COURT HOUSE – Cape May County Prosecutor Jeffrey Sutherland’s office puts out press releases announcing the more serious arrests in the county. Among the serious charges are possession and distribution of child pornography – now being referred to as child sexual abuse materials – or CSAM.

Between Jan. 13 and July 18, Sutherland’s office has announced 11 separate arrests of individuals who have been charged with possession of child pornography or possession and distribution of the same. The charges can be third- or second-degree crimes depending on the amount of materials in a person’s possession – including those stored in the cloud – and if they are being transferred to other people.

“It’s disturbing to me, the number of cases,” Sutherland said. “A lot of these people could be anyone’s neighbor.”

Sutherland said his office has been seeing more incidents involving CSAM.

“We can’t say this is prevalent, per se, in our county, but it is disturbing,” Sutherland said.

In general, he said, his office is seeing a lot more cases, which he said is the result of a number of factors, but noticeably, he said, during the pandemic and Covid restrictions, there was a big uptick in CSAM incidents.

“When the pandemic hit, our CyberTips increased 400% over 2019,” Sutherland said, “and it has not changed a lot since then.”

A CyberTip is simply a report using a line dedicated to receiving information about internet crimes.

People staying home more due to pandemic restrictions might have been one contributing factor, he said, but it doesn’t explain the 32 million reports of possible CSAM violations in 2022, as reported by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). NCMEC also saw an 82% increase in online child enticements last year, which includes aggressive extortion methods.

New Jersey State Police (NJSP) Sgt. Katie Feehan works with the state’s Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force, and she echoed Sutherland’s assessment regarding the increase.

“Unfortunately, during Covid, it spiked and it held steady,” Feehan said.

Feehan attended an NCMEC seminar a couple weeks ago and found the same trend happening nationally. What this did was create a backlog for law enforcement, which forced law enforcement agencies to expand their ICAC units. Statewide, Feehan said during a phone interview July 24, the NJSP has had between 9,000 and 10,000 CyberTips regarding CSAM.

“That puts us on pace to have 20,000 CyberTips for the year,” she said.

Sutherland said his office also expanded its ICAC, bringing in officers from outside agencies, such as the NJSP or the Department of Homeland Security, who work part-time – and remotely.

“This is all internet-based, so they’re not all together all the time,” Sutherland said.

The prosecutor said combatting CSAM starts with interviewing internet service providers (ISP) and getting them involved. The ISPs generally cooperate with the law and report all suspected violations to NCMEC. NCMEC will gather preliminary information and provide it to state and federal law enforcement. The county prosecutor’s office provides support throughout the process.

According to NCMEC, a lot of the CSAM is produced, or “manufactured,” overseas, which makes it difficult to enforce. And while most of the CSAM comes from overseas, the NCMEC site says, there are also victims of CSAM manufacturing in the U.S.

The site indicated there are predators on the internet who are always looking to entice children into becoming unwilling participants in the production of CSAM and, according to NCMEC, the CSAM they are evaluating these days are not photos of a baby in a bathtub. They are images of children, some as young as infants, being raped or sexually abused, often in their own homes. Feehan said they see victims from birth to adolescence.

“We call them crime scene photos,” said someone from the NCMEC site. “We have counselors on staff who have to look at this every day.”

“We continue to see CSAM evolving, often becoming more egregious, with offenders increasingly demanding that children record themselves carrying out specific sex acts on video or over live streaming services that can be screen captured. This includes demands to engage in self-harm or to sexually abuse pets or younger children in the home under threat that the offender will ruin their victims’ lives,” the NCMEC site reports.

According to NCMEC, when a child is victimized, the CSAM is shared again and again.

Feehan said the hot topic last year in fighting CSAM is “sextortion.” She said once CSAM is created, the person who initiates the manufacture will then extort money from the victim. Feehan said a boy who was a victim of sextortion sent all his Christmas money in an attempt to keep the CSAM from being distributed. Eventually, he told his mother, once his money ran out. Feehan said this boy was rather fortunate.

“There have been countless suicides across the nation due to sextortion. It’s a huge epidemic,” she said.

Feehan said in some cases the child might have to admit a same-sex attraction in order to stop the abuse, but she encourages children to communicate with parents and report it if they are being victimized.

“The point of all this, the end game, is to save children from being abused,” she said.

Feehan said law enforcement is trying to identify people who have a sexual interest in children. She said the contact between these children and the perpetrator is already a crime, and rarely do they ever have physical contact. However, the NJSP will do a polygraph test on suspects to see if they are hands-on offenders. Feehan said data shows that 80% of CSAM users are hands-on offenders, if not in the U.S., then overseas where they can get away with abusing children.

Sutherland likened the use of CSAM to drugs, where those who are users end up in the distribution end of an illegal activity. He said he suspects CSAM users were also abused as children.

When asked about stopping CSAM from continuing to proliferate, Feehan said, “Sometimes there are images that can be traced. Sometimes when there is a tip, we have only the IP (internet protocol) address and email address or a phone number and it takes a lot of follow-up work.”

Trying to establish a profile for a typical person with a sexual attraction toward children is also not easy, Feehan said. The only thing they know for sure is that nearly all of them are men. In the past seven years, she has only seen a handful of women involved with CSAM. Otherwise, there is no typical offender – they are all income levels and races. Feehan said she has seen multi-millionaires and homeless men arrested for the same crime.

“We have arrested police officers and doctors,” she said.

Sutherland said part of the enforcement effort includes undercover chatting, where law enforcement officers pose as children on the internet to ferret out the CSAM users. He said his office is attempting to use education and awareness to help prevent CSAM use, as does the NJSP.

Feehan said NJSP are more likely to speak to children directly if they are middle-school-aged or up. She said they attempt to get the message to parents of children younger than that. She advised parents to communicate with their children about what sites they are visiting or who is attempting to contact them. Otherwise, adults who become aware of CSAM use should report it to authorities.

NCMEC operates the CyberTipline, a national mechanism for the public and electronic service providers (ESPs) to report instances of suspected child sexual exploitation. Since its inception in 1998, the CyberTipline has received more than 144 million reports.

In 2022, the CyberTipline received 32,059,029 reports. For a more comprehensive look at data and insights from the CyberTipline, visit the CyberTipline 2022 Report.

Contact the author, Christopher South, at csouth@cmcherald.com or 609-86-8600, ext. 128.