Gov. Tom Corbett has been on notice about Pennsylvania's unreported child predator suspects since at least 2009, when the National Association to Protect Children and Pennsylvania child abduction survivor Alicia Kozakiewicz briefed him on it and asked him to take action.
As the state's top cop, Attorney General Linda Kelly has known at least since she entered office earlier this year.
If you're a member of the Penn State community and feeling like the national poster child for tolerance of child rape, I hope you have a big problem with this.
Here's what Corbett and Kelly know, and how:
For centuries, criminals who preyed on children hid in the shadows. The only way anyone knew a child was being abused (unless he happened to walk in on the crime as Mike McQueary allegedly did) was when the victim came forward with a cry for help. Sadly, such disclosures are rare, and typically come long after the abuse has started.
But today, for the first time in history, adults with a sexual interest in children are hiding in plain sight. Their identities and locations can be readily pinpointed by a distinct marker: the presence of illegal child abuse images, or child pornography. This can be done by police online.
Not all individuals who possess these illegal images are hands-on offenders who have raped children. Research indicates that number could be anywhere from 40 to 80 percent of all possessors. (Digital forensics may prove Jerry Sandusky was one of these “dual offenders.”)
But all are criminals, whose crimes turn children into sexual commodities and contribute to a flourishing black market, supplied by the rape, abuse and torture of children.
Make no mistake, the material being called “child pornography” today has nothing to do with snapshots of babies in the bathtub. These are brutal crime scene recordings of children— many very young—being raped and hurt.
Which brings us back to what Corbett and Kelly know. Each day across America, law enforcement investigators log online using a national system called RoundUp. They locate thousands of criminals trafficking in child abuse images online. These suspects are geo-located, evidence is collected on their activities and they are logged into a central law enforcement database.
That database is hosted on servers at the Pennsylvania State Police.
The RoundUp database contains evidence on as many as 20,000 suspects in Pennsylvania alone. The vast majority are never investigated or referred to local law enforcement agencies.
So if Pennsylvania really cares about arresting predatory criminals who target children, it's easy to stop them. They're sitting in the RoundUp database.
State Reps. Dan Deasy, Mike Sturla and Dan Frankel plan to introduce a bill to make Attorney General Kelly a mandated reporter of these crimes, and their campaign is gathering momentum. Attorney general candidate Patrick Murphy said he would welcome this mandated reporter status.
Now, apologists for Corbett and Kelly will want you to believe this is all a far cry from covering up abuse at Penn State. Yes, child pornography is terrible, they'll say privately, but failing to report rape of a child and failing to round up every pervert in the Keystone state are two different things.
But even if Corbett and Kelly don't want to pay what it costs to stop the sexual exploitation of children in Pennsylvania, that's not the only crime they're covering up. The truly explosive secret of RoundUp is that it contains vast volumes of evidence about which suspects are the hands-on offenders, actively raping children.
There are so many of those suspects that it is entirely safe to predict that every night in Pennsylvania, a child will be raped by a predator who was on Attorney General Linda Kelly's radar screen.
That might not make the pages of Sports Illustrated, but it should enrage Pennsylvanians to action.
Grier Weeks is executive director of the National Association to Protect Children (www.protect.org) in Knoxville, Tenn.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://www.centredaily.com/2011/12/11/3016401/abuse-images-database-bigger-scandal.html
.
