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(2 votes, average: 3 out of 5) Loading ...Thu Jun 5, 12:26 AM ET
SYDNEY (AFP) - Seventy men in Australia have been arrested in a global crackdown on Internet child pornography and more will be detained, police said Thursday.
The Interpol-led probe involving 170 countries was launched after a hacker posted 99 child porn images on a European website, which attracted 12 million hits in just 76 hours.
More than 2,800 computer Internet protocol (IP) addresses were traced back to Australia and federal police identified all of them in a six-month operation, Police Commissioner Mick Keelty said.
“You will see more arrests, the investigations are continuing,” Keelty told reporters.
Keelty said the first arrests were made in cases where children might be in danger and four children had been taken from their homes.
Several teachers, a federal police officer and a sports administrator were reportedly among those arrested.
“It’s really one of the largest single operations we’ve done on child pornography with our international partners and our state police partners here in Australia,” Keelty said.
“You’re talking about 12 million hits from around the world but in a small time period of three days.
“In Australia the operation has netted over a million images of children, and these are not children in passive positions, these are children who are being abused.”
The children range in age from babies to 18 years old, he said.
“They come from various countries, the real tragedy of this is that we don’t know the origins of a lot of these children.
“We don’t know whether these children are still being the victims of child abuse.”
The flood of hits on the website came after word got around online paedophile networks that the images were available and the website’s address was circulated, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
Almost 150,000 different computer users from 170 countries accessed the otherwise obscure website in just 76 hours, the paper said.
The assistant director of police high tech operations, Andrew Colvin, told reporters all those arrested were men but they were impossible to stereotype.
“We’ve seen everything from teenagers, 19-year-olds, through to 80-year-olds,” he said.
“We’ve seen school teachers, police officers… people in positions of trust, positions of responsibility, farmers, bankers, pharmacists, every walk of life.”
Keelty said the child porn network was a vicious cycle.
“To get in you’ve actually got to be supplying something yourself and that means more children will be abused,” he said.
“The viewing of these images continues the abuse, it’s an horrific crime.”
The maximum penalty for possessing child pornography is 10 years in jail.
Comments:
Relatively close to Australia, Cambodia has become a popular destination for Australian pedophiles. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be much public concern about this threat. Some arrests have been made, but there have also been appeals for the release of convicted foreign pedophiles from Cambodian prisons. I can’t understand how anyone could have sympathy for sex predators who travel to exploit children in poor countries.
Safeguarding Khmer children from foreign predators may seem secondary to securing basic needs. But the two must never be viewed as mutually exclusive. The safety of all children, not just our own, is a precious and universal concern that should be shared by everyone. Greater public aversion to child exploitation in Cambodia is essential to improving how our society is viewed around the world.
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(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5) Loading ...Olaf Achleitner of Salzburg, who was arrested in September, denied the allegations and accused police of framing him.
“They were in my house but I did nothing wrong,” he told Reuters outside the courtroom as he was led away in handcuffs.
“This is a death sentence for me as an old man.”
Achleitner, who worked as a cook at a western restaurant in Phnom Penh, was also ordered to pay $1,000 (512 pounds) in compensation to the two victims.
Cambodia, a deeply impoverished southeast Asian nation, has long-been regarded as a haven for western paedophiles and perverts, although it has stepped up prosecution of foreigners in recent years.
(Reporting by Ek Madra, Editing by Ed Cropley and Sanjeev Miglani)
Sigh….when will it all end?! Of course, he was “framed” by the police, as if foreign pedophiles are so rare in Cambodia that one must be framed.
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(8 votes, average: 2.75 out of 5) Loading ...Dear Oudam,
Thank you for your excellent and informative website. You seem to be genuinely concerned about our homeland Cambodia, and it shows through your passionate and inspiring articles. As a Cambodian American, I am very proud of you and your contributions to our community.
Last summer, at the age of 19, I visited Cambodia for the very first time in my life. At first, I really didn’t want to go after reading and hearing so much negative things about the country. But after some persuasion by my parents, I decided to give it a shot. I didn’t know what to expect and braced for the worst.
Well, what can I say? I fell in love with the country and the people as soon as I set foot on Cambodia. Even though I was born in the U.S., for the first time in my life I felt truly at home. It was a strange and magical feeling.
I think Cambodia is a land of gentle, friendly people. Even though it was heart-wrenching to see little kids digging through garbage and the conditions that some people live under, I think our country has come a long way since the Khmer Rouge. As a Cambodian American, I am very proud of what our people have achieved. Even our poorest people manage to find ways to survive in a respectable manner and to enjoy life with what they have. They are not angry like some people here in America.
The only thing that I didn’t like about Cambodia were the old white geezers who run around with young Khmer girls. They were everywhere and no one seemed to care that they were in our country to take advantage of our people.
