracted persons than anyone else, by far. He is Detective Paul Krawczyk of the Toronto Police.
Detective Krawczyk was one of the principal investigators involved in Project Spade, the insidious, two-year-long, secret mass-arrest campaign aimed at the customers of ‘naturist’ video distributor Azov Films. The firm was based in Krawczyk’s home town of Toronto, Canada. Krawczyk was instrumental, among other things, in the international coordination of the series of arrests that extended across the globe to many far-flung purchasers of Azov’s wares.
His principal accomplishment as a candidate Pedophobe of the Year does not lie in that effort alone. His true triumph lies in his successful social extortion of international police forces that were initially reluctant to cooperate with Project Spade. He was able to force them to adopt his viewpoint that the Azov customers were serious pornography-collecting criminals, rather than mostly innocuous viewers of legally sold naturist cinematography. To achieve this result, he truly did something unusual. How often do you see members of one nation’s police forces showing up in the press and publicly humiliating the forces of other, friendly nations?
The problem with Azov Films, as a police target, was that the material it sold had passed lawyers’ tests for legality in more than one country. It contained no sexual content, just photos and videos of boys involved in nude sports and recreation. Canada’s particularly conservative criminal code allowed judges to determine such ‘nudity only’ naturist material as child-pornographic if they subjectively decided that “a sexual purpose” was involved in manufacture. In most other countries, though, the materials were clearly legal or borderline-legal. Even in Canada, the home base of Azov Films, the company had survived a police raid in 2005 and its naturist wares had been accepted as non-pornographic.
Early on in Project Spade, Toronto Police obtained the enthusiastic cooperation of the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), a specialized police force dedicated to preventing and detecting crimes involving the U.S. mail. The workload of this force had been declining significantly for years, in lockstep with the general decline in use of ‘snail mail,’ and USPIS, as an institution, was clearly on the road to irrelevance. Perhaps there should be no surprise, then, that the force became vigorously involved when they found out much of Azov’s material was being shipped by post through a warehouse in North Tonawanda, New York.
USPIS became so committed to arresting the Azov customers that they clearly took steps to minimize the chances that the material would be considered legally benign. Clever strategists produced a reinterpretation of the wording of existing U.S. law so that the Azov material could be represented to judges as pornographic. This reinterpretation, as can be seen in the dozens of Justice Department affidavits collected and linked at the Boywiki Azov Films page, involved labelling any frontal nudity seen in the sports activities as ‘displaying the genitals,’ and any posterior nudity involving bending as ‘displaying the anus.’ This oversexed view of naked sports allowed normal athletic movements to be represented as ‘lascivious,’ thus fulfilling one of the ‘Dost criteria’ used to distinguish pornographic from non-pornographic child nudity in the US.
Other nations’ police forces were seldom as cooperative as USPIS. Project Spade was ignored by many of the 94 countries where the Azov products had been distributed. The final list of participating police forces mentioned in Toronto Police press releases included those of Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Israel, Romania, Ukraine, Greece, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, Norway, Ireland, Hongkong, and Gibraltar. Conspicuous gaps included the U.K., and most of Europe, Asia, and South America.
Immediately after the Toronto press conference on Nov 14, 2013, where cooperating forces broke their silence about Project Spade, Krawczyk showed up in his role of international enforcer. He appeared in the news in Australia, humiliating the Australian federal police for their slowness in jumping on the Spade bandwagon. His criticisms were reported in a national news story titled “Child porn suspects slip through net after Australian Federal Police bungle.”
Detective Krawczyk said a goldmine of information about Australian customers - including names, addresses, computer numbers and banking details - was forwarded to the AFP in the middle of last year.
However Australia appeared only to act after he mentioned the list to Argos Detective Inspector Jon Rouse earlier this year.
[quote]
"It just so happened that Jon and I were talking back earlier this year and I mentioned to him how the case was going and actually they hadn't even heard of it,'' he said.
[end quote]
Not satisfied with rubbing Australian police noses in the dirt, even though the AFP had started to perform once he’d called them on their deficiencies, he also went after the Queensland judiciary. “Sex-crimes detective blasts Queensland's lenient justice system after global pedophile ring busted.,’ read the headline in Brisbane’s Courier Mail on Nov. 17.
[quote]
Detective Paul Krawczyk said it was "disgusting'' a man from Boonah, south west of Brisbane, was fined $1000 and had no conviction recorded after being caught with child abuse images in the sting.
"If you think of the children who are being exploited in these and in some cases abused, to me it's unacceptable to have a $1000 fine,'' Det Krawczyk told The Courier-Mail.
"We get higher fines for speeding here.''
[end quote]
How often do you see members of one country’s police forces calling the legal judgments of other friendly nations ‘disgusting?’
But Krawczyk was not content just to go after Australia. The U.K. had stiffed his efforts completely. As the National Crime Agency’s Deputy Director General Phil Gormley revealed on Nov 17, “The material sent by Toronto via Interpol in 2012 was assessed at the time by CEOP (the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center, a department with the NCA). The material related to customer details of purchasers of DVDs and videos from the internet. The ‘screen shots’ CEOP received did not show contact child sexual abuse, and were classified by CEOP's experts as Level 1 on the COPINE scale (used to rate the criminality of potentially erotic material involving children from 1, minimal, to 7, maximal -BN).”
That meant that the Azov material was judged too innocuous to excite legal interest in the UK.
Krawczyk was free to avenge himself for this after the Nov. 14 press conference.
Scandal-rag the Daily Mirror breathlessly reported on Nov. 28 that “Toronto police chief Paul Krawczyk (he’s not the chief – the error is typical Mirror sloppiness - BN) told a fortnight ago how he passed the list (of Azov customers) to UK detectives in 2012.
He said: “I know the British authorities are aware of the project but we have not been informed of any arrests or other data or conclusions.”
The Mirror’s reporter, Tom Pettifor, described the customer base as “perverts” and “suspected child abusers.”
[quote]
Police are finally investigating 2,345 suspected child abusers nearly two years after officers were handed their names by Canadian detectives.
The shocking list includes around 50 dangerous paedophiles who were part of a ring of perverts that spanned 94 countries.
Some are convicted criminals being monitored but others are feared to have been left free to abuse children as officers snubbed the chance to nail them.
The Mirror revealed two weeks ago crime fighters failed to act on the information when it was first sent by Toronto police in spring 2012.
[end quote]
As usual in the U.K., other professional scandalizers immediately began to gnash and growl in massive numbers, forcing the NCA to resort to the ultimate gesture of public humiliation: appointing an independent inquiry.
[quote]
The NCA said: “We have now completed enquiries into the information provided.
“The CEOP command has processed 2,345 suspects believed to have purchased DVDs and videos from the internet.
"Within this we have identified a small number of high-risk individuals, many of whom are already being managed by local police. (A typical pseudo-soothing note issued by government bodies that have their tails between their legs – BN)
“The data has been passed to police forces around the UK for further investigation and/or action. An independent management review of the processes taken upon initial receipt of the information is under way.”
[end quote]
Wow.
One little bully, two big kids bashed up on the schoolyard. Australia and the United Kingdom. It was the police version of World War III, and Canada blew the enemy to self-reviewing smithereens.
It has to be said that Krawczyk wasn’t the sole Spade representative responsible for kicking the Brits and Aussies in the slats. His main partner in this enterprise, though, is someone whose name we don’t know. Since the covered-up beginning of the Azov arrest series, it has been clear that USPIS, generally in decline, has one thing going for it. Among the people who do its public relations and its legal positioning is at least one near-genius. USPIS has a professional propagandist who is so sharp that he, or she, inspires awe, the same kind of awe that Bin Laden inspired when he (not Bush) brought down the towers. Simple but brilliant.
