Advertisements, Web sites and beauty contests feed pedophilia

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With each day the news show more crimes and dead children. People are afraid to let their kids go to school or the park. This is the case in every town and village and not only in big cities.

Children are in danger wherever they go – school, the gym or at camp. But what's really happening? How can we protect them from the growing number of Russia's pedophiles? Have they always been around? Were their crimes simply hidden? Or is there a new wave of pedophilia taking hold of the country?

Several recent crimes of child assault

Krasnoyarsk – After a yearlong search, police finally captured the murderer of 5-year-old Polina Malkova. Her tortured remains were found 10 days after the child's disappearance. The maniac lived nearby.

Leningrad region, February – Nine-year-old Natasha Rubtsova was raped and killed.

Saint Petersburg, January  – Former boxer Kuznetsov beat a man to death who purportedly violated his 8-year-old son. Investigators will soon bring the matter to trial and learn who was in fact to blame in the case. Most people, though, have already taken Kuznetsov's side. They're relieved that someone has finally defended an innocent child.

Krasnoyarsk region, January – A 10-year-old girl was raped and killed in the small Severo-Eniseysk village.

Orenburg, December 2007 – Relatives caught a boy raping their 8-year-old girl. They beat him to death.

Orenburg region, Staritskaia village, December 2007 – Officials learned that the director of a local school was raping female pupils for more than two years by threatening to expel them. The victims were younger than 12 years old. The director would ask one girl at a time to stay after her lessons and then force her to fulfill his sexual desires.

Maniacs wake up in spring?

There are tens, hundreds, even thousands of similar incidents. Each year, almost 7,000 children in Russia are victims of sexual assault. (These statistics were mentioned during a recent round table at the Interior Ministry.) Pedophiles belong to the category of so-called latent criminals, meaning that it's nearly impossible to estimate how many of them there are. Their sickness is made apparent only after the crime is committed.

Investigators have also found pedophilia to be a seasonal crime. Like many mentally ill people, pedophiles are mainly active in the spring and fall. The rest of the year, incidents of child sexual assault remain steady. So why were there so many crimes this winter?

"This winter was unusually warm," specialists say. "They probably confused it with the spring. But to our horror the spring has just started."

Where did they come from?

The pedophiles didn't arrive from another planet. They often live close by for years without showing any sign of aggression. Specialists say there are as many such criminals now as there were 5-10 years ago. They also assert that society pushes these individuals into action, removing the taboos that were once placed on these heinous crimes.

In recent years, advertisements have helped to build an international cult of youth. The age which is considered young is constantly shrinking. The models in TV clips who used to be 18-20 years old are now only 15-16. Sometimes younger. These girls are depicted as the pinnacle of beauty and objects of desire. Lusting over young girls is now more prestigious than it is embarrassing. Children’s faces flood media advertisements. What's more, children are taught at a young age that they need to live beautifully and healthily. How? By selling their youth.

Одно из самых громких дел в Екатеринбурге. Группа педофилов-извращенцев поставляла мальчиков 8 - 14 лет богатым клиентам. На фото: оперативная съемка во время задержания преступников.

Child molesters help their victims with money. Many agree to pose for them. But what about children's beauty contests and model agencies where first graders are invited to participate?

Beauty contests for young children were held several years in a row in Yekaterinburg. Children aged 7-10 were taught to dress stylishly and even pick out cosmetics. They also learned how to walk like models and use etiquette. It may have looked like a harmless initiative at first, but what a sight! Little girls coquettishly walking the catwalk, showing their naked shoulders and adult make-up... The last contest was held in the summer. The winner was only 7 years old. Moreover, an entire criminal network was later discovered in Yekaterinburg that offered young boys to wealthy clients. And almost every day, the city’s children are victims to these maniacs.

In Nizhniy Novgorod, Director of the Elit-Moda Model Agency Dmitriy Petrakovskiy was arrested for molesting young girls and running a prostitution ring. Petrakovskiy used nude photos of the girls to find his clients. But everything started off with seemingly good intentions – to teach young girls how to be pretty.

Russia's beauty industry has acquired a vicious image. Frederik Berbeder addressed this issue in his book "Ideal." The main character searches for a new modeling superstar across Russia.

"Only one thing bothered me – the growing pedophilization of the industry," he said. "But inasmuch as my colleagues thought that this was normal, I soon stopped worrying as well. And I worked my hardest, successfully arousing the desire of men all over the world to sleep with children."

And the growing popularity of child pornography proves that more and more men are interested in young girls.

Monsters on the Web

The true expanse for all perverts is the Web.

Pedophiles are usually advanced Internet users. They enter various sites, leave children's photos, and introduce themselves to others. As gifted psychologists, most maniacs easily win over children's trust and offer to meet them in real life. Some schools make their jobs easier by placing information about their students on the Web (though only with good intentions). Pedophiles actively use this information while looking for new victims.

Perverts have their own online communities as well. They meet at forums and exchange fantasies. On occasion, the heated desires of a pervert may force others to act. And it's difficult to find pedophiles over the Internet. They rarely enter the same site or forum more than once.

На детских конкурсах красоты малышки вышагивали по подиуму с оголенными плечами.

"We place special attention on suppressing the spread of child pornography across the Web," said Boris Miroshnikov, head of the Interior Ministry's Bureau of Special Technical Actions, at a round table discussion to combat child assault. "This horrid crime isn't so popular in Russia. We work with Internet providers that block access to these sites. Our main goal is to find those who make and distribute these materials. But we're not chasing the people who look at these sites."

Strange, isn't it? They're looking for the producers, not the consumers. But the people who use these horrible materials are every bit as dangerous. An ordinary person won't search out child pornography on the Web.

It's also questionable whether child pornography isn't popular in Russia. There are thousands of sites for perverts across our Internet. In the virtual porn industry, child pornography is a very profitable sector. And as the free market adage goes – supply breeds demand. Even if the officials catch everyone who is producing child pornography, the Web site owners will still be earning from the clicks and subscriptions of their visitors.

Of course Russian law does envisage punishments for those found making and distributing child pornography. According to Article 242-1 of the Russian Criminal Code, "Preparation and Distribution of Materials or Objects with Pornographic Images of Children," criminals face 6 years in prison if convicted.

Judging from the abundance of child pornography sites, though, this sentence seems too lenient.

As an experiment, we typed in "child pornography" on Yandex.ru. A huge number of links popped up ranging from "Lolitas, Sex with 12-year-old Girls" to "Child Pornography Boy" and "10-Year-Old Girls Sex."

Truth be told, the majority of these links didn't open. We found the following message on one: "Sometimes we take the site off the Web for one or two days to get the police off out tracks."

Some sites took us further. After reading the note, "Looking for child pornography? Then come on in!," we found ourselves on the completely harmless children's goods site shkolnik.ru. Such advertising tells us that there are more child pornography lovers across the Web than individuals interested in buying run-of-the-mill products for their kids.

Attention! In the next issue of our weekly, we'll continue to address this issue. What do you think?

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