A long article but. . my son is treated like a monster as well. I'm just posting part and then a link to the whole article.















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NEWARK — Tim Ryan climbed from his FBI-issued van and started toward the beige-brick building that holds roomfuls of forensic evidence from across the state: blood samples, human skeletal fragments, markings from tools used in crimes, ballistics results.

He swiped his security card and passed through several doors. Then he walked through long corridors before stepping inside the forensic computer lab.

On a table in front of him sat a DVD. It had two simple words scrawled across it in black.

Baby Pics.

"God, please get me through this," the FBI agent prayed silently.

As he lifted the DVD and carried it toward an open computer tray, grim memories trudged through his mind. Ryan knew that in his job, DVDs crammed with thousands of images of young children’s bodies usually depicted a choreography of vile and depraved crime scenes. And little else.

"I don’t know if I can do (review) a whole DVD disk, 4.67 gigabytes of a baby being raped," Ryan said to himself.

This scene — and others that follow — are taken from a long series of interviews with Ryan and other FBI agents. The incident happened in 2008, early in Ryan’s career as a child pornography investigator, but it’s a day he said he remembers because he was still learning the horrors of his assignment.

He and other agents agreed to talk about the bureau’s specialized team of child pornography and sexual abuse crime fighters in New Jersey — providing a rare glimpse into a world the public never sees and detailing the stress it exacts on the agents.

Like colleagues across the country, these agents spend days and nights immersed in a depraved, internet-based society that encourages and trades on the monstrous abuse of children.

To do their jobs, they are forced to struggle and adjust, hopefully creating an island of calm and normalcy in their own minds, even as they are surrounded by depictions of evil.

Ryan left the FBI five months ago, but said his struggles changed him, as a man and a father. He admitted watching over his own children much more carefully and scrutinizing men who drift through public spaces. Are there any child predators among them, he will ask himself.

The moment from early in his career also represents, he said, the kind of psychological battles waged deep within many men and women who staff the FBI’s euphemistically named "Innocent Images" unit. Ryan left the FBI after four years of supervising the "Innocent Images" team in New Jersey. But he will look people in the eye as he describes the never-ending battle between the abusers and the agents who go after them and try to save the children.

"Like pedophiles have a nose for vulnerable kids, we have a nose for pedophiles," he said. "So … they can smell a child they’re going to be able to groom. Well, we can smell a pedophile."

PREPUBESCENT CHILDREN

To grasp how explosively images of child porn and sexual abuse are proliferating across the internet, consider: In 2010, law enforcement officers across the country sent nearly 14.2 million images and videos of child pornography to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, a congressionally authorized clearinghouse for child porn that assists criminal investigators.

In 2011, that number jumped to more than 22 million.

The 55 percent increase, said Michelle Collins, a vice president at the center, is one example of what investigators know already: Internet-traded child pornography has multiplied exponentially over the past decade, as hoarders of often violent material use increased access to high-speed internet and the vastly increased digital storage of computers to their advantage.

Even as inventions such as smart phones, thumb drives and cloud computing have also made it easier for these offenders to round up child pornography, Collins said, other tools such as anonymizers and encryption have enhanced their ability to stay hidden.

The pornography itself focuses mostly on prepubescent children, experts and investigators said. Collins reports that of the identified victims her clearinghouse sees again and again in images and videos, 76 percent are preteen or young teenagers who have yet to show physical signs of sexual maturation.

Among that 76 percent, one in 10 is an infant or toddler.

Meanwhile, the abuse seems to know no bounds.

"You are seeing babies having their diapers removed so they can be assaulted," said Joshua Wilson, an FBI agent based in New Jersey who has spent nearly five years working full time on child pornography.

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/12/a_depraved_world_fbi_agents_wa.html