To allow Spade to go forward in the US, brilliant legal trickery was used to make the Azov product appear illegal to judges, and then the press were masterfully fed tantalizing pieces of disconnected drama, while being completely obstructed from revealing the underlying story. As dozens of men who were otherwise legally stainless were arrested for their Azov purchases, selective disclosures by USPIS emphasized the small number of cases where child contact offences or genuine child pornography collections were discovered. Much was made, in particular, of three arrestees who were found to have made private home movies of naked children. Two men did this in school facilities where they worked, and one filmed at home, recording his interactions with a child he was allegedly ‘raping’ over a six-year period, according to his Washington State charges. The many arrestees who had lived their whole lives without legal transgression (most arrestees were over 50 years old) were ignored in publicity, other than being written up in their home town newspapers as child pornography buyers. The more dramatic American stories appeared, oddly, in newspapers in two geographic locations – in the local area of the arrested offenders, and in the UK. The UK stories appeared in the conservative scandal-tabs the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror. In retrospect, this pattern of publicity appears to have been designed to make a point to the still-uncooperative U.K. authorities.
It was in the Nov. 14 press release in Toronto, however, that the USPIS propagandist revealed his master stroke. He (or she) produced a huge and apparently unchallengeable figure, 330, as the number of child victims of sexual exploitation who had been ‘rescued’ in the US as the result of the 74 arrests made there by Project Spade. Added together with the 6 victims from Australia from 65 arrests, 24 in Canada from 108 arrests, and so on, that brought the ‘rescued children’ number up to 386 worldwide, 85% of whom were American. That’s in contrast to 348 arrestees worldwide, 22% of whom were American. That may make it seem as if one or more Americans had abused large numbers of children. The completely unrestrained Tom Pettifor of the Daily Mirror went so far as to say that police had “freed 400 child sex slaves.”
What Pettifor and others didn’t bother to check was that criminal affidavits and press reports detailing the contact and videographic offences of the individual US Azov arrestees were widely available. Complete information on the offences of 54 of the 76 US arrestees was available online, to be collected either with some personal labor or by looking at websites produced by online the minor-attracted community where the information had already been compiled. The 54 well documented arrests, including all of the worst-case examples cited by USPIS in their publicity, accounted for the ‘rescue’ of at most 16 Americans who had been exposed to sexual contact as children. Many of these 16 had already reached adulthood, some of them decades earlier. They were the only people who could possibly be conceived of as ‘sex slaves’ among the 330 U.S. ‘rescues.’
The number of children who had been ‘exploited’ via private videography, without their knowledge, was around 80, plus an uncertain number of others who could not be identified or counted because identifying features were not included in the films. One arrestee, Scott Studer, filmed a total of 74 naked boys after eight years of secret filming in the showers of a school where he taught physical education. He did not attempt to interact sexually with any of the students. Another, David Engle, made around 500 videos of sexual acts involving a single boy over a 6-year period, plus a few additional videos showing him touching another boy who was asleep. A third, Josh Ensley, became something of a ‘poster boy’ for USPIS by filming the genitalia of boys and girls using the washroom at a school where he worked as a janitor. He used a small spy camera hidden in an air freshener container, and probably filmed in a way that did not allow his targets to be identified. It seems unlikely that large numbers were involved, and even if they were, they would not be countable. If they had been countable, the counts would certainly have appeared in Ensley’s public Justice Department press releases or affidavits.
The appearance, in ‘child rescue’ lists, of over 200 ‘sex slaves’ who could not be substantiated in any way, plus an estimated 100 slaves whose enslavement consisted only of being immorally videotaped without their knowledge, gave USPIS and the Toronto Police an enormous advantage in shaming the police forces who did not cooperate with their massive pedophile roundup. The question on the mind of every U.K. citizen who picked up the Mail or Mirror to read the day’s news had to be, “How could our police miss out on arresting evil men who could be sexually enslaving hundreds of children even as we speak?” The stories even tied in to previous Mail and Mirror stories that astute readers might remember, involving perpetrators like Engle and Studer. It stood to reason that the British police must have known all this was going on. And here they were, sitting on their hands. It was absolutely outrageous.
While that was going on, Krawczyk was always available to speak to reporters and gently point out what a bloody botch their local police forces had made.
The force of public pressure on the UK police forces must have been gruelling. Most of this moral force was exerted, as in an old horror movie, by the imaginary groanings and sufferings of 300 nonexistent, ghostly slaves.
What, people might ask, motivated Krawczyk to put his fellow police officers through the torture of being held morally accountable by hundreds of apparently fabricated victims? Was he conscientiously doing his job in calling out others who appeared to be slacking? Did he sincerely believe the USPIS propagandist and pass on his fabrications unwittingly? Or was something more sinister going on?
It is understandable that Krawczyk, working day to day chatting incognito with child porn traders and contact offenders on the internet, is not fond of sex offenders. A couple of years ago, a man in St. Thomas, Ontario, began to sexually assault a pre-school-aged girl, probably his own daughter, on live cam in front of Krawczyk. Later, Donnie Snook, an allegedly prolific contact offender who was a St. John, New Brunswick city councillor, offered Krawczyk some sort of a sexually tinged interaction with a boy on live cam. Krawczyk made sure the local police got there before the session could begin.
Krawczyk cut his teeth on international child porn roundups as the coordinator of 2010’s Project Sanctuary, which led to the arrest of 57 men on a total of 218 charges. He’s good at what he does. In interviews, he sounds soft-spoken and reasonable.
The trait that identifies Krawczyk as a pedophobe is not his efficiency as a tracker of pornographic and sexual offenders. Above and beyond that, he strongly promotes his own idée-fixe that all minor-attracted people are sex offenders. He’s the sexual-politics equivalent of an officer who is convinced that all Muslims are terrorists, openly or secretly.
In his interview with the Brisbane Courier Mail, criticizing a judge who let an Azov customer off with a fine, he said that “it was ‘time the courts realised’ the (Azov) material was causing a cycle of abuse against children.”
‘It's completely disgusting,’ he said of the Boonah sentence.
‘We were pretty similar to those type of releases back in 2005 and earlier. It used to frustrate me … You only possess this material if there is a sexual interest.'
On Feb. 28, 2013, Krawczyk was interviewed by the Calgary Sun newspaper of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, as part of the media pile-up on local university professor Tom Flanagan, who had publicly described some kinds of child pornography as ‘victimless.’ Krawczyk further elaborated his views, following up an incoherent statement with opinions that were very clear indeed.
“Studies show (that child pornography viewers) are more likely to offend against a child than those who actually are hands-on offenders where (an attack) could be situational.”
“It’s terrible. (It shows) a sexual interest in children. How can that not be dangerous?”
Some would argue that those who have lived for five or six or seven decades of their sexually mature lives, attracted to children but not allowing those desires to affect children or cause legal offence, are among the world’s most reliable people. Krawczyk, however, clearly doesn’t want anyone who has such an interest to escape legal detection and restriction. This explains his dedication to trawling-style campaigns like Project Spade, where the great majority of men caught will not have been contact offenders or porn traders. It may also explain his tolerance of the exaggerations produced by his American colleagues.
Interestingly, an interviewer for Voice of Russia managed to get Krawczyk to yield the criteria used to define a rescued child in Project Spade – something that Project Spade lead investigator Inspector Joanna Beaven-Desjardins waffled and obfuscated about in the Nov. 14 press conference. He told the interviewer, “the children were either being sexually abused or they were being sexually exploited by having videos taken of them in exploitative positions, so whether they were, you know, having video taken without their knowledge when they were nude or actually having sexual acts performed on them and then those were videotaped.”
This statement allows us to be reasonably certain that the numbers of rescues given by USPIS was an outright fabrication, rather than a number enlarged by inclusion of types of perceived victims that were not mentioned in press materials. For example, David Engle videotaped the groin areas of some of the minor league baseball players he coached while they were on the playing field, clothed in their baseball uniforms. We can now be sure that those boys are not included among the ‘rescued children,’ since they were not filmed in the nude. We can also be sure, based on Krawczyk's definition, that USPIS wasn't counting 'prospective victims,' such as students who were at risk of being videotaped in future years if Studer and Ensley had been left to work unchecked. Krawczyk’s clarified definition leaves no way to account for the total of 330 rescued children in the US, other than to imagine that over 200 of them were linked to the 22 U.S. arrestees who, to our knowledge, were never mentioned in the press (number reduced to 19 in latest data - BN). Surely, however, unless a major case was completely covered up by USPIS and the Justice Department, none of those 22 men is responsible for hundreds of victims. All the known dramatic cases, wherever there were multiple contact offences or videotapes, were heavily publicized, and were detailed in the Nov. 14 press conference.
