No Surprise: Nearly 90% Of Those Convicted Of Wider Child Abuse Offences And On The Sex Offenders Register Are White Conservative Men

[Is Candace Owens A Pedophile?]

Pedophile profile: Young, white, wealthy
Four-year FBI investigation shows that vast majority of online child porn
arrests involve people in high places.
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Written by Maria Seminerio, Contributor on Sept. 19, 1999
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Associates of an Infoseek exec arrested for using chat to solicit a minor
may have been shocked and surprised, but not the FBI.

As it turns out, a corner office at a high-profile, high-tech company
isn't such an unlikely place to find an online pedophile -- not according
to records being yielded from a three-year-old Federal Bureau of
Investigation crackdown on Internet pornography.

Of the 413 people arrested as part of the agency's "Innocent Images"
investigation since 1995, "only a handful have not been upper-middle-
class, educated white men," said Special Agent Pete Gulotta who serves as
the investigation's chief spokesman. "They're almost all white males
between the ages of 25 and 45."

"We've had military officers with high clearances, pediatricians, lawyers,
school principals, and tech executives," Gulotta said of those arrested
under Innocent Images.

Pre-emptive strikes
Of those arrested, 337 have been convicted of online child pornography
trafficking or using the Internet to solicit children for sex, Gulotta
said. The investigation actually began in 1994, but was not publicly
disclosed by the agency until the following year.

The Innocent Images operation is aimed at "taking these people out before
they strike," which is why agents frequently pose as youngsters in chat
rooms, acting as bait for would-be child abusers, Gulotta said.

The Innocent Images project was sparked by the disappearance, in 1993, of
a 10-year-old boy from Brantwood, Md., Gulotta said. While the boy, George
Burdinski, was never found, the FBI obtained information linking his
disappearance to a network of online child pornography traffickers, he
said.

Gulotta objected strongly to claims that suspects are being "entrapped" by
agents posing as minors. Agents most often enter chat rooms after getting
tips that men seeking young sexual partners are frequenting the chat
rooms, though in some cases they investigate chat sites simply because
they have names that suggests pedophile activity occurs there, he said.

"We are very careful in these investigations to make sure that the subject
initiates the contact," Gulotta said. "And all these conversations are
documented. It's very clear what's happening."

Not entrapment
Tod Burke, an associate professor of criminal justice at Radford
University in Radford, Va., also defended the legality of FBI undercover
tactics, such as those used in the arrest of Infoseek exec Patrick
Naughton. In Naughton's case, an FBI agent encountered Naughton in an
Internet chat room, while the agent was posing as a 13-year-old girl,
according to an affidavit filed in the case.

"The investigators are not forcing people to commit criminal acts simply
by being present in the chat room," he said. "These individuals are
predisposed to commit these crimes." The criminal charges would be the
same if the suspect originally contacted the potential victim by letter or
by telephone, Burke added. (No laws specifically outlaw child pornography
and pedophile activity on the Internet, since they are already illegal in
the offline world.)

"This is nothing new," Burke said. "Using a computer to go undercover is
somewhat new, but for decades before that it was pen pal services" where
law enforcement officials sought pedophiles, he said.

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