Child pornographer link probed in Chapala
Connection between kindergarten abuse case and
US fugitive investigated
Mexico News Daily
Investigators of sexual abuse in a Jalisco kindergarten are pursuing a possible link between the school’s English teacher and a United States citizen wanted for the production of child pornography.
Parents of the kindergarten students in San Nicolás de Ibarra, Chapala, have filed formal complaints against the teacher, who allegedly abused 11 children.
Ana Guadalupe P. was arrested in Chapala on Tuesday.
The investigation is looking into a possible link with David Benjamin Creamer, a suspected pedophile who was arrested in the U.S. in 1997 and charged with the possession and production of over 100,000 videos depicting child pornography, sexual violence and bestiality. He fled after posting bail.
Creamer, 71, is on the list of the U.S. Marshals’ 15 most-wanted fugitives and has been identified as one of the largest producers of child pornography in that country. He is believed to have made millions of dollars from the sale of his videos.
It will do him no good in Hell!
He has also been described as armed and extremely dangerous. U.S. authorities seized 70 firearms and 80,000 rounds of ammunition when they arrested him in 1997.
Neither will his guns.
According to the National Immigration Institute (INM), Creamer entered Mexico via Guadalajara several years ago and witness accounts have placed him in Chapala, Ajijic and Puerto Vallarta since 2013.
Creamer has also been singled out as an accomplice of Thomas Frank White, a multimillionaire who opened a shelter in Puerto Vallarta for homeless children whom he sexually abused and filmed.
White died in a Puerto Vallarta penitentiary in 2013.
Jalisco Attorney General Eduardo Almaguer Ramírez said the search for Creamer has intensified since the Chapala kindergarten accusations. Investigators are also looking for videos allegedly filmed by the teacher.
All faculty members at the kindergarten have now been questioned, Almaguer said.
San Nicholas de Ibarra, Mexico
Three men jailed for repeatedly raping
young girl who became pregnant
Victim came forward 28 years after the abuse at the
hands of two brothers and their friend began
Alvin Muschette, Noel Hutton and Robert Hutton were all convicted of rape
following a two week trial Metropolitan Police
Three men who repeatedly raped a young girl and made her pregnant have been jailed for a total of 20 years following a trial for historic sex abuse.
The girl was subject to “systematic" abuse between 1987 and 1990, when she was aged between 12 and 15 years old and living in north London.
The victim came forward to report the crimes to police in June 2015, and specialist officers launched an investigation.
The three men were all convicted of rape following a two-week trial at Harrow Crown Court and were each given prison sentences of between five and eight years.
Noel Hutton, 65, was jailed for seven years. A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police said he was known to the victim’s mother and used his position of trust to abuse her.
He was joined in the abuse by his brother, Robert Hutton, 63, who was sentenced to five years' imprisonment.
Alvin Muschette, 55, who also knew the family and joined the brothers in the abuse, was sentenced to eight years' imprisonment.
The court heard the attacks took place over three years at various addresses in Brent, north-west London.
The victim eventually became pregnant as a result of one of the rapes and told her family what had happened.
She told police officers her family had dismissed her allegations and she underwent an abortion in her early teens, with concerned parties being told her boyfriend had made her pregnant.
Detective Constable Alpesh Patel, of the Child Abuse and Sexual Offences Command, said: “She was cruelly and vilely abused while she was a child; she has had a long wait for justice. Thanks to her courage she has now seen that justice done.
"Those who are, or have been, the victim of sexual assaults will be believed and supported by dedicated investigators. As a result of the victim's bravery and our inquiry these men will now pay the penalty for preying on a vulnerable young girl."
The Great and the Good, Preda Saving Children in the Philippines
And, Statutes of Limitations in Germany
BY FR. SHAY CULLEN
It was the Preda hotline for reporting sexual abuse that saved four children from sexual and physical abuse. The message came from an anonymous reporter, who tipped that Geraldine, 13, was being sexually abused by her grandfather. A Preda Foundation social worker contacted her counterpart in the local government and she, trained by Preda, knew exactly what to do. She went to find the child in her school and had a heart to heart chat with her in a private room.