Krawczyk is a 43-year-old, married father of two who joined the Toronto Police force in 1996 as a street cop, patrolling some of the city’s impoverished housing projects. He has clearly found himself as a pedohunter. He and his colleague Janelle Blackadar won a joint award as Police Officer of the Year in 2012 for their work on Project Sanctuary. In a 2008 listing of public service salaries over $100,000, Krawczyk’s salary had risen to CAD 101,699.66, plus benefits, around $95,700 in current US dollars.
Many other police officers worldwide work in positions similar to the one Krawczyk holds, but he is surely the first to have successfully beaten up other national police forces whose approach to minor-attracted people seemed too soft. It is very likely that his efforts will have a lasting effect on anyone in the UK who is found to possess COPINE level 1 images, such as family-style photos of children in swimsuits at the beach. Through Project Spade’s brazen exaggeration of victim numbers, he has also had a lasting impact in promoting the idea, among police forces and judiciary worldwide, that any sign of minor attraction is sufficient to proclaim a person dangerous and justify a raid. Krawczyk, in my view, will do whatever is possible to send the most innocent and legally conscientious person to prison if any evidence of minor attraction can be found in his or her possessions or actions. After all, how can the person “not be dangerous?”
If his endorsement of USPIS’s egregious 330-victim fiction is deliberate complicity, he may be willing to lie and cheat in order to get any suspected pedophile into a cell.
Vladimir Putin is a teddy bear compared to Paul Krawczyk.
Krawczyk is the hands-down winner of the 2013 Pedophobe of the Year award.
(This article or excerpts may be reproduced in unaltered form without copyright restriction.)
Appendix 1. The U.S. Project Spade contact offense data
Compilation by ‘Kristofor’ of the data on contact offences and offenses related to children photographed while nude or with exposed genitals. Reprinted with permission.
Links for press stories and/or affidavits for each of the U.S. Project Spade cases listed below are at http://en.boywiki.org/wiki/Azov_Films_Prosecutions
This is for comparison with the USPIS claims of 330 children rescued in the US. To be eligible for inclusion within that number, the children documented below must have been contacted or photographed within the United States. Other contact and photographic offenses, however, are mentioned separately, to allow readers to get the complete picture.
Definitions are in the first entry.
1. Kendall, Jonathan
Nr. contact (number of child sexual contacts discovered for arrestee): 0
Nr. photo (number of children subjected by arrestee to photography while nude or while genitals exposed): 0
2. Wilson, Joseph Monroe
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
3. Keller, Richard
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0 Americans
(possessed video, photographer not determined, showing some children playing at a French nudist resort)
4. Thomas, William
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
5. Cousens, Edward F.
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
6. Deneault Gerald
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
(Registered sex offender with previous contact conviction)
7. Silva, Gerald
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
8. Woolery, Philip
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 1
(Video showed 16 year old boy, apparently not a personal contact, masturbating in pool)
9. Hopper, Harry
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
10. Byrd, Gary Jefferson
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
(Had previous legal case that involved taking nude photos of children)
11. Finocchiario, Joseph
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
12. Hitt, Loyd Jeffrey
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
13. Sysock, Nicholas G.
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
14. Mason, John Charles
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
15. Ensley, Josh
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: No counts published, probably not countable
(Videotaped children using washroom; had placed a spycam in an air freshener container)
16. Villemez, William
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
17. Nielsen, Andrew W.
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
18. Baynes, Michael Winston
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 1 (ambiguous)
(Teenaged boy was filmed in the nude but apparently no laws were broken)
19. Engle, David S.
Nr. contact: 2
Nr. photo: 2
(Made many videos of his sexual encounters with one boy. Both contacts still children in 2012 when arrest made.)
20. Studer, Scott
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 74
(Filmed children in shower and locker room at school where he worked.)
21. McClendon, Larry
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
22. Bieler, Ryan C.
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
23. Kasler, Ryan
Nr. contact: 1 (in Romania, not the U.S.)
Nr. photo: 0
24. Katzenmeyer, Kris
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
(Previously registered as a sex offender; nature of offense not disclosed by state)
25. Shaffer, Mark B
Nr. contact: 2
Nr. photo: 0
(contacts: one boy, contacted when 12 years old in 2008, would be 16 in 2012 when arrest made; one girl, contacted when 5 – 9 years old in 1996-2000, 21 in 2012)
26. Johnson, Stanley Keith
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 1
(Boy was photographed nude in 2004 when 8 years old; 16 in 2012)
27. Lanier, Jerry Michael
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
28. Nouwen, Robert L
Nr. contact: 2?
Nr. photo: 0
(82 years old when arrested. Had sexual contact with children over 40 years ago, then apparently became abstinent after asking for counselling. Two contacts were mentioned in press report, but prosecutor statements implied that there were more. All contacts apparently middle-aged or older in 2012, though ages not stated. No charges laid related to those cases but one person mentioned as making court statement.)
29. Jones, Willard I.
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
30. Mobley, James Donald
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
31. Manring, James Douglas
Nr. contact: 7 (all in Japan)
Nr. photo: 10 (all in Japan)
(While working in pre-school in Japan, sexual contact and photography with 5 boys, 2 girls, all around 5 years old, in 1996-1999; also filmed 3 additional children playing naked. Children estimated 17 – 21 years old in 2012.)
32. Robertson, Daryl J
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
(Previously acquitted of sexual assault on a boy)
33. Rosenfeld, Louis
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
34. McMullin, Brad
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
35. Hickey, Stephen
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
36. Czukoski, Troy
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
37. Compton, Charles
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
(Previously registered as a sex offender based on a contact offense)
38. Forrest, Stuart
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
39. Collins, Douglas Randolph
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
40. Beres, Mark
Nr. contact: 3
Nr. photo: 3
(Boys were stated as ages 3, 7 and 13 at time of contact and photography, but no indication found of whether offenses were current or in the past)
41. Hamel, Thomas
Nr. contact: 2?
Nr. photo: 2-4?
(Only known information is that Hamel was arraigned on two counts for ‘child sexually abusive activity’ – legally defined as “a child engaging in a listed act” – and four additional counts of ‘child sexually abusive material, possession.’ Inferred two contacts, but possibly one contact subjected to two acts.)
42. Roman, Jorge A
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
43. Perian, Clifford Eric
Nr. contact: 2-3
Nr. photo: 0
(Had 3-4 teenaged contacts, but the age range given was 16-17; the age of consent in home state Colorado is 17. According to a Justice Dept. press release “There were … allegations that Perian sexually touched and was sexually touched by at least three boys ages 16 to 17 in approximately 2004 through 2006.” All contacts over 20 in 2012 when arrest made.).
44. Guros, Evan
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
45. Shaffer, William
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
(Was accused of contact offense 26 years before Spade arrest, never prosecuted.)
46. Downsbrough, Bruce O.
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
(Had past record of accusation dealt with by police >25 yr earlier; not prosecuted)
47. Hager, Stanton
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
48. Hines, Jeffrey Lynn
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 2-3
(Photographed two children in his home bathroom using a hidden camera; possessed a video, possibly taken by him, featuring a boy “in a vehicle at night engaging in a sex act.” Was previously registered as a sex offender for a contact offense involving a 6-year-old).
49. Russell, Richard Dean
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
50. Burnham, Gerald
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
(Registered sex offender with previous offense involving a 15-year-old).
