Trinity Mount Ministries

Thursday, June 25, 2015

Shocking scale of trafficking and grooming in the West Midlands:

The shocking scale of trafficking and grooming gangs across the West Midlands has been revealed in a series of police reports.

Official documents dating back to 2009 show West Midlands Police was not fully aware of the extent of the region’s high level of vulnerable youngsters and how to deal with the problem.
One report says that although the majority of suspects were from an Asian background, police were concerned about the dangers of racial stereotyping when dealing with incidents of abuse.
Another document details the lack of trust between police and social workers and the dismissive attitudes officers had towards vulnerable runaways.
Reports also show how children living at home were targeted with more frequency than those in care, with abuse going on virtually unheeded for years.
It has also emerged that the force’s failure to cope with the rising problem was so acute the identities of many of those engaged in the abuse was either not known or outdated.
These police difficulties in dealing with the widespread and escalating scale of the abuse has not been made public until now.
In Sandwell in 2010, two vulnerable young women were noted as being ‘at high risk’ of sexual exploitation. Police believe they were being groomed for – or were already being sexually exploited – at the time of the report.
Two other young women were identified as being at high risk in Dudley, along with six girls in Walsall during the same period.
Officers in Wolverhampton, where two groups of young women had been identified, said alcohol, drugs and acts of physical violence were ‘key leverages’ used by offenders to groom victims into prostitution.
The worst area in the West Midlands was Birmingham, where almost half of all offenders were said to live. No recent figures have been released, although a report from this year could be issued in the coming weeks.
The reports also reveal the largest proportion of victims, at 44 per cent, did not reside in children’s homes and lived with their parents or other family members.
“The force has very limited insight into the threat, and the intelligence profile related to children who are not in care is non-existent,” a document said.
“The current situation poses significant challenges for West Midlands Police in protecting children and enhancing the trust and confidence agenda.” Victims were also said to frequently abscond from their family homes, leading to calls for the force to improve the way it deals with such situations.
The most common offenders were said to be Pakistani males aged between 16 and 26, and the majority of the victims were white.
But the report showed senior officers had warned of the dangers of racial stereotyping amid claims of a ‘widespread problem of British Pakistani men exploiting under-age white girls’. Police said ‘convenience and accessibility’ may be the prime drivers for those looking for victims, rather than race.
But another report, entitled Internal Human Trafficking For Sexual Exploitation Within the West Midlands, revealed that of 139 female victims, 78 per cent were white. A ‘significant proportion’ of the suspects were said to be of Muslim background.
The oldest document dates from October 2009 and highlights a lack of trust between police and social workers said to be prevalent at the time. Some of the unsympathetic attitudes from the authorities towards vulnerable runaways are also detailed.
“For a number of years children in care or residing in children’s homes have repeatedly run away,” it states. “Unfortunately they are often perceived to be streetwise and able to look after themselves while police officers consider them to be a nuisance and permanent drain on resources.
“Children’s services, home managers and social workers are frustrated by what they perceive to be a lack of interest and action from police officers.
“Officers are equally frustrated by their perception the workers are not protecting the children and let them runaway, often within minutes of a return to their home, which has undermined opportunities to protect missing children.”
The report adds children in care who regularly go missing ‘receive very little police attention’, despite police intelligence showing young girls were being groomed by older men who were often involved in drug trafficking and other criminality.
It also says the identity of those currently engaged in abuse was not known and some intelligence gained in 2008/09 was no longer current.
“There is no current intelligence on vehicles or telephone numbers,” it says.
Police identify three ‘organisational risks’ in the 2010 report, including missing opportunities to secure convictions by dealing with offences only in isolation.
The report also highlighted ‘repeat offence locations’, including hotels, parks, and private homes.
Offences were said to include group rape and sexual assault, indecent assault, child abuse and false imprisonment.

