Aussie kids rescued in sex exploitation probe
MORE than forty children have been rescued from sexual exploitation across Australia in just four months — while police investigations with overseas partners have uncovered many more youngsters still in danger.
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POLICE have rescued dozens of children from child sexual exploitation across Australia in the past four months alone as officers ramp up both the pursuit of offenders and education programs for school students and teachers.
Australian Federal Police deputy commissioner Neil Gaughan yesterday told a Senate committee hearing that only months after creating the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation, 44 children had been “removed from harm”.
According to his evidence, from July 1 to October 17, 44 children had been rescued from sexual exploitation nationally, with criminal action launched against 40 offenders facing 173 charges. Equally troubling, he said, however, was there had been another 106 children identified who were previously not known to law enforcement.
The AFP declined to go into specifics but confirmed the rescued were from every state and territory.
Another 20 people have been arrested overseas as part of AFP investigations.
“Through international partnerships we’ve identified a number of children who were subjected to child abuse, particularly in relation to the production of child exploitation material, and we’ve identified 106 children who were not previously known to law enforcement, which is obviously the first step to recovering those children once they’re identified,” Mr Gaughan said.
Those partnerships were particularly in the region including Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines, where sex tourism still booms for foreign visitors.
The AFP has warned Australians exploiting children that whether they are in Australia or overseas they will be pursued and caught, such as the recent multi-agency case launched with overseas partners to identify and catch deplorable characters like Peter Gerard Scully who built a global industry from sadistic child sexual torture videos he made from his base in the Philippines.
“We work very closely with our South-East Asian partners,” Mr Gaughan said. “Unfortunately, many Australians travel to South-East Asia to undertake child sex offences, so we work very closely, particularly with the Thais and Cambodians, to try and stop that. We’ve also been very successful in recent times working with our international partners and our partners in Home Affairs to prevent people travelling overseas by having their passports cancelled or something similar.”
Mr Gaughan said a big focus of the AFP had been the agency’s involvement in the ThinkUKnow program in schools, which educates about the dangers of the internet and how it is used to groom young people. Together with state and territory police counterparts, 485 presentations were delivered to reach 17,000 parents, carers and teachers over the year as well as 2711 presentations to 196,000 school students.
When asked by Senator Jim Molan about the dollar value of such programs, AFP Commissioner Andrew Colvin added: “I couldn’t put a dollar value on what it costs, but I also can’t put a value on the return, because I think the return on this investment is enormous.”
He added that the AFP had a focus that was very much projected outward to partners in the region and Australian involvement in abuse overseas.
“At the same time, our interest extends to those people who are offending against children online, through viewing images, through what we see as an insidious development in this crime type, pay for view, where people are actively using the internet to pay to watch children overseas being offended against,” Mr Colvin said. “Then again, there are children in Australia who, as a result of information from overseas or our investigations, who we are rescuing now.”
According to the AFP’s annual report tabled this week, in 2017–18, co-operation between the AFP and Indonesian Immigration, facilitated by AFP officers in Bali and Jakarta, has contributed to a reduction in the number of registered offender arrivals into Bali alone from 157 in 2013 to five in 2017–18. The rate of offenders turned away at the Indonesian border has also significantly increased. No registered offenders were refused entry in 2013, while 88 per cent were refused entry in the last year.
PREDATOR JAILED
THROUGH tears, cheers and applause, children in a Filipino court exploded with emotion in June this year as Australian child sex predator Peter Gerard Scully was found guilty and sentenced to life for raping, abusing and trafficking them over several years.
Scully appeared unmoved as, in the Cagayan de Oro court in Mindanao in southern Philippines, Judge Jose Escobido found him guilty of one charge of trafficking which carried a life sentence and five charges of rape by sexual assault for which he was sentenced to a maximum nine years each.
Despite Scully being told he would “suffer” life in jail, the court went further and said the former Victorian man would still be arraigned the following week on 11 further sexual assault charges and pledged to follow through with another 50 charges for justice to be done for his many victims.
In all he faced 75 charges in three different Filipino districts related to abuse of more than a dozen children.
Scully’s lawyers suggested their client would look to appeal.
Those in court told News Corp Australia many of his child victims were present for the sentencing and cheered as soon as they heard the word “life”.
“Some of the victims are dead but the applause by some of the kids, the victims, who were there in court summed up what this means for all of them and those who worked on the case,” one court witness said.
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Scully fled Melbourne in 2011 after being pursued on fraud charges related to property scams. But from Mindanao he built an international paedophile network with pay-per-view streams on the dark web of children, some as young as one-year-old, being abused on camera.
Some of the children were put in chains and raped and tortured by Scully and two accomplices on camera, sparking a team of Australian Federal Police officers from various divisions, both based in the Philippines and Australia, to urgently work around-the-clock to gather evidence, find him and bring him to justice.
On one video he urged would-be viewers to watch the “mental ruin” of a young girl as she was tied upside down and abused. He later forced her to dig her own grave but she was rescued in time.
The video known as “Daisy’s Destruction”, which was selling for $10,000 per view and rated one of the worst abuses of its kind ever recorded, was also ordered by Judge Escobido to be taken down from the internet, with him warning anyone having the video would be arrested and charged. The video was being downloaded at one stage 15,000 times a day.
Scully, who was arrested in 2015, and his accomplices found their victims either as homeless street children or by promising parents to pay for their children’s upbringing and education.
An accomplice and Scully’s former Filipino partner Carme Ann Alvarez was also found guilty and sentenced to life, in their shared 70-page court judgment, and ordered to pay compensation of at least $123,000. Alvarez cried at hearing their sentence.
“While we celebrate the conviction, we should not be complacent, this case should tell us parents, teachers and all that we are the first line of defence in protecting children from online predators and exploiters,” Atty Perfecto Mendoza, head of KASO network of non-government agencies fighting child sexual crimes said.
Originally published as Aussie kids rescued in sex exploitation probe
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