51. Appel, Charles
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
52. Bennett, Clifton Brett
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
53. Meyer, Walter Thomas
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
54. Mitchell, James Rick
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
55. Loskarn, Jesse Ryan
Nr. contact: 0
Nr. photo: 0
out of 74 arrests mentioned at the Project Spade press conference on Nov. 14. Unaccounted for at compilation date: 19 arrestees.
Total American children ‘rescued’ as children from illegal sexual contact at the time of arrest: 3 definite, possibly as many as 8, but ambiguous news stories prevent clarification.
Total American children and current adults affected as children by contact offenses, recent or historic, newly revealed by Project Spade. 12-14 mentioned; Robert L. Nouwen appears to have confessed to more incidents that occurred over 30 years ago.
Added note by BN: The number of additional American children who were not subjected to contact but who were ‘rescued’ by discovery of secretly held nude photography in which they figured, was 78-79, in addition to an unknown number partially photographed by Josh Ensley in case number 15. It isn’t clear if students who were photographed in the past in schools would be considered ‘rescued’ when the photographic images were discovered years later.
Appendix 2. Detective Paul Krawczyk, Dr. Peter Collins, and Queen Victoria
A comment by ‘Kristofor’ on Bernie Najarian’s article ‘Pedophobe of the Year: Paul Krawczyk, Toronto Police’ Copied from: https://www.boychat.org/messages/1375058.htm
When I read the opinions of Paul Krawczyk, they sound curiously familiar.
In particular, as paraphrased by Brisbane Courier-Mail reporter, Krawczyk said “it was ‘time the courts realised’ the material (videos and photos from Azov Films showing non-sexual child nudity) was causing a cycle of abuse against children.” And then he said, “(Possession of such materials shows) a sexual interest in children. How can that not be dangerous?”
These statements embody two of the primary principles of Victorian-era sexual philosophy that remain with us today.
1. The statement, “the material was causing a cycle of abuse” grows from the following generality: images or writing reflecting socially heterodox sexual ideas straightforwardly cause deviant or promiscuous sex to occur with increased frequency. This was the essence of the argument used to ban the D.H. Lawrence novel, ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover.’
2. The statement, “(that) shows a sexual interest in children. How can that not be dangerous?” grows from a related generality: anyone interested in deviant sex lacks empathy, social cohesion and self-control. This was the argument used to ensure that homosexuals were perennially seen, for over a hundred years, as frivolous, out-of-control, sex-crazed people who were too narcissistic to form meaningful loving relationships.
Typically, Krawczyk mentions psychiatric studies in support of proposition number 1. In fact, the issue of the extent to which pornography causes any kind of behavior is profoundly controversial, and nothing is considered proven. You can find studies supporting every position from ‘positive effect on human relations’ to ‘no effect at all’ to ‘profoundly negative effect on human relations.’ A major problem is that most researchers and funding organizations embark on such studies with unstated biases that then skew the results. Add in the fact that into the 1980s, many publishing psychiatrists (unlike some categories of psychologists) were complete statistical naïfs, and you get a profoundly unsettled area of investigation.
The proposition about deviants lacking social responsiveness is simply superstition. It has no basis whatsoever. It relates to the basic idea in Victorian, white-man’s-empire-building militarism that anyone with social responsiveness would conform to the uniformities (usually called ‘norms’) of society. Anyone with a non-conformity that couldn’t be convincingly explained as a unique contribution to social military power could only be anti-social. The person’s anti-social nature appeared to reflect disdain for society’s ideals of moral control, ergo, he must be intrinsically out-of-control.
In Krawczyk’s Victorianism, the idea that a person who had a deviant sexual interest in children could be completely held in check by empathy – a strong respect for children’s true wishes and optimal situations – is completely ruled out as impossible. Have a deviant interest in children, and you can only be out-of-control and lacking in fellow-feeling, hence dangerous.
Krawczyk’s ideas, however, don’t just sound familiar because they reflect Victorian ideas. They sound very much like the ideas propounded by Dr. Peter I. Collins, psychiatrist, as an expert witness in the crucial ‘Regina vs. Sharpe’ legal case that shaped the Canadian legal attitude towards child pornography. I wrote about Collins a few years ago in an article contrasting his attitude, and the resulting Canadian attitude, to the attitudes that dominated in the U.S. and the U.K. To simplify, the Canadian attitudes were pure Victorianism; the U.S. firmly rejected Victorianism presumptions and demanded evidence of harm done to children; and the U.K. went in the direction of new age shamanism, conjuring up child spirits that were injured even in imaginative cartoons.
It turns out, if you do a little web investigation linking the names, you find that Paul Krawczyk, back when he was a greenhorn in 2006, was trained by Peter Collins.
The linked reference cites a Toronto Globe and Mail article from Nov. 2006.
The unique stresses faced by officers who work on child-pornography cases prompted the Ontario Provincial Police a few years ago to introduce a screening and support program called Safeguard. It was designed by Dr. Peter Collins, a forensic psychiatrist for the OPP and associate professor at the University of Toronto.
"Really it's just a spinoff of trying to protect undercover officers generally," Dr. Collins said yesterday, after a brief stop in Toronto to see how Det. Constable Krawczyk was doing. "You're having them sit down with professionals to essentially debrief them and make sure they're okay."
Just to give you the context of what this all means, here’s what I said about Collins and the Canadian attitudes he influenced in my article “Ethel Quayle's new Spirit of Child Pornography: as a menace to free speech in areas unrelated to porn.”
There have been two long-standing objections to child pornography. One is the view that children should not be put in a sexual situation that is recorded for later viewing by other people. The other is that viewing such recordings might incite people to take sexual advantage of children.
… The second objection (to child pornography), the ‘opening the floodgates’ (OTF) argument, appears at first to be much simpler to uphold (than the prevailing U.S. attitude, that child pornography is bad when its production or distribution harms children, directly or indirectly). It proposes that viewing child pornography loosens up the viewer’s mind, making him imagine that the scenes he sees in the depictions are possible for him to view in the flesh or even to touch and get involved in. It also proposes that the circulation of such material infects additional people with the same loosening-up of inhibitions and prohibitions. This objection has the minor problem that it is clearly involved with thought control, directly trying to regulate what people have in their minds. In practice, however, western societies have never been afraid to erect some barriers against “thoughtcrime,” as author George Orwell called it in his novel ‘1984.’ Traditional penalties against crimes like adultery and sodomy were often exaggeratedly severe in order to frighten others away from the same orgasmically reinforced behaviours. Blanket prohibitions against publishing on sexual topics – all those bans on D.H. Lawrence’s explicit novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover – also exerted thought control against sexual no-no’s.
The main problem with OTF is that it refers to causality. It requires that you believe that images will mechanically cause people to change their thought patterns and to perform acts that they wouldn’t perform otherwise. Free will, the fundamental assumption of the justice system, must be seen to be compromised by sexual imagery. Or more simply, you have to think that many people will take a monkey-see, monkey-do approach to depictions. This may sound like common sense, since we all take in information that influences what we do, and the entire advertising industry is dedicated to motivating us with images. And yet, there are deep problems involved in assuming images will have predictable effects. We have a relationship with advertising that we don’t have with all other sorts of visuals and stories. We all know, for example, that most people can watch violent dramas on stage or on television and yet not be mechanically caused to go maim or kill people. Horror films don’t function as advertising. Indeed, watching second-hand, controlled violence – for example, in American or Australian football games – is thought to be one of our main ways of shouting aggressive urges out of our system. This is called ‘catharsis,’ when merely watching something works out the energy that might otherwise go into problematical actions. Images may cause the exact opposite of what they show.