 Trinity Mount Ministries Website

Cracking down on child exploitation

KOAA.com | Continuous News | Colorado Springs and Pueblo

Between April and May 2015, the Colorado Internet Crimes Against Children task force arrested more than 40 people for sex crimes involving victims who are teens and young children.
Nationwide, more than 1,100 arrests were made during this two-month sweep operation.
“Child pornography now involves children as young as infants,” Judy Smith with the U.S. Attorney's Office said. "Back in the 1980's there were hundreds of images online. Now, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has millions of images."
Smith goes after some of the worst child predators in Colorado.
"We focus on child traffickers, people who travel across the state to have sex with children under the age of 12 and people who have enormous amounts of child pornography,” she said.
Take Jon Baker for example. He shared more than 30,0000 pictures and 2,500 videos of child pornography.
He also shared explicit video clips of young girls in chat rooms, pretending to be the girl in the video in order to lure in more victims.
“Baker would play this video when he was chatting with underage boys between 10-12 years old and in doing that, he would get them to expose themselves and create their own child porn and then capture them on his computer and share it with others,” Smith said.
Baker is currently serving a 40-year prison sentence.
Locally, the Internet Crimes Against Children task force goes after the following criminals:
*Offenders who possess, manufacture, and distribute child pornography
*Offenders who engage in online enticement of children for sexual purposes
*Offenders who engage in the commercial sexual exploitation of children (child prostitution)
*Offenders who engage in child sex tourism (traveling abroad)
In May, Colorado Springs police arrested Anthony Martinez, 25.
Authorities say he met up with underage girls he started chatting with online.
Police believe he may have had unlawful sexual contact with 140 victims across five states in addition to Colorado.
Martinez is currently behind bars in Arizona awaiting extradition. He has a court appearance on July 6.
While online child predator cases can be complex to solve, police say they'll catch the predators eventually.
“The predators believe they have anonymity and to a degree they do,” Lt. Robert Weber said. “However, we're constantly finding ways to uncover their anonymity.”
Police say they have tools to uncover a person's IP address, and trace a computer to a specific location.
The Colorado Springs Police Department builds a lot of their cases from tips.
If you have any information about a child being exploited or information about an active sex crimes case involving a child, call police at 444-7000.
In 2008, Congress recognized child exploitation as a national problem and imposed harsher penalties for first-time offenders.
A conviction for distributing child pornography carries a 5-year minimum sentence, while those caught producing child porn face a 15-year minimum sentence.



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Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Bhopal, India - Kids go missing from shelter home, kidnapping case filed:



TNN | Jun 24, 2015, 12.15 PM IST

BHOPAL: A case of kidnapping was filed after two kids, a girl and a boy went missing from a shelter home Nitya Seva Society on Monday. A case of kidnapping was registered at Gandhi Nagar police station against unidentified accused. Kids who went missing are Ankush Batham, 12 and Tasleem, 11. 

They were seen till evening prayer, but found missing in counting during dinner. Officials said Tasleem was brought from Bhopal railway station while the boy was handed over by Child Line. The society works for needy street, slum and platform children. In April, a deaf and mute boy went away, but was later found. The two in question had reportedly gone in past and were found. Teams are on the job to trace missing kids and bring them back, police said. 


Source: The Times Of India - Bhopal


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Lake Bluff To Enact CodeRED System For Emergencies:

 System will allow village to easily communicate with residents during emergencies.


Following an extensive and thorough evaluation and review of alerting systems, the Village of Lake Bluff has implemented the CodeRED system, a high-speed emergency notification service provided by Emergency Communications Network, based in Ormond Beach, Florida.

Public safety officials across the United States have credited CodeRED notifications for saving lives and many successful events including locating missing children, apprehending wanted criminals and issuing timely evacuations.

The CodeRED system will serve as the backbone of the Village’s emergency planning and communications outreach. The platform will allow the Village to communicate with residents and Village personnel by sending telephone calls, text messages, emails, social media and CodeRED Mobile Alert app messages in an effort to effectively inform residents of emergencies to protect life and property. CodeRED, among other notification systems available, was selected for its unrivaled reliability and accuracy, as well as the system’s global use.
“CodeRED’s robust system will provide Village officials with a reliable, easy-to-use interface to quickly disseminate critical information to our residents during emergencies. We are very eager to use this technology to enhance our emergency preparedness plans,” said Police Chief David Belmonte.

The system will be used to notify residents in specific geographic locations of weather emergencies, floods and missing children notices.

Lake Bluff has also contracted the CodeRED Weather Warning system, an automated weather warning technology that delivers phone calls, text messages, and emails to registered residents and businesses within the direct path of severe weather.

The CodeRED Weather Warning system is an opt-in service that automatically notifies those registered of tornado, flash flood, and severe thunderstorm warnings just minutes after an alert is issued by the National Weather Service (NWS).

The Village of Lake Bluff has been provided an initial database of residential and business telephone numbers, however all residents living within the Lake Bluff Village limits are encouraged to visit http://www.lakebluff.org/departments-services/police-department/110-codered and click on the CodeRED logo to enroll additional contact information including cell phone numbers, text and email addresses. No one should assume they have been automatically added to the emergency contact database. The enrollment link will also allow residents to opt-in to receive the automated Weather Warnings. Residents and businesses are encouraged to enter both a cell phone number and email address, and designate the types of weather warnings to be received.

