June 6, 2008 (update)KINSA is pleased to congratulate author Julian Sher, whose book One Child at a Time: The Global Fight to Rescue Children from Online Predators has won the 2008 Arthur Ellis Crime Writers of Canada Award in the Best Non-Fiction Category. KINSA also recently honoured Sher as one of Eight Heroes Who Make a Difference in the fight to end the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet. Read more and watch a video highlighting Sher's and the other heroes' important contributions here.
KINSA is pleased to congratulate author Julian Sher, whose book One Child at a Time has been shortlisted for a 2008 Arthur Ellis Crime Writers of Canada Award. Learn more about the award here.
One Child at a Time has garnered consistently positive reviews, and was cited as a Globe and Mail top 100 book for 2007. Published in the spring of 2007, the book goes behind the headlines to show how law officers are fighting back against the tide of abuse that is online child exploitation, from daring rescues in homes to the seizures of millions of dollars in the offshore bank accounts of porn merchants. In riveting detail, Sher shows how clue by clue, and image by image, investigators are using cutting edge tools, turning the technology of the Internet against the perpetrators as they race to find and rescue the victims - children who otherwise have no voice.
The following is an excerpt:
In their efforts to rescue the child victims of one of today's most pervasive and insidious crimes, police must be creative, dogged and go well beyond the borders drawn on any map ...
Canadian cop Paul Gillespie changed the way that police around the world tackle Internet porn. He decided that if the system was broken, he was going to send an email to Bill Gates and ask for help. Gates not only answered, but Microsoft ended up kicking in millions of dollars, working with Gillespie's team to develop the Child Exploitation Tracking System, a searchable database to track and investigate Web predators and their victims. It soon spread across Canada, and then to the UK, Australia and the U.S.
Older men pretend to be young and caring, luring lonely young girls in chat rooms. But when they show up to meet their victim, they discover the FBI is waiting to arrest them. Emily Vacher, one of the FBI's top Internet undercover operatives, specializes in trapping the predators at their own game of deception.
The photos of the child's abuse were everywhere on the Net, but no one knew who or where she was. In a frantic 36-hour hunt, using CSI-type sleuthing to find clues in the pictures, Canadian, American and European police rescued a girl from North Carolina.
Jim Gamble, one of the most senior police officers in the UK, has spearheaded the creation of a Virtual Global Taskforce to patrol the web 24/7. It was time for a sheriff to tame the wild, wild Web, Gamble decided. Now children have a red "report abuse" button on chat room software and browsers they can click any time they feel threatened.
It is time for the children's stories - too often hidden in the dark corners of the Web - to be told. Their torment has been etched in their memories - and the memories of the police officers dedicated to rescuing them. It is what scars them. But it is also what spurs them on.
Because they know behind every picture or video lies a little, frightened child. Detective Sergeant Paul Gillespie of the Toronto Police's Exploited Child Unit can't shake the lingering echoes of some of the worst videos he has seen of shackled children:
"Sometimes," he says, "you can hear the children cry."
Learn more about One Child at a Time at Amazon.ca.