The catharsis argument has long been applied to pornography of all kinds. Using porn has been proposed as a way of quenching urges for extramarital sex, problematic fetish behavior (think of the poor fellow a few years ago who was arrested while standing in the underside of a women’s campground outhouse, watching all the women do their thing up above – he must have had very poor internet skills) and sex with underage partners. Social-scientific studies attempting to find out whether pornography causes what it shows or defuses it are a notoriously mixed bag, some claiming an effect and some claiming no effect. Such studies are also plagued by scientific problems – biased assumptions and skewed samples. Studies on pedophiles, for example, have mostly been done on people who have been arrested or otherwise caught. The groups studied probably had exaggerated proportions of people with low intelligence (examples removed in deference to BoyChat house rules), and people whose risk-taking behavior stemmed from serious depression or other existing mental health problems. These highly arrestable subgroups are also the most likely groups to take a monkey-see-monkey-do approach to images: the very-low-intelligence person might see new ideas he truly had never thought of, and then have no idea why they shouldn’t be acted on; the sociopath might reason that if someone else was actually getting something that was only a fantasy for him, he was darn well going to get some live action too; and the depressed person might think, ‘what have I got to lose if I do that too?’ On the other hand, the numbers of people who use erotica to subdue their socially inconvenient sexual urges are likely to be far larger than the numbers in these risk-prone special groups.
Logically, in order to believe that child pornography causes sex with children or further child porn production, you have to also believe the parallel causality stories. You cannot escape the analogy that adult hetero pornography must cause the degradation of woman and relationships, and that violent depictions must cause violence. ‘Sensual images propagate the morally loose things they show’ has to be a general conclusion – it can’t be specific to one arbitrary topic or another. In fact, the OTF campaign against child pornography on the internet is the outgrowth of a (so far) spectacularly unsuccessful campaign to eliminate adult heterosexual pornography on the grounds that it causes women to be conceived of and treated as objects. I strongly suspect that everyone who believes in OTF causality for child pornography also believes in ‘objectification’ causality in adult hetero porn. In working against child porn, these believers have simply chosen a field where the counter-arguments that trip them up are socially difficult to present. Their arguments can’t win on the adult battlefield, but the same propositions can win on the child front.
The front runner in the OTF camp in recent times has been the Supreme Court of Canada. In its key judgment R. vs. Sharpe, it bought heavily into the idea that child pornography causes unrealistic deformations to occur in the minds of those who view it. This idea was introduced to it by expert witness Dr. Peter Collins, who was then working for the Ontario Provincial Police. The court, in its judgment, accepted the following (among other, similar propositions that I won’t discuss in detail:
Dr. Collins testified at trial to the first type of harm identified by the Crown, namely that the possession of child pornography contributes to the cognitive distortions of paedophiles. He testified that it is generally accepted amongst the vast majority of forensic psychiatrists that possession of child pornography reinforces some paedophiles’ cognitive distortions. He described these “offence-facilitating beliefs” as the rationalizations and justifications that paedophiles have for their deviant behaviour. Cognitive distortions contribute to the paedophile’s belief that sexual activity with children is acceptable, and that children enjoy sex with adults. Dr. Collins concluded that child pornography, cognitive distortions and the validation of the belief that sexual activity with children is acceptable are inextricably linked.
Firstly, Collins says, the moral fundamental that ‘sex with children is unacceptable’ is literally warped out of shape within the brain by ideas arising from exposure to child pornography. Secondly, porn introduces the unthinkably unrealistic idea that ‘children enjoy sex with adults’ as a new fun-house mirror deep in the pedophile’s mind.
Collin’s first proposition is basic Victorianism: seeing any depiction of forbidden sex unforbids it. Child porn makes sex with children seem do-able. Depicting adultery makes adultery happen. Writing about promiscuity produces orgies. Allowing sale of Lady Chatterley’s Lover weakens the family. Cognitive distortions consist of permissions to accept the unacceptable, and these permissions are caused by viewing a representation of the unacceptable. Freedom of speech thus must be limited so that it doesn’t allow any representation of forbidden sex. Thought must be limited to what is legally allowed in real life – but only in the case of sex. Sex has more corrupting juju than violence or any other topic that can be shown in books, photos and movies. There are no legally problematical cognitive distortions built up by watching a grisly revenge murder on TV, but such distortions are built up by seeing realistic or cartoon imagery showing sexuality in a child.
The second proposition – that children do not enjoy sex with adults – is what philosophers, technically, would call an ‘empirical’ question. It is a real-world item that could be tested by an experiment: you could allow 500 children to decide privately if they wanted to have sex with any of 500 attractive adults, count how many (if any) decided to do so, and then interview them at later time intervals about whether or not they enjoyed it. Human behavior is a part of biology, and answers to biological questions (except where physical or chemical limits are involved) are usually statistical. It would be statistically safe to predict that some proportion of the children would enjoy sex with adults – perhaps some of the 14 year old heterosexual boys who admired the 21 year old supermodels in the adult test group. Think of the classic Summer of 42, one of the most successful movies in history. Its author, Herman Raucher, did indeed fall in love with and have sex with a 30-something woman when he was a child of 14. Evidently he enjoyed the experience very much; he spent years looking for his Dorothy and wrote a movie and a book about his profound experience of love with her.
Nonetheless, such a ‘how many kids like Raucher are there?’ experiment cannot ethically or legally be run. Its outcome can only be imagined. Collins therefore proposes the bizarre cognitive short-cut of stating that imagining one experimental outcome, non-enjoyment, is cognitively well formed, while imagining the other, enjoyment, is cognitively distorted. Indeed, extending Collin’s pseudo-logic, reading Raucher’s autobiographical story, which graphically shows a child enjoying sex with an adult, provides permanent brain corruption.
And Collins is supposed to be a scientist.
Perhaps Collins should eventually be nominated as ‘Pedophobe of the Decade’ as he inculcates ever more people like Krawczyk in biased beliefs based on a biased selection of biased studies. Working blokes like Krawczyk tend to be far too deferential to people with big fuzzy diplomas.
Follow ups:
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Spading Up Hate: Joanna Beaven-Desjardins’ Big Lie
Posted by Bernie Najarian on 2013-December-13 18:11:53, Friday
Spading Up Hate: Joanna Beaven-Desjardins’ Big Lie
By Bernie Najarian
With contributions from Kamil S. Bey, Kristofor and Artémie Khazdjian
A hush fell across the room on Nov. 14, 2013, as the Metropolitan Toronto Police, flanked by partners from multiple international police forces, stood at the podium in the Toronto, Canada Police Headquarters Media Gallery, poised to make a major announcement.
The momentary hush was the final instalment of a much longer hush that had been going on since May, 2011. Now, the silence was about to be shattered in a big way, as an outstanding triumph of cooperative policing was announced. A major child porn distributor based in Toronto, Azov Films, had been dismantled, along with the vast worldwide ring of pedophiles it had served. The long-lasting police operation involved, called Operation Spade or Project Spade, was finally having its day in the sun.
Across town, much bigger crowds of reporters were frantically trying to buttonhole Toronto mayor Rob Ford, a ruddy human football who had just confessed to smoking crack cocaine. The Toronto Star newspaper had been needling for over a year at the mayor and his Somali drug pirate friends, and had finally succeeded in popping their silence. On one side of town, journalists fought against a hush; on the other, they came to collect the spoils of colluding in one.
The Toronto Star, in the Azov Films case, was especially deeply implicated in the hush. In exchange for years of silence, Toronto police had given the paper special access to their ongoing Azov investigations. Star reporters had even used the international police connections and surreptitiously travelled to Romania, where they had interviewed the families of boys who had wrestled in the nude in ‘naturist’ films produced by filmmaker Markus Roth. These films had been sold to the public by the Azov distribution center in Canada. The Star’s information was withheld from publication until the big police press event was ready to be staged.
The Toronto police were collaborating in the investigation with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), a special police force for crimes involving the U.S. mails, and with national forces in Australia, Spain, South Africa, New Zealand, Israel, Ukraine, Romania, Germany and Mexico, among others. The Azov investigations were a deep secret in all these countries except the Ukraine. As individual customers of Azov were arrested, affidavits and press releases in the US only reported that the men had received materials from “a foreign company” or “a Toronto company.”