By

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Tuesday, June 23, 2015

The Dark Web: A haven for pedophiles beyond the Internet

by Jerome Elam

WASHINGTON, June 6, 2015 – It was November of 2014 in the quiet suburban neighborhood as the light of an early Saturday morning began to peek through the clouds and the day found its beginning. The quaint three-bedroom home on the corner blended in with the rest of the neighborhood, as the freshly painted beige exterior glistened in the early morning sun. The neatly trimmed yard was littered with the toys of young children, and a brown mini van missing a hubcap was parked in the driveway.

Suddenly the screech of tires broke the landscape of silence as three black Chevy Suburbans with blacked windows came to an abrupt halt in front of the house. A group of men wearing black body armor and matching helmets formed a line behind two others holding a large black battering ram as they the disengaged the safety of their automatic weapons. As the group advanced on the front door, a loud crash echoed as the force of the battering ram met the front door and splinters of wood rained down on the group.

Inside the house a middle-aged man sat at a computer in the darkness as images of young children flashed across the screen and the video streamed across the secret network that made him invisible to the rest of the world. Seconds later, he was lying on the floor handcuffed, and law enforcement agents carefully began to collect the evidence they needed to bring down a global ring of pedophiles.

The investigation had taken over a year and had led agents into the darkest depths of a world few know about, a world where terrorists, drug dealers and pedophiles roam freely. Known as “the Dark Web,” it is a series on non-indexed sites around the world that create an abyss 500 times larger than the Internet you and I surf every day.

Tor is free software that allows a user to browse, send e-mail and chat anonymously. It also allows users access to the “Dark Web.” A 2014 study by University of Portsmouth computer science researcher Gareth Owen discovered a startling 80 percent of the traffic to sites on the Dark Web were associated with child pornography.

In an interview with CBS News, Greg Virgin, who formerly worked with the National Security Agency and is now a cyber security consultant to children’s rights groups commented, “It was just an awful realization, discovering there were tens of thousands of people who are not only trading child pornography, but planning to exploit children.”

On the Dark Web, pedophile “shopping” sites advertise children for sale as well as take “orders” for specific age groups. Virgin said, “We found one site where users openly advertised the ages of the children they were interested in. The average youngest age they were seeking for girls was zero years old. And the average age for boys was one.”

A 2014 Business Insider article by James Cook that documents a pedophile fundraising site for child exploitation videos further emphasizes the growth of child exploitation on the Dark Web. Pedophiles created a twisted form of the popular fundraising tool “Kickstarter,” which collected funds to exploit children and then share the videos on the Dark Web for free.

The FBI is rumored to have taken down several of the servers used by pedophiles on the Dark Web in 2013. But, according to Virgin, “”The demand is picked up very quickly by other sites, and the sites are replaced very quickly, usually by a stronger, better site.”

The Dark Web is a Rubik’s cube of depravity. For those who know how to unlock its many hidden doors, there is no limit to the horrific nightmares children are forced to live. Internet browsers such as Internet Explorer and Google Chrome scan roughly 5 percent of the space that is reached by Tor, which plunges deeply into the hidden world. Internet privacy enthusiasts attempt to deflect criticism of the use of Tor and the presence of child exploitation on the Dark Web by saying the numbers are inflated.

A computer hacker who spoke under the condition of anonymity noted, “There are doors within the Dark Web hidden so well that only a handful of experts could find them, and even then it would take some time to uncover the warren of passageways deep beneath the surface.”

Tor began with a much nobler purpose that still finds its place in the expanding landscape of illicit users on the Dark Web. It was envisioned as a way to allow journalists and those living under oppressive governments a means of communication that would protect their identities and their lives.

Created by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Tor began in the 1990s as a way for the U.S. Intelligence Community to communicate securely. In 1997, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) further developed Tor and in 2004, the Naval Research Laboratory released the code for Tor under a free license. In 2006 a non-profit called “The Tor Project” was created by a group of computer scientists in Massachusetts that maintains Tor in association with several other organizations.

Law enforcement has been fighting back against those who exploit Tor for darker purposes. In 2013, Irish authorities arrested 28-year-old Eric Eoin Marques, who is thought responsible for Freedom Hosting, an anonymous hosting company rife with child exploitation.

After Marques’ arrest, a panic rushed through the pedophile community, when the U.S. National Security Agency released a virus onto the Freedom Hosting website to track and uncover the pedophiles lurking on the Dark Web. Numerous child exploitation forums were deleted in response to law enforcement’s infiltration of their twisted domain, and warnings temporarily drove pedophiles further underground.