The child had someone she could trust and revealed all that happened to her, confirming the sexual abuse by the grandfather and her uncle who was still a teenager. She said her elder sister was also abused. The cruel grandfather had continually beaten her younger sister and brother. Their mother knew of the abuse, but did nothing. Their mother had separated from her father, who disappeared, and left them with the grandfather. She was too poor to support them. This was the cost of a broken home and the abandonment of children by their parents.
The municipal social worker immediately took the four children into custody as allowed by law and entrusted them to the Preda Home for Girls. The mother was found and she signed a custody agreement allowing the children to be taken care of in the Preda Home. The girls were taken to the clinic for a legal-medical examination. The wounds of the two girls revealed sexual abuse.
A case of rape and abusive acts were filed against the grandfather and teenage uncle. On July 17, the court issued an arrest warrant and it was served by the police with the help of Preda senior staff. The grandfather was jailed to await trial. The teenager uncle was ordered by the court to be sent to rehabilitation.
The rescue and the recovery and pursuit of justice for the three girls and their small brother is just one more successful service to help abused children. What if there was no such intervention? The children would continue to be victims and not survivors.
There are as many as 40 children presently in the Preda Home for Girls, happily freed from the power of their abusers and are receiving therapy and education as well as a childhood so long denied them. The early reporting of child abuse is very important. The child, in care and with proper therapy, counseling, and a caring community will recover quickly. Then justice will be done as the child becomes empowered, testifying in court against her abusers.
Otherwise, they just grow up holding on to the buried pain of the terrible fearful memories of what they cruelly experienced. Getting justice is the final closure for the survivor of child sexual abuse.
Germany's statutes of limitations
We can see that there is a culture of concealment, denial, cover-up. Even society tries to deny the survivors justice through statutes of limitation. These deny the victim or survivor the right to get justice. In Germany, hundreds of former members of a famous boys choir recently have come forward after many years of silence to voice their complaints of physical and sexual abuse. But according to German law, it is too late to initiate legal action.
Children have been abused by individuals, institutions and by the culture of silence in society that forbade such complaints to be aired in public. People in positions of power, influence, and authority were not to be accused, challenged, and confronted. They enjoy impunity and they make the laws. It is the same in all countries. Only now there is the encouragement and support given to victims to complain and a shameful history of abuse is being exposed to a horrified public.
German law allows for criminal prosecution only within 10 years of the alleged victim turning 18. The statute of limitations for pursuing financial compensation through a civil suit is only three years. After that period there is no recourse. There is a move in Germany to extend the time from when one can take legal action against alleged abusers. Bamberg Archbishop Ludwig Schick claims that he is for a limit of 30 years within which a victim could bring a legal action. Bavarian Justice Minister Beate Merk has also called for change. “If it were up to me, Germany wouldn’t have any statute of limitations at all, like in Switzerland,” he said.
Having no statute of limitation is a deterrent too for abusers when they know they could be charged anytime. They should live with that possibility. In the Philippines, a complaint of sexual abuse can be filed within 20 years after the abuse happened.
But prevention is the greatest and most important action we can take. Child abusers will always be lurking, preying, and waiting. Human nature is corrupt and twisted. Child sexual abuse is mostly done by relatives, in the home, and then by neighbors and people in authority. We have to teach children to run and tell someone they trust and to overcome fear and get help. We need more hotlines and community education on the rights of the child and the need for adults to report and protect children. Dial or text to the Preda hotline 09175324453.
Joint online SA-Federal Police taskforce has
saved 16 children from sexual abuse
Nigel Hunt, Exclusive, The Advertiser
THEY might not live in South Australia, but their lives have literally been saved by police in a Wakefield St office.
Victims of the insidious online child exploitation trade, the 16 children have been painstakingly identified by detectives tracking the predators exploiting and destroying their innocence.