Dear Steve,
Thanks for your inspiring account. Through this website, I hope to build a bridge for young Cambodians from around the world to celebrate their Khmer heritage and reconnect with their roots. I am very encouraged to find bright young overseas Cambodians like you take an interest in the rebuilding of our beloved homeland.
You are absolutely right that Cambodia is not the hell hole as it is sometimes made out to be by the naysayers. You just have to visit the country and decide for yourself. Sometimes, the negativity alone can keep good, decent people from visiting our heavily tourism-dependent country.
As for the Cambodian people’s apparent apathy toward the “old white geezers who run around with young Khmer girls,” I think this is an area where you and I can make a major impact. Remember that Cambodia is still reeling from decades of war and destruction, so the most important thing on most people’s minds is day-to-day survival, not sexual exploitation of our women and children by foreigners. The “old white geezers” recognize the extreme poverty in our country and simply move in to prey on less fortunate people. Some of them may find a twisted sense of psychological victory in sexually dominating a race they view inferior to them.
You must understand that many Cambodians associate Westerners with wealth, power, and even righteousness. Consequently, the mischiefs of some Westerners in Cambodia tend to become, over time, normalized and even accepted by the Cambodian people. In fact, some people in Cambodia even consider a teen-aged Khmer girl to be “somnang” (fortunate) to be hitched to a middle-aged white man.
As Cambodians from overseas, we can help explain to our compatriots back home that these behaviors are neither normal nor acceptable in Western societies. In fact, here in America incarcerated child molesters are so hated that they are routinely beaten– even killed– by fellow inmates. While I don’t condone this type of vigilante justice, it’s indicative of the level of revulsion, even among thieves and murderers, that Americans have for sex predators. This is a major reason that the pedophiles are venturing overseas to take advantage of poor law enforcement in developing countries like Cambodia.
When I visit Cambodia, I don’t get angry when my relatives, friends and acquaintances condone the sexual exploits of the “old white geezers.” I just take the time to calmly explain and educate them about how Western societies view sexual predators, and how our apathy toward them is hurting our honor and national image. If my compatriots do not agree with my stance, or simply pretend to sympathize with me just to get on my good side, then all I could do is to distance myself from them and focus on the things that I could do. For instance, I would personally boycott any restaurants and hotels whose employees smile and bow at foreign customers but not at their own kind. I know my boycott may not run them out of business, but I do it anyway because it’s the right thing to do.
You don’t have to accept what you know to be wrong just because you feel powerless to make a difference. There are many skillful and respectful ways you can influence positive changes without being seen as overbearing or confrontational. Remember that most Cambodians are not privileged to travel back and forth between Cambodia and foreign countries, so they don’t have a personal understanding of outside cultures like we do. Many rely on information they hear from their friends and relatives, the media, and even from the foreign “sexpats” themselves.
Cambodian expatriates wield a lot of economic and social power when we return to our homeland; we just have to play our cards right and use our influences to encourage positive changes in calm, realistic and intelligent ways.
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(2 votes, average: 3.5 out of 5) Loading ...
Opening statements are expected today in the downtown Los Angeles trial of a jailed ex-Marine Corps captain accused of raping girls as young as 9 years old while living in Cambodia.
Michael Joseph Pepe, 54, is charged with seven counts of engaging in illicit sexual conduct in foreign places. The federal law that Pepe allegedly broke allows the prosecution of those accused of engaging in child sex tourism.
Pepe faces up to 30 years’ imprisonment if he’s convicted. He has pleaded not guilty to all counts.
Prosecutors allege that Pepe raped seven preteen girls at his Phnom Penh home beginning in the late fall of 2005 and ending shortly before his June 2006 arrest by the Cambodian National Police. In February 2007, he was extradited to Los Angeles — the last U.S. city he spent time in before returning to Cambodia after visiting his daughter.
The alleged victims are expected to testify at his trial.
Pepe, who moved to Cambodia in 2003 and married there, allegedly paid a prostitute a finder’s fee to bring him young victims, typically between the ages of nine and 15.
He also paid the young girls’ families a fee and monthly stipend for access to the girls for sexual gratification, prosecutors said. In one case, the prostitute admitted receiving $10 for finding a young girl, whose family received $300, prosecutors said.
Agents who searched Pepe’s home found rope and cloth strips used to restrain the victims, prosecutors said. They also found mind-altering drugs, condoms, Viagra, children’s clothes and newspaper articles about pedophiles, prosecutors said.
Pepe’s computer contained hundreds of images of nude and semi-clothed children, in some cases bound, performing various sex acts, prosecutors claim.
One witness expected to testify in Pepe’s defense is Dr. Michael Maloney, a defense witness in the 1980s McMartin Preschool child molestation trial.
In that trial, Maloney criticized police interview techniques of the alleged victims. He testified that they elicited erroneous information that the children had been sexually abused.
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