On the internet, communities of minor-attracted people who were aware of Azov Films – long in the open and purported to be a perfectly legal purveyor of naturist cinema – cracked the story early, in Aug., 2011, based on Russian-language news reports on the Crimean Peninsula of the Ukraine. They attempted to get the ongoing mega-bust into the news elsewhere. After Sept., 2012, when the keynote arrest of pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Richard Keller was individually publicized in Boston, special web pages were set up listing the arrested men and the accusations laid against them. Fresh news reports of people being arrested for ‘child pornography’ were sifted for clues that disclosed the hidden Azov link, such as an allusion to videos ‘received from a foreign company.’ A clear pattern could soon be seen despite the police obfuscation.
Internetters wrote to reporters to show them that the individual arrest stories were linked to a much bigger picture, and to clarify that the materials in question had long been considered naturist and legal rather than pornographic. Surely it was of interest that child pornography prosecutions were going forward based on material that had been repeatedly lawyered as legal. Men were being arrested left and right who had had no legal mens rea – that is, no intention to break the law. Nonetheless, nearly all journalists worldwide boycotted these efforts and maintained the overall hush. Police clearly had warned them off the story, perhaps with the conventional line that investigations were ongoing and suspects shouldn’t be tipped off. The suspects in this case, though, had all been completely above board in their dealings with Azov, and had used their credit cards and personal email addresses. There was no chance of anyone evading identification as a purchaser. It didn’t matter. The only exception outside the Ukraine to the total press blackout was one reporter, Matthew Crane, writing for an Indiana paper called the Dubois County Free Press. He disclosed everything to local readers. It appeared that this aptly named paper was, perhaps, the only truly free press left in North America. Journalists today, one suspects, are so dependent on police forces for their daily feed of drama that they will normally suppress a major story indefinitely as long as the police wish them to do so. And when they do release the story, they will generally spin it as the police want them to spin it.
When press blowout day finally came for the Azov affair, how the police did spin that story. They twirled it in style. The Azov press party was like the Academy Awards. The stage in the Toronto Police ‘media gallery’ featured a ceremonial line of officers and online activists, all dressed in their best uniforms or suits. Inspector-in-Charge Jerry O’Farrell was there from USPIS headquarters in Washington, DC, along with his lead investigator Brian Bone. Police were present from every regional unit in Canada that had participated in Spade, and they were joined by colleagues from Australia, Spain and Mexico. It was a gala occasion, lacking only streamers and disco balls. The amount of public money spent on airfare, accommodation, meals, and maybe champagne for all the international glory-sharers must have been prodigious.
“As you look behind me, you’ll see an incredible array of different uniforms and police agencies represented,” crowed Toronto police chief Bill Blair, introducing the press conference. But, then again, why not throw an event? The story the police had to tell was as dramatic as any seen in a Hollywood crime blockbuster.
The reality of Azov Films was not as dramatic as the show that was about to take place. The company, according to online statements still visible in web archives, had consulted with lawyers throughout its existence, and had plausibly represented itself as supplying naturist videos and photographs that were legal in most Western countries. Toronto Police, during question period at the press conference, disclosed that they had investigated Azov in 2005, and, as lead Project Spade investigator Inspector Joanna Beaven-Desjardins (surnamed just Beaven by Bill Blair) stated, “no charges were deemed to be appropriate at that time.”
American law, similarly, had a strong track record of judgments indicating that ‘nudity only,’ without sexual content or marked genital focus, was ‘protected content’ under the constitutional right to free speech. Producers of the Azov videos therefore rigorously controlled their content to be non-sexual in nature. The videos consistently featured boys mostly from age 8 to 15, and featured them in the buff, so a sexual interest on the part of at least some viewers could reasonably be inferred. The subjects of the films, however, came from countries where naturism or at least skinny-dipping and nude communal saunas were well established as acceptable. They were encouraged to act naturally and were not put into sexual situations, deliberately or accidentally. The Azov website said “We do not sell nor condone the sale of child pornography. Our naturist/nudist films are of authentic naturism and are not obscene, lewd, sexually oriented, lascivious, or pornographic. They are not illegal to own, sell or distribute. Our naturist films are suitable for viewing by all family members.” In films from the Ukraine, the subjects played sports, swam, lay on the beach, took showers, and basked in the Russian sauna (Detailed descriptions of the scenes shown in the movies are found in over 30 affidavits released to the public in the USA as individuals were arrested. Many of these affidavits are linked in Will Robinson’s Azov Films wiki page). In Romania, the boys played out the same sorts of nude wrestling scenes as are shown on thousands of ancient Greek pots and potsherds from nearby regions.
Prosecution was only possible in the U.S. because of a legal innovation introduced by USPIS strategists: any scene in the naturist sports where the nudity shown revealed the front of the body was cited as ‘displaying the genitals’ and was therefore recast as ‘lascivious’ on that basis. This allowed invocation of the previously determined ‘Dost criteria’ suggested for use in the US to distinguish erotic from banal nudity in material involving children. Similarly, scenes showing any bending of the reverse side of the body were accused of ‘exposing the anus,’ even though Azov’s editing had prevented any actual sight of the subjects’ anuses, and had excluded gestures that would appear to be provocative.
The spin placed on this material in the police gala gave out a much different picture than that seen by careful readers of affidavits. The verbal twisting was subtle at first, as such efforts generally are. Ultimately, though, the police managed to spin the straw of ‘possibly over-appreciated naturism’ into the investigational gold of ‘frank child pornography.’ They began their spinning by mentioning truly explicit child pornography, not connected with Azov Films, that they had found at the home of Azov owner Brian Way. Beaven cited “hundreds of thousands of images and videos detailing hundreds of thousands of horrific sexual acts against very young children.” She then spoke of seizing 45 terabytes of data at Azov’s warehouse, an amount, she pointed out, that if printed on paper, would yield a pillar higher than 1500 CN Towers stacked one above the other (The CN Tower is a 1960’s ‘space needle’ type construction in Toronto, 1,815 ft. or 553 meters high). A quick calculation shows that that would take the digitized porn to the edge of the Earth’s exosphere, raising the possibility of putting together a bridge of pornographic zeroes and ones extending to the moon after a few more investigations. The contents of any typical DVD warehouse, however, would stretch much higher than Azov’s space tower in the same calculation system.
After that bit of theater, in descriptions of Azov Films, Beaven said simply, “investigators believed many of these images were consistent with the Canadian criminal code definition of child pornography.” This was plausible, in that Canadian law (Criminal Code section 163.1) allows a judge or jury to decide subjectively whether nude images that were not intrinsically sexual when made, were, nonetheless, recorded “for a sexual purpose.” What Beaven didn’t mention was that a track record of American legal cases had specifically rejected this sort of subjectivity, leaving naturist images squarely on the right side of U.S. law.
In response to Beaven’s opening salvo, reporters asked some probing questions.
.
“Was it sort of borderline?” asked a woman who had clearly done some homework. “Do you think that some of the people who were getting these images didn’t consider them to be child sexual abuse images?”
Beaven responded with a brazen fudge line: “They were clearly child pornography – clearly children being sexually abused and/or exploited.” This answer could be defended as reciting a broad definition of child pornography, but to most people, it would very strongly imply that sexual contact was being made. Nothing of the sort occurred in any of the films, including those repeatedly treated as the most incriminating in U.S. affidavits.
The reporter continued, “So people who were buying these movies knew exactly what they were doing.”
“Yes, correct,” Beaven replied.
In fact, a reading of the individual affidavits on Azov customers discloses that many stated that they believed their purchases were legal, similar to other naturist offerings available on Amazon websites and elsewhere. Their suppositions have been supported by one U.S. court. In Valencia, California, a typical Azov-related child pornography possession charge against teacher Douglas R. Collins was reduced to a misdemeanor. A spokesperson for the local District Attorney’s office said, “A thorough review of the evidence revealed that the material in the defendant’s possession did not meet the legal definition of child pornography. The content did not depict minors engaging in sexual activity. Rather, the videos were of nudist/naturist activities.”
In the Toronto press conference, such views were not to be heard.