Starting with just an image depicting the child being horrifically sexually assaulted, SA police and federal agents comprising the Joint Anti Child Exploitation Team, have painstakingly traced its origin and identified the child — ensuring their removal from an abusive environment.
While arresting the deviants responsible for producing child exploitation material and putting them before the courts is paramount for the detectives involved, the realisation they have saved a victim is on another level entirely.
“The police that undertake this work are extremely dedicated and passionate, they put in long hours and want to see a child safe.’’
Since being formed 18 months ago the JACET has launched 264 investigations and executed 134 search warrants. This has resulted in 82 offenders being arrested and prosecuted for offences ranging from possession and dissemination of child exploitation material, using a carriage service to access or transmit child exploitation material, online sexual procurement and persistent sexual exploitation of a child.
While those results have been achieved locally, its impact has also been significant in overseas jurisdictions with numerous leads resulting in prosecutions in other countries.
The most co-ordinated attack on online predators ever launched, paradoxically its success is as encouraging as it is disheartening.
“There is no shortage of work. You could be as busy as you want to be in terms of all of the platforms on the internet people communicate on,’’ Detective Supt Wieszyk said.
“The good part of this is that SAPOL is not working in isolation here. Globally there are law enforcement agencies working on this issue that will share information, act on information and provide assistance.
“You prioritise on the basis of risk to children because if there is risk to a child you have got to take immediate action.’’
The commitment to JACET is considerable. It comprises six detectives, one field intelligence officer and two electronic crime support officers from SAPOL, along with four federal agents and a specialist electronic crime forensic officer. Significantly, it is one of six identical teams operating simultaneously in other states, each with the same remit.
Investigations conducted by the task force are initiated through intelligence referrals from a myriad of sources including the public, the Child Protection Assessment Centre in Canberra, overseas jurisdictions and Interpol. Not surprisingly, internet service providers are also a source thanks to cooperative agreements. And while it is a topic police prefer not to elaborate on for obvious reasons, the task force also works covertly online with detectives posing as users and purchasers of material. They also pose as children, responding to the grooming of online predators.
While its key focus is locking up online paedophiles, a significant aspect of its work now involves identifying the victims of this foul offending.
Once a painstaking manual task, detectives are now using complex computer programs to scan literally tens of thousands of images to detect similarities. The telltale markers that can help police locate a child victim can range from distinctive marks on a blanket, a toy or even a landscape feature.
The relatively new technology has allowed police to establish a vast library of such material, with various reference points assisting identification of individuals or common points in material produced by recidivist paedophiles.
“There are some very well documented cases where it is not only about facial recognition, but also location recognition, things that have popped up in a room for instance where this horrific abuse has occurred or a location in the countryside where there is a similar tree or camping area,’’ Fedpol SA Commander Peter Sykora said. Previously in charge of financial cybercrime operations as national coordinator of High Tech Crime Investigations, Commander Sykora said investigations had shown links between that type of crime and paedophile activity.
“One of the things we looked at was cyber fraud and what we did was have a look at where the servers were, where people were sending money for phishing activity and we overlaid that with paedophile servers and online exploitation material and they were basically the same places,’’ he said.
“The correlation between cyber criminals and paedophiles is immense.’’
“The people who deal with these images and the videos know exactly what they need to do to obfuscate their activities whether it is the encryption of their laptops through to having secure communications through the Dark Net or private messaging where it is pretty well encrypted as well,’’ Commander Sykora said. “But whatever they do, they still leave a digital footprint somewhere and that is where the use of our digital forensics is used.’’
There is no stereotype for a consumer of this material. They range from juveniles through to adults, blue collar workers to school teachers and even supposedly loving, caring mums and dads. Quite literally, police have no idea who they are dealing with until they are identified and finally knock on their door armed with a search warrant.
“In all honesty nothing surprises us these days. It is not just males, females are a part of this process, whether they are acting alone or assisting in the offending,’’ Commander Sykora said. “Unfortunately these days with the images Mark and I have seen nothing surprises us, it is absolutely horrific. It is not child pornography at all, this is child and sex abuse material.’’
