Eastern Michigan University professor: Child porn voyeurs looking for someone to dominate
The GM retiree lives in a mobile home, works a part-time job at Walmart and has children and grandchildren.
But on April 20, his ordinary-man image was shattered when the Washtenaw County Sheriff ‘s Department raided Randall’s mobile home in Ypsilanti Township, seized computers and arrested him on child pornography charges.
Randall is jailed awaiting trial. He was in court briefly Thursday, where a pre-trial hearing was set for Aug. 13.
Randall’s case is typical of many accused child porn purveyors, police say.
“Most of the time they keep it very hidden, and it’s a big surprise when it comes out,” said Washtenaw County Sheriff Detective Kevin Parviz. “It’s not unusual for people arrested on child porn charges to have no criminal record.”
Perry Francis, a professor in the college of education at Eastern Michigan University who has studied the topic, agreed.
“It’s fascinating. They’re everyday people. It crosses all socioeconomic, racial barriers,” he said. “Whether they like boys or girls, it’s the fact that they are looking at children that’s exciting them. It’s some sort of coping way to get relief or excitement in their life. It becomes that obsession, that thing they think about all the time.”
A high-volume crime
Most people caught possessing child porn don’t have one or two images. They have thousands - in one local case, more than 73,000.
“People who have child porn tend to hoard it, they travel with it,” Ann Arbor Police Officer Brett Hansen testified in a recent case.
They also often carefully organize it, Parviz said, noting a 2007 raid of a Manchester house.
“This house was nothing but porn. There were boxes all over the place, handwritten labels on it all,” he said.
In Randall’s case, police allege he had hundreds of images of child porn on two computers - one a desktop in his bedroom and one a laptop in the family room. The pictures - of everything from children having sex with adult males to children having sex with animals - were in folders, including one labeled “unbelievable pictures,” court files indicate.
In the Manchester house, Parviz said he could see a progression in technology over the years - and in the suspect’s obsession.
“It went from VHS tapes of adult porn to DVDs of barely legal teenagers to child porn on the computer. … It kept getting younger and younger,” he said.
Francis said it’s common for pedophiles to progress to increasingly younger victims.
“They are looking for things that excite them, and sometimes the same thing won’t do it,” Francis said. “It’s all about objectifying. Their whole focus is on someone they can dominate.”
Not everyone who views child pornography engages in pedophilia, Francis said.
“The debate is, is child porn a gateway to pedophilia or just something people like to look at? Correlation studies say that viewing child porn is related to pedophilia, but that’s different than a causation study. It’s more of a contributing factor,” Francis said.
But most pedophiles have child porn on their computers, said Parviz, who has checked many convicted pedophiles’ computers as part of their monitoring during probation.
“It used to be 100 percent of them had it on their computers. Then it declined to about 75 percent as they realized that we were checking it,” Parviz said.
Snaring victims
Pedophiles have two approaches for meeting children or getting pictures of them in the nude, authorities say.
One way is to go on to a social networking site and harvest as many e-mail addresses for children as possible.
“They send out a mass e-mail to every 14-year-old they can find on the Web,” Parviz said. “If they send out 200-300 e-mails, someone will respond.”
A pedophile often takes on the identity of a child and works to gain his or her trust.
The other approach is more aggressive. Parviz illustrated the point with an actual conversation between a suspect and a local preteen girl.
The suspect, while on probation for a child sex crime, opens with an aggressive line - “Do you like porn?” he instant messages to a girl.
The girl responds that she does.
The pedophile sends back a link to some free porn.
The conversation moves to discussing sex and favorite sexual positions.
“Rape is my favorite position,” the man messages the girl.
Sheriff’s Cmdr. Dieter Heren said making contact with potential victims is easier now than it used to be, thanks to the Internet.
“In most cases, the perpetrator does not even reside in the same vicinity as the victim,” Heren said. “It is difficult and expensive for law enforcement agencies to keep up with the technology used to distribute child pornography. It is labor-intensive to proactively patrol the Internet for predators who want to victimize and exploit our children.”
And even when police manage to bust someone with child porn, that often isn’t a deterrent, Parviz said.
“These guys just don’t give up their way of life,” he said.
Related stories:
• "Not enough" investigators in Washtenaw County working on child pornography cases
• Most convicted of possessing child pornography in Washtenaw County receive probation sentences
• Computers play key role in prosecuting child pornography cases
David Jesse covers K-12 education for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at davidjesse@annarbor.com or 734-623-2534.
Photo by Lon Horwedel: Fred Randall watches his attorney sign some paperwork during a brief court appearance Thursday.