As the press question period continued, the online video of the conference, filmed with a static camera pointed at the stage, recorded a male voice tentatively identified by confidential sources as that of the Toronto Globe and Mail’s Tu Thanh Ha. He asked, “I’m sorry, could you clarify (your assertion that the videos were pornographic), because the company promoted itself as selling what it called naturist movies, yet you say that some of the movies depict explicit sexual acts?”
“Yes – I didn’t say that,” Beaven replied, cautiously contradicting herself. “I think you may have got that from somewhere else. However, the pictures and videos we have been investigating are definitely child pornography as defined under the criminal code, meaning that it’s children being sexually exploited, pictures being taken for a sexual purpose.”
“Which does not mean necessarily a sexual act,” the man rejoined.
“No,” Beaven replied, “not always a sexual act for a sexual purpose.”
This may seem, so far, to lack pizzazz as a pornographic horror story, but the missing element of drama was supplied by Jerry O’Farrell of USPIS.
“The child victims identified in this operation numbered over 300,” O’Farrell said when he took the stage. “These 300 children have had their lives altered forever.”
The impression this left on the minds of the public, as news stories quoted it, can be illustrated with the comments posted on the CNN wire story that appeared in Kentucky’s ky3 news service on Nov. 14.
Terrence Lee • Top Commenter
Whenever a dog attacks and harms a child it is destroyed. Should the same thing happen to all of these 350 people (she means the 348 arrested worldwide)?
Gloria Hughes • Chief Examiner at CIC
Pedophilia is a disease that is cured with bullets.
Peggy Fischer • Marshall Senior High
If they knew something was going on in 2005 then WHY did it take that long to get help for the children?? (O’Farrell’s story backfired to some extent, making police look incompetent - BN)
Carol Goldsberry-Albrecht
That was what I was thinking. How many innocent lives could have been saved if they didn't wait so long?
Bea Hall • Texas County Technical College
So where are these children now? Were any of them children that had been kidnapped?
Karen Erkiletian • Works at Mercy Clinic Rolla
God bless those who helped save those children. I pray all the children receive counseling and hopefully are reunited with loved ones who will help them recover from their horrible experience. I hope all those sick people who were involved in this, rot in prison for the rest of their miserable lifes (sic).
Emily Anonmaly (pseudonym for Anonymous supporter Emily Ann Croushore - BN) Northern Arizona University
You do realize though these children will likely be turned over to foster homes where there is great probability they will be sexually victimized again. 70% of children in child protective services across the nation have been raped and/or sexually assaulted. Sick world we live and it's time we brought back the death penalty for rape.
Karen Erkiletian • Works at Mercy Clinic Rolla
I agree with you Emily. It is a sick sad world and scares me what it will be like the older my grandchildren get and they begin to have children of their own too. I believe the death penalty would be appropriate for rape, esp of children. Sometimes I think we need to go back to biblical ways. Hope you and yours are doing well!
O’Farrell’s numbers incited the public to homicidal outrage, creating visions of hundreds of kidnapped children being tearfully reunited with their parents after being raped by Azov customers. The numbers of victims and the time involved in the investigation also made the police look like slackers who’d let kids be diddled for five years while they did their paperwork, but that bit of counterspin could easily be overlooked.
We now know, thanks to the documentary efforts of pseudonymous internetters ‘Will Robinson,’ ‘Affan’ ‘Kristofor’ and ‘TJ,’ that this figure of 300 ‘victims’ in the USA (the official number was “more than 330” as of Nov. 14, 2013, according to the Toronto Star) is, at best, mysterious. It is perhaps imaginatively calculated or even, for the most part, fabricated. Of the 76 men arrested for their Azov purchases in the US, all but 22 have had their offences detailed in the press. Also, prosecutors’ affidavits are available for the majority. The number of children involved in contact sexual offences with these men, excluding a small number of cases prosecuted and fully dealt with in the past, was 13 to 15 in the US and eight outside the country. Only eight of the 54 known arrestees were involved in those offences. In addition, another eight arrestees had historic charges that had been legally dealt with, including one acquittal and two cases of dropped or unfiled charges. Four of these eight were registered sex offenders. No person charged or investigated in the past for contact offences was involved in any new offences of that nature. Of the 13 to 15 current, US-based ‘victims’ (some of whom would have been considered legally consenting in the nearly half of US states with an age of consent at 16), a high proportion were involved in previously undisclosed cases from the distant past, and were well into adulthood at the time of the Azov investigation. Based on all available details, the actual number of Americans who were children in 2011 and who were rescued from contact offences as a result of Project Spade is fewer than 10. No number is insignificant, but to give out the figure of 10 rescued children doesn’t have quite the same impact as stating there were 330.
Perhaps, though, since children were being rescued from ‘exploitation’ in general, photography was involved rather than contact offences.
O’Farrell certainly seemed to imply this. Apparently continuing to talk about the 300 rescued children, he said, “The images of them become a permanent record of the sexual abuse of a child. In this operation, the victims were all pre-pubescent (mispronounced), some as young as 5 years of age. Once child pornography images are posted on the internet, they can continue to circulate forever.”
He ended off with the catechism of contemporary police voodoo about child spirits living in images: “The child is re-victimized as the images are viewed again and again.”
These comments by O’Farrell only deepened the mystery. None of the 54 documented Azov cases in the US involved a man who made pornographic images of children he was in contact with, and then posted them on the internet. Nor were any such images of personally known children sent out through direct internet communication or any other medium, including the mails. There were some flagrant cases of privately held videos. Most notably, gym teacher Scott Studer, over an eight-year period, filmed a total of 76 high school students taking showers. Elementary school janitor Josh Ensley installed hidden cameras that videotaped childrens’ genitals in the washrooms of a school where he worked. Jeffrey Hines videotaped two children in his home washroom. James Manring, perhaps the man O’Farrell was alluding to with his statement that children as young as five were filmed, recorded his sexual encounters with seven preschoolers in the mid-1990’s in Japan, Later, according to statements made to police, he resolved never to touch children sexually again, and held to his resolution until the time he was arrested. Police officer Philip Woolery somehow managed to film a 16-year-old boy masturbating in a swimming pool, without having any other documented interaction with the youth. The boy was not cited as a victim in press reports about Woolery’s trial, and we presume that he was spared the trauma of being identified and notified that his youthful indiscretions had been recorded. And then there was David Engle.
O’Farrell described him as “an attorney and youth baseball coach in the state of Washington who pled guilty to producing over 500 videos of children, all under the age of 16, who he sexually molested.”
That sounds like a lot of children. What O’Farrell omitted is that around 495 of those videos involved the same teenaged child. A single additional child was involved in the remainder. Serious legal offences, then, but not greatly adding to the mystery number of 300 victims. The two boys are included in the general contact offence count of 13 to 15, given above.
The total number of American victims of the arrested men’s intrusive, illegal photography numbered 76 + an unknown number (Ensley) + 2 + 2 = 80 + Ensley’s number. Ensley is unlikely to have filmed 220 sets of genitals. There are at least 200 American victims of sexual exploitation in O’Farrell’s press conference story who remain unaccounted for, plus another 30 added on in the Toronto Star’s official count. Were they victims of the unknown 22 offenders? This seems very unlikely. O’Farrell gave a list of the most serious and dramatic cases he had seen, and although the names of suspects were not spoken, the details clearly matched those of Engle, Ensley, Manring and Woolery. It is highly unlikely that any of the 22 arrested, unpublicized men could account for a substantial fraction of the missing hundreds of rescued children, and yet still not be mentioned among the serious cases.
Lead USPIS investigator Brian Bone told the Toronto Star in separate interviews that, as reporter Julian Sher put it, “At (age) 31, he has seen often graphic abuse and pain, yet the level of suffering among child victims he uncovered in Project Spade never fails to unnerve him.” That may be so, but was the unnerving pain seen strictly among the 13 to 15 contact victims, or was there soul-shearing agony evident among the estimated 100 who were surreptitiously filmed for unethical home viewing? Without wishing to invade anyone’s privacy, we must ask if it would not be illuminating to clarify what criteria USPIS was using to define a child rescued from exploitation.