The Dark Web interests law enforcement not only because of its large community of pedophiles but also because organized crime, terrorists, money laundering and the illegal drug trade have proliferated in its dark abyss.

For example, the infamous “Silk Road” site provided a marketplace of illicit drugs for sale on the Dark Web. Run by an administrator known only as the “Dread Pirate Roberts” (named after the character in the William Goldman novel and later movie “The Princess Bride”), the site drew the public ire of New York Sen. Chuck Schumer. The FBI arrested Ross William Ulbricht after an elaborate sting operation caught him logged on to the Silk Road site as the Dread Pirate Roberts himself.

The Dark Web has become an arena where the cat and mouse game between authorities and those who exploit a child’s innocence continues. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reports that as of January 2015, its CyberTipline received more than 3.3 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation since it was launched in 1998. Memex, a powerful new search engine developed by DARPA has given U.S. law enforcement the ability to root out the elusive miscreants who trade in the most depraved corners of the Dark Web.

We face a desperate struggle as child exploitation continues to grow at an unprecedented rate. Law enforcement needs everyone to learn how those who exploit our children operate. It is only when we have all joined together in the fight to save our children that we will finally eradicate these parasites of the innocent.

As a survivor of child sex trafficking, childhood sexual abuse and childhood sexual exploitation, I understand the continuous cycle of abuse each victim suffers. As a child I was abandoned by irresponsible and abusive parents, left to fend for myself, stripped of the tools that every child needs to function in the world and saved from a darker ending only by the unconditional love of my great-aunt.

I have struggled my entire life with the effects of my early loss of innocence. Overcoming it has been my greatest triumph, but it only became possible through the love and caring of those who held human compassion in the highest regard and dedicated themselves to the rescue of those standing at the edge of the abyss.

My sincerest hope is that I can save one child from suffering the hell I endured. Then I can leave this life with a sense of accomplishment. I hope you will all join me in the fight to protect our children from sexual predators before the next child is stripped of innocence.

To learn more about how you can help stop those who exploit a child’s innocence and report suspected child sexual exploitation, visit the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children website http://www.missingkids.com/cybertipline/ or call the CyberTipline at 1-800-843-5678. Working together we can save the next child from a lifetime of ravaged innocence and stolen hopes and dreams.

Source: The Dark Web

Friday, June 19, 2015

Missing child alerts to become part of all Dutch Facebook timelines:


Amber Alerts for missing children will be automatically placed on all Facebook pages in the Netherlands, thanks to a new agreement between the social media platform, police and the hotline organisation, the Telegraaf reports on Friday.

Amber Alerts are currently shown in the timelines of people who have ‘liked’ the warning system, but that is now set to change, the paper says. 

The Amber Alert will be placed at the top of every Facebook user’s timeline for 12 hours when they log in for the first time. The aim, the paper says, is to ensure missing children are found more quickly. 

Facebook has been working with the Amber Alert operations in the US since the beginning of this year. This is the first European agreement. 

Amber Alerts are issued three to four times a year in the Netherlands and are also spread via mobile phone apps, text messages, emails and motorway information boards. 

They are only used for the most urgent cases, the organisation says.

Source: Missing child alerts on Dutch Facebook timelines


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Mother of Missing Hoggle Kids Faces Two Trials:

Family members of Sarah and Jacob Hoggle, missing for 9 months, say the children are alive. Their mother won't disclose their location.
Catherine Hoggle, the Montgomery County mother charged with child neglect in the disappearance of her two children, faces two rounds of legal battles this summer: a criminal trial and a civil fight with the children’s father.
Missing siblings Jacob Hoggle, 2, and Sarah Hoggle, 4, have not been seen since early September 2014. Their mentally ill mother was with them last and refuses to tell the children’s father, her mother, or police, where the children are. Those family members remain steadfast in their belief that the children are alive.
Catherine Hoggle – a schizophrenic who reportedly refused to stay on her medication -- remains in the Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center. Hoggle says the children are safe, but has not given any information on their whereabouts.
She is scheduled to go to trial July 8 on charges of child neglect and obstructing and hindering an investigation in connection with the disappearance of the youngsters, reports Montgomery Community Media.
The children’s father, Troy Turner, who is Hoggle’s common-law husband, is seeking to be appointed her legal guardian. Hoggle’s attorney has filed to dismiss the case, says MCM, but an Aug. 6 trial is scheduled in that matter.
There are two theories on the fate of the children. Turner and Lindsey Hoggle, the children’s grandmother, believe Catherine gave the youngsters to someone to care for them. Montgomery County Police say they believe the children are dead, although no bodies have been found.
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