Case study one.
In May a Tennessee man, 28, was charged with using the internet to solicit child rape following information uncovered by the JACET in South Australia.
Detectives in Adelaide discovered the man was using the Kik encrypted message App to peddle child exploitation material. His username provided a link to a Dropbox account which contained both images and videos for downloading by others.
This information was relayed to Homeland security in the US and in turn to the Knoxville police department’s internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.
The task force launched an undercover sting operation during which an undercover officer had a text exchange with him in which he offered her $400 to rape her daughter to fulfil his fantasy.
“I want to thank you for doing this for me, sweety,’’ he stated in the text.
When arrested he confessed to the rape proposition and to peddling child exploitation material on the internet.
Case study two.
Last month a Cleveland man, 34, was sentenced to 26 years jail over his role in running an online forum featuring images and videos of toddlers being raped.
District Judge James Gwin described the man’s conduct “may be the worst type of conduct I’ve seen for one of these cases’’ and said he posed a great threat to children due to his “obsession.’’
He was arrested by Homeland Security officers following a tip-off from JACET detectives that he and others ran a group called “toddlers’’ using the Kik messaging App.
This was discovered when the detectives arrested a man who admitted molesting a girl, 4, while filming it. This man then shared the file with others using his Kik account. The account was accessed and the detectives discovered he was a member of the “toddlers’’ group the Cleveland man was administrator of.
The man confessed that the group had around 50 members and that he traded thousands of files from his mobile phone.
The man, who also abused some of the children in the videos, pleaded guilty to possession and distribution the material.
Escaping Boko Haram: The mother who hid her child in a ditch for nine months
Nigerian woman describes the moment the violent militias
arrived in her home town
Sally Hayden in Gwoza, Nigeria
Zainabeu Hamayaji, 47, who hid her daughter in a ditch in her back garden for nine months while Boko Haram occupied their town. Her husband was killed. Photograph: Sally Hayden
When she heard reports that Boko Haram was approaching her home town three years ago, Zainabeu Hamayaji had to think quickly. The Islamist militant group – whose name roughly translates as “Western Education is Forbidden” – had been terrorising the northeast of Nigeria since 2009, and now it was moving on to Madagali.
The 47-year-old’s biggest concern was her eldest daughter, Hassana Isa. At 12, she was young enough to enjoy childish games with her siblings, but old enough to be chosen as a wife for one of the violent militants whose organisation was becoming synonymous with destruction and bloodshed.
Not to mention kidnapping and sexual slavery of children
In that moment, Hamayaji made a decision that would change all of her family’s lives. Speaking about it now, a range of emotions flicker across her face as she recounts what happened next. She is sitting in an old schoolroom-turned camp for the displaced in Gwoza, a rural Nigerian town that served as the headquarters of Boko Haram’s once sizeable caliphate. Through a large bullet hole in the blackboard, she can see boys playing outside.
Eight years into a war that has caused tens of thousands of deaths and the displacement of more than 2.5 million, the scale of the brutality of Boko Haram is still emerging. As more and more of the territory it seized becomes accessible, evidence of massacres, the use of child soldiers and other atrocities committed across Nigeria’s northeast are being laid bare.
So too come tales of heroism, bravery and ingenuity. Hamayaji’s story is one of these.
Hidden in a hole
“I dug a ditch within my compound,” she says. Inside it, Hamayaji hid almost 100 jerrycans of water, sacks of nonperishable food and some leather bags to use in lieu of a toilet. Then, she told her daughter to get inside the hole. Hamayaji covered the top of the hole with corrugated iron, and erected a tent on top. She kept her daughter hidden in that hole for the next nine months.
Within days, Boko Haram arrived in her town, killing her husband and many other local men, and quickly gaining total control of the area. “I saw them killing so many people because they were trying to escape, so I couldn’t leave,” Hamayaji says.