The answers Beaven gave during the question period shed very little light on what was going on.
“Can you elaborate on the children rescued?” asked a reporter. “Are we talking about children being taken out of homes, or film studios? What does that mean that they were rescued?”
After clarifying that the ‘rescued’ count only applied to children the Azov customers knew, not to the children filmed in the Azov productions, Beaven answered, “They were removed from the situation of the sexual abuse.” In response to a later question, she said, “It’s a first for the magnitude, one, of the victims saved. That, to us, is the paramount result that we want – that’s a first for us.”
Canada, according to the Toronto Star, only claimed 24 “victims saved” after 108 men had been arrested, numbers that were in line with those given by other countries such as Australia. There was nothing else, anywhere in the world, comparable to the massive number of ‘rescues’ claimed in the US.
Seeking further clarity, a reporter asked, “And you did mention there were a few cases where the people who have been arrested or who were involved knew the victims? Are there – was that also a majority of it, or were there a lot of people who did not know the victims who were being exploited?”
In terms of documented US cases, you already know that eight arrestees out of 54 had had undisclosed sexual contact with children they knew. Beaven’s answer?
“I can’t say that it was the majority, but it was an investigation that surprised our officers on how many hands-on, meaning how many actual people that were arrested actually also sexually abused.”
In the case of Azov arrestee William Shaffer from Michigan, Wylie Christopher, the USPIS inspector involved, told wxyz.com that, “Statistics show that 1 in 3 people that view child pornography have molested a child.” That’s 33%. Among the publicized US Azov cases, even if the non-backsliding historical offenders are included, the number is only 16/54. That’s 29%. If the previously unprosecuted offenders are singled out, the ratio is 15%, or about 1 in 6, half the usual rate. How do we reconcile those numbers with the statement that “it was an investigation that surprised our officers on how many hands-on” cases there were? Beaven couldn’t be citing Canadian cases, since with only 24 child rescues among 108 Azov arrestees, even if each rescued child was being abused by a separate arrestee, that would only involve 22% of the men, or less than 1 in 4.
What are we missing here, Inspector Beaven?
With consummate showmanship, Beaven saved the best until last.
‘This is just the beginning of these types of investigations of this magnitude,’ she said near the end of the question period. In response to a related question about how the investigations were being adapted to changing times, she added, “Now we’ve gone underground with the internet, and all these people with the same sexual desires – predators (conspicuous gesture of exasperation on the video) – they can get together, basically unknown, in a covert way.”
The last sentence contained the ploy that surprised me the most. Beaven clearly referred to all persons attracted to minors, “people with the same sexual desires,” as “predators.” Let’s have a look at a couple of these ‘predators’ from the Azov arrests. North Bay, Ontario’s Edward Rutherford, 55 when arrested, owned a variety store that had sponsored community hockey teams for years, including one involving children. He had never touched a child sexually (Like many arrestees, he endured considerable publicity when arrested, and we can expect that at least some persons with historical complaints would have come forward.) He had also never downloaded or viewed conventional child pornography. He had an adult son. According to his lawyer, he had become intrigued by what seemed to be an unusually attractive ‘nudist’ website. Predator? Only if looking upon willing, naked frolic is equivalent to lethal carnivory. How about Joseph Wilson, 43, well loved teacher from Villa Rica, Georgia? Wilson was a hobby sculptor who was in the process of sculpting a boy au naturel, but was too discreet to use live models, so he ordered some Azov material instead. He had no track record of contact or photographic offenses. Is this what a ‘predator’ looks like today, or is Joanna Beaven literally ‘crying wolf?’ In fact, 24 of the 54 publicized Azov arrestees in the U.S. had spotless legal records, other than their Azov purchases, even when their belongings and personal histories were microscopically ransacked by police investigators. Several others had nothing more incriminating than a few extra photos that may or may not have met the legal definition of pornography.
The extent to which Toronto police are on a crusade against all the minor-attracted is revealed by an article that appeared in the Brisbane, Australia, Courier Mail. Detective Paul Krawczyk from the Toronto Sex Crimes Unit, described as a key officer on Project Spade, publicly lambasted the Queensland, Australia, justice system for only levying an Azov customer a $1000 fine, with no criminal conviction.
"If you think of the children who are being exploited in these (instances) and in some cases abused, to me it's unacceptable to have a $1000 fine,'' Det Krawczyk told reporters. (None of the children filmed in Azov productions was alleged by Romanian or Ukrainian police to have been sexually abused - BN)
The same article continues, “Police say the demand for child abuse material leads to further abuse of children. People found with the material are also frequently found to have abused children.
“Det Krawczyk said it was "time the courts realised'' the material was causing a cycle of abuse against children.
"‘It's completely disgusting,’'' he said of the Boonah (Queensland) sentence.
"’We were pretty similar to those type(s) of releases back in 2005 and earlier. It used to frustrate me … You only possess this material if there is a sexual interest.’''
Clearly, Krawczyk wants to jail everyone who has this sexual interest – every “predator” in the sense of Beaven – if only for the Canadian minimum of 14 days. That way, there’d be a record of who to watch and who restrict forever afterward. As he says, the impetus to do this has arisen since 2005.
Let’s look, then, at what may have changed between the time Azov Films passed a police inspection in 2005, and the time it became portrayed as an international ring of disgusting child-abusing pedophiles in 2011. Beaven was asked at the press conference,” have the types of movies and videos changed over those 5 years?”
Her typically sinuous answer was, “I would say, allegedly, yes, they have.”
What had actually changed at Azov during the five years? The impression given by Toronto Star stories is that the main change in Azov’s business was the increasing popularity of Markus Roth’s nude wrestling videos from Romania. Given that the clothing worn in wrestling is always scant, and that no hint of sexual engagement ever appeared in U.S. federal affidavits describing Roth’s films (despite, no doubt, minute scrutiny by police looking for erections), Azov’s shift in a pornographic direction was, at worst, marginal.
In the same period of time, however, public moral outrage over sexual abuse grew steadily. Canadian and international police, who had been raiding true pornographic exchange networks in 2009 (Operation Icarus) and 2010 (Project Sanctuary), switched in a big way to trawling legal networks for true offenders who might randomly be exposed. Their keystone venture into this new investigational strategy was Operation Rescue, the raid on the 70,000-member, scrupulously legal website boylover.net. And indeed, a small proportion of members of that site, including several administrators, were exposed as either contact offenders or illicit image collectors, even though none of the communications about those activities ran through the website itself. A small proportion of 70,000 people still amounts to a fair number of people, and 184 arrests were announced at the Operation Rescue press gala in March, 2011. The idea of filtering the legal masses via mass raids in order to snag the few illegal fellow-travelers was a smash success. All that was needed to generate further trawling success stories was a sufficient pretext to have search warrants approved against more networks of ostensibly legally acting minor-attracted people. I would argue that Azov Films became redefined as definitively pornographic at the moment when Toronto police realized that launching a pedo-hunting safari did not require that a plurality of the men investigated truly be disposed to break the law. That ‘aha’ moment arrived with a bang in March 2011. Azov Films was raided in May of the same year.
Currently, Krawczyk, Beaven and colleagues are engaged, in essence, in a fervent campaign to pin yellow stars onto all of the world’s new Juden, the minor-attracted. No pre-existing concept of legal photographic content will stand in their way, if they can circumvent it. They know that if enough harmless men can be mortified, some authentic offenders will also be turned up. Every child rescued from the minority of true offenders can be theoretically multiplied by 30 for impact, and turned into a huge ‘children rescued’ number that no one can scrutinize in any way. When the pedophiles are all tagged, and barred from parks, churches, schools, theaters and libraries, then the world will be a safer place.
Any approach more lax than that, as Krawczyk said, is ‘completely disgusting.’
Beaven, one of the great architects of this final solution, deserves the last word. Let’s repeat the one straightforwardly meaningful quote she uttered during the glittery Toronto showcase, and contemplate it in all its verbally convoluted glory:
“This is just the beginning of these types of investigations of this magnitude.”