Online predator numbers rising

This is not news to you unless you've been asleep for the last few years. I don't post this in an "OMG, there are people using the internet as a vehicle to help them do bad things" kind of way, rather to highlight another aspect of the problem.

Last month, The Guardian published an article telling us that 100 children per month are alerting CEOP to internet predators.

"Specialist officers from Ceop, the Home Office-funded Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre, are receiving on average four alerts every day from children who are about to meet in the real world a suspicious character they have met online or are suicidal because they have been so comprehensively groomed."

And these are just the cases that are reported to CEOP.

This article from the San Fransisco Chronicle was brought to my attention today. The piece interweaves the story of Eric Szatkowski, a Wisconsin Justice Department special agent, with scary statistics and facts documenting the increase of predator behaviour online.

"The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's cyber tip line took 85,301 reports of child porn and 8,787 reports of online enticement last year. Investigations of Internet crimes against children resulted in 3,000 arrests nationwide in 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Justice."

However, what moved me in particular were the responses of officers and agents who are immersed on a daily basis in the awful business of investigating these cases. One, Dave Matthews, deals with it by not socialising with his colleagues, and explains...

"Mainly you just shut down a part of your brain that makes you feel like crap"

Chris Byars, an Analyst who spends her working days scouring child abuse content for clues talks about being unable to look at the people living in her neighbourhood without feeling...

"All of a sudden I'm wondering how many people in Lodi right now are assaulting or abusing their children," she said. "I don't think you can turn it off."

And from Szatkowski, the agent involved in the case the article centres around...

"It just reinforced ... you don't put faith in a person"

How sad - and possibly inevitable(?) - that being so constantly immersed in this kind of work can result in such a general lack of trust.

I hope all of the people who work in this field are adequately supported. I know the officers at CEOP have strong support structures in place and so do some of the moderation agencies that I know of, including ours. However, is this enough? How do we best tackle this problem? Do we rotate the staff working in this particular arena to minimise any individual's exposure to the horror - or do we then risk losing their valuable expertise?