In Child Sex Case, More Facets Than Meet the Eye

PARIS — The site was called BoyLover.net, and on it the authorities say they found thousands of lurid comments, including conversations about performing sexual acts on boys sometimes barely out of infancy.

Europol, the European Union police agency, cracked the site’s server and developed intelligence reports on 4,200 participants in 35 countries, 670 of whom are suspected of downloading illegal images of child abuse or engaging in illegal acts with minors. The police have made more than 180 arrests and say they have taken 230 children out of harm’s way.

It was, Europol said with some hyperbole, “probably the biggest online pedophile network in the world.” But with arrests quietly continuing in a dozen countries (at least one as recently as last week), it may turn out to be something more: the clearest test yet of whether, after 25 years of intense focus on this particularly disturbing set of crimes, the prosecution of child molestation has come of age.

As countries around the world have ramped up their investigations of pedophile rings and the sexual abuse of children in recent years, they have achieved some notable successes: in February, for example, a Canadian who was convicted of running a brothel in Thailand of boys as young as 3 years old was sentenced to 25 years in prison after Interpol and the U.S. police tracked him down. In September, a six-year trial of a high-society pedophile ring in Portugal that included a former ambassador and a prominent television celebrity concluded with prison sentences of 5 to 18 years for six of the seven defendants.

But with the alarming nature of the crime provoking sometimes rushed action, there is also a record of highly publicized prosecutions gone awry, with innocent people imprisoned for years, other cases eventually dismissed for lack of evidence and physical attacks not only on suspects but on people mistaken for them.

With the latest case, the authorities say, they have learned hard lessons about how to home in on predators while ensuring that the nature of the crime does not lead to prosecutorial excess. If anything, said John Carr, a member of the British Home Secretary’s Internet task force on child protection, “It is more likely that fewer people were prosecuted than should have been rather than more were prosecuted than should have been.”

That notwithstanding, experts who have long tracked the record of pedophile prosecutions say there is a need to monitor every aspect of the emerging cases closely. “This is really excellent police work and I would have no doubt that they have caught some very dangerous and predatory pedophiles in this net who meet the stereotype the public are afraid of,” said Mary de Young, a professor of sociology at Grand Valley State University in Michigan who has written about the issue extensively. “The danger is that the net is very wide and that there are a lot of different fish in this net.”

The issue is so fraught, she said, that even basic the terms used are very much in dispute — starting with the term pedophile itself.

In the narrow sense, a pedophile is defined as a person who has a sexual interest in children. But colloquially the term is often understood to mean someone who goes beyond mere interest to sexual abuse. That blurs the line between molesters and those who view images of molestation, a disturbing but different crime.

Investigators point out that the demand for images drives their supply and therefore the molestation. Interviews with investigators involved in the Europol operation suggest that most of those arrested so far have been people suspected of downloading and exchanging illegal images of child abuse rather than abusing children themselves.

In Britain, for example, where most arrests have been made — 121 as of mid-March — one in five are suspected of child molestation, said Kelvin Lay, a senior investigating officer on the case. The others are what police call “image offenders” of different degrees, he said.