Warning: This story contains accounts of child sexual abuse cases. Readers may find the content distressing.
“I simply wanted to tell you that there are some men in this world who were born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father’s one of them.”
This quote is about lawyer Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, but it could have been written about Detective Sergeant Simon Fogarty of the Victoria Police.
For nearly 20 years Fogarty has peered into a dark world most of us choose to ignore. Men, who more often than not sit behind what they hope are anonymous keyboards, watching the degradation, humiliation and physical abuse of children.
He says the satisfaction comes from rescuing children and catching those behind the rackets: “I enjoy the hunt.”
But this work comes at a price. We ask about the cases that stick. He pauses, then talks of the image of a little girl in an animal costume. She is wearing a dog collar.
He then bursts into tears. The little girl looked a little like his daughter.
Detective Sergeant Simon Fogarty.Credit: Justin McManus
“I haven’t thought of that for years,” he says. He apologises. There is no need. It is the look on her face, he says, one of fear and hopelessness. “That is what drives us. To be her voice and to make sure those who commit the abuse face justice.”
He talks of the 10-year-old boy wearing pyjamas and eating pizza in his bedroom when a man online orders him to behave in a sexualised way. The boy, clearly confused and distressed, does what he is told. He even asks permission to leave the room to use the bathroom. Then he comes back.
Fogarty says while viewing the display he was mentally urging the boy to “just shut the computer down”. Of course, he didn’t.
There are two ways cops can deal with this sort of trauma. Develop a protective cloak of cynicism or accept the personal cost is worth the public good.
This doesn’t mean the investigators who hunt paedophiles are left to battle the demons on their own. They are given time limits on viewing online material and have access to counselling. Recently, the courts have abandoned a legal checklist that required investigators to view the images again and again to grade their severity.
Champ the support dog.Credit: Margaret Gordon
And the Victorian Joint Anti Child Exploitation Team (JACET) have their own welfare dog, Champ, a brown Labrador.
He looks after everyone in the office, but those who keep snacks in their pocket are given priority. Helping deal with trauma is hungry work.
Assistant Commissioner (Crime) Bob Hill wonders about the long-term effects on detectives dealing with modern technology. When he worked homicide, the investigators went to the crime scene well after life had left the body.
Now they can view CCTV and often see the crime in real time, such as the young man repeatedly stabbed by multiple offenders in a barbaric gang attack.
So, why do some detectives volunteer to work on child sex crimes? Because it matters.
The morale in the unit is surprisingly high. A pathologist who dealt with war crimes told me: “As long as you believe what you do matters, you can deal with the stress.”
Fogarty is an international expert in his field and earlier this year was awarded the prestigious Australia Police Medal for his work. He has been commended by the US Department of Homeland Security for uncovering online sexual abuse that stretched across countries.
Not bad for a bloke who at 20 had tired of manual labour “working in the rain in winter and often not getting paid”: “I didn’t have a direction and was looking for something different.”
The internet has opened the borders. You can have a child victim in Victoria with the offender in Germany.
In 1996 he joined the police force. On the road in general duties, he was diagnosed with hereditary diabetes and moved to a desk job. Frustrated, he was sent to an anti-corruption taskforce as an intelligence analyst. It was supposed to be for three months. It lasted five years.
With his new set of skills he was sent to child sex crimes at a time when the unit had two dial-up internet lines.
The typical offender then was an older male who had placed himself in a position of trust with children, such as a sports coach, youth volunteer, teacher or church leader.
Now the world has changed: “The internet has opened the borders. You can have a child victim in Victoria with the offender in Germany.”
Some of his cases expose the depth to which people can descend. Kids are effectively put up for auction: “It is live-streaming on demand using children in poorer countries.”
JACET doesn’t just find and charge offenders. Within the squad police have an emergency rescue unit called the Victim Identification Team that tries to find kids at risk.
On the Dark Web a mother and her boyfriend published a price list for abuse. Pay the price and pick your perversion, up to murdering the child in a snuff movie.
VIT found the link and through the Australian Federal Police alerted police in the Philippines, who arrested the man. “The mother with the child is on the run. We are still trying to locate them,” says Fogarty.
They also found a man in Denmark trying to source the correct type of drugs to sedate a child to abuse her while her mother was overseas at a conference.
Alerted by VIT, Danish police arrested the man three days later. “They found the drugs and the mother was about to leave for the conference,” says Fogarty.
In his first international case 10 years ago, Fogarty found an abuser in the United States. Then something strange – his sense of triumph was tinged with guilt. The offender was the victim’s mother. “She only had her mum and she got 25 years’ jail.”
While these horror stories are dreadfully confronting, we can take comfort in the fact that the offenders are a small group of pathetic perverts hiding in the shadows, right?
Wrong.
The tired stereotype that child victims come from broken homes and low socio-economic backgrounds couldn’t be further from the truth.
Fogarty says the more affluent are now the targets. Kids with wireless laptops and mobile phones who disappear into their bedrooms to surf the net for hours at a time.
Locks, CCTV and alarms are pointless, as broadband provides the entry point.
Kids can be groomed in hours – persuaded to send compromising selfies and then blackmailed into an online or physical relationship under the threat of the offender releasing the images.
One predator had multiple online identities, using one to bully young girls and then entering as a second person to protect them. The white knight would then tell his target he was a modelling agent and ask for photos.
You know the rest.
Fogarty says some kids don’t tell their parents of the approaches, fearing they will lose access to their devices. He says parents should be careful to respect their kids’ privacy while making sure the lines of communication stay open.
Of all the crime scene images I have seen over more than 40 years, one stands out as the most depressing, yet it doesn’t show a body or a devastating crime scene.
It is a nighttime map of Melbourne illuminated with thousands of red pinpricks.
Each time a child porn file is seized by police, it is filed in a library. That file now contains millions of files and when one is shared from person to person, it lights up on the map.
Look at the map, and you realise that someone in your immediate neighbourhood is looking at images of abused children. Fogarty says the offenders, often without criminal records, rationalise their behaviour by saying they are “just looking”.
“They are driving the market,” he says.
And, he says, there is a direct link between viewing the material and then seeking personal contact with a child.
COVID, he says, has also fed the market, with adults spending more time online and at home. They click on an image, then another and another, each worse than the last. Desensitised as the images become more brutal, they seek more.
“We are seeing a new batch of offenders across all demographics. We’ve had barristers, bank executives and police.
“We know we are dealing with the tip of an iceberg – we can’t police our way out of this.”
Kids, too young to understand, can involve themselves in sexualised language and images, simply to appear to be grown up. But once the images are online, they can be there for a lifetime.
We all make mistakes, but for older generations they are usually confined to a laugh at the school reunion, not accessed millions of times around the world by strangers.
Police have an online undercover presence, stalking the stalkers. They establish identities, often as lonely teenagers, and when an offender sets up a meeting he finds not a potential sex target but a large group of police with handcuffs.
The key, Fogarty says, is remaining vigilant without overreacting. A child on a walk ran about 100 metres in front of her parents when she tripped. A car pulled over, and the male occupant opened the door.
It was reported as a potential daylight abduction.
“We thought ‘Really?’ The man was just offering to help.”
If you or anyone you know needs support call Kidshelpline 1800 55 1800, Lifeline 131 114, or Beyond Blue 1300 224 636.
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