Next, as anticipated, the militants went door to door looking for young women. Tipped-off about Hamayaji’s eldest, they turned up at her house. “I swore and swore I didn’t have a daughter but they didn’t believe me and kept beating me,” she says.
“They came every day to beat me and they were constantly terrorising me. So I decided to strip myself of all of my clothing and just walk around naked in the village. I un-plaited my hair to look like a mad woman. I urinated and put faeces on my hair and my body. I’d go to the town centre and roll around in trash so they would think I was mentally unstable.”
Her other three children – aged seven, 10 and 11 – backed up the charade, telling the sceptical militants that their mother had been attending a psychiatric hospital before the town was captured.
Zainabeu Hamayaji: “I swore and swore I didn’t have a daughter but they didn’t believe me and kept beating me.” Photograph: Sally Hayden
Hamayaji demonstrates how, while pretending to be mentally unwell, she would pull her other daughters close to her. She’d have flies swarming around her, attracted to the excrement. This was another ploy to save her children.
“Boko Haram decided they did not want a child from a madwoman. Previously they had killed a madwoman and the curse from the madwoman prevented them from any military successes. They didn’t want to kill another, so I was spared because of their belief. They wrote something on the wall saying nobody should attack this madwoman, it will be a curse. So I was protected.”
Soldiers arrived
Nine months after Boko Haram arrived in Madagali, it was ousted by the Nigerian military.
When the army’s soldiers arrived they were also suspicious of Hamayaji, asking her whether she had been married to a member of Boko Haram, unable to understand how she had survived without collaborating. She explained to them that her daughter had been living for nine months in the ditch she had dug for her.
For mother and daughter, the scars will last a long time. Hamayaji still has a dislocated shoulder from being repeatedly beaten — which, along with almost constant headaches, stops her from working. She has a scar on her forehead, and a missing tooth. She gesticulates wildly when telling her story, almost reenacting the persona she had to adopt to get her through those nine horrific months.
A woman walks through a camp for the displaced in Gwoza, northeast Nigeria. Gwoza was part of the territory recaptured from Boko Haram in 2015, but the land around the town remains insecure. Photograph: Sally Hayden
She readily accepts that what she did was unusual. “There are not a lot of woman who sacrificed like that,” she says. “Other women actually gave away their children for selfish reasons, because Boko Haram were giving money at the time – they got food in exchange and needed to eat.”
The sum being paid for children ranged from 100,000 Nigerian naira (€278) to twice that amount, she says.
Hamayaji says sometimes the militants would give mothers land in the villages they had captured as a kind of dowry for their daughters. “Women would be so elated, they’d collect the money and the properties.”
Schoolgirls kidnapped
Boko Haram came to global attention when it kidnapped 276 schoolgirls from their dormitories in Chibok. However, thousands of other women and girls have also been abducted or forced into marriages by the terror group. While some have few complaints about how they were treated, many have suffered physical and sexual abuse, and some forced into warfare.
Former wives have told stories of regular rape by both their “husbands” and other militants, forced labour and even the possibility of being made to carry a suicide bomb. The majority of bombings in public areas are currently carried out by women, some of whom may not know what they’re carrying, as the devices are detonated by militants from a distance.
A camp for the displaced in Gwoza, Borno State, northeast Nigeria. Photograph: Sally Hayden
For women and girls who escape, the threat of abuse remains. Last October, a Human Rights Watch report found that displaced women were being raped and sexually exploited by Nigerian authorities including government officials, police and camp leaders.
For now, Hamayaji says her eldest daughter is safe. Aged 14, she is at the Eid (end of Ramadan) celebrations when I meet her mother. However, in common with some 11 million other children across north east Nigeria, Hassana Isa is not in school and has limited opportunities. Hamayaji is reduced to begging for scraps to feed the family, she says, though it’s better than living under Boko Haram control.
“I will see what the future holds. I don’t know what will happen,” Hamayaji says, batting away flies in the dark, empty schoolroom, the sounds of hundreds of other displaced people outside. “I just know we’re safe now.”
Gwoza, Nigeria
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