UCC project helps find US paedophile

AN American foster father arrested for multiple child rape in one of the worst cases of abuse in the US was tracked down with the help of an Irish team of experts.

University College Cork’s COPINE project (Combating Paedophile Information Networks in Europe) officially became involved in the case on March 10, but has been tracking the progress of the abuse of the children for almost two years via the internet.

Ronald Harold Young, aged 41, was arrested at his home on the Key Peninsula, west of Tacoma, Pierce County, Washington. He was held for investigation into 32 counts of first-degree child rape, 10 counts of distribution of images of children engaged in sexually explicit acts, 10 counts of possession of child pornography and two counts of child molestation. Bail was set at $2 million (€1.6m).

Six foster children, all boys aged five to seven, were removed from the home, interviewed, given medical examinations and placed in new foster homes.

Authorities searching Young’s home seized a computer, a digital camera and hundreds of photographs “showing the boys in sexually explicit poses and engaged in sexual acts with the suspect”, Det Troyer said.

The abuse is believed to have occurred when Young’s wife was at work. She is not under suspicion.

COPINE victim identification researcher Margaret Brennan said the unit was contacted by the West Midlands Police on March 10. They had arrested a man with more than 100 abusive images of children on his computer and asked COPINE if they could find out who was posting the images on the internet.

COPINE consulted its archive and within days put together a detailed report on the number of aliases this man used on the internet, the type of material he was posting and evidence to suggest the person posting the images on the internet was also producing them.

The Midlands Police and the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which had been working on this case since last September after an anonymous tip-off, found that the person posting the images on the internet was from the Tacoma area of Washington.

COPINE sent its archive of 675 images to Tacoma police to see if they could identify any of the victims.

“After we sent our file to Tacoma police, he posted more new abusive images on the net,” said Ms Brennan. “He was a hero in this circle [paedophiles] because he was producing so many new images.”

In 2001 COPINE created a rating system from zero to 10 for abusive images which is used in British courts to aid sentencing. Zero is classed as ordinary pictures of children, while 10 involves bestiality or extreme sadism. The images from this collection were rated 10. Ms Brennan said the images were so sadistic some of the paedophiles receiving them asked him to tone down the level of abuse.

Given COPINE’s report, West Midlands Police, afraid the local police in Tacoma were not acting fast enough, asked the federal police to get involved. Young was arrested on March 18, eight days after COPINE was called in on the case.