NCMEC's Child Victim Identification Program (CVIP) helps UK law enforcement rescue child victim
June 21, 2012
During the course of providing technical assistance to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in November 2011, staff with the Child Victim Identification Program (CVIP) at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) reviewed sexually abusive images and videos of an unidentified female child. The videos depicted an adult male, which only the side of the male'sface was seen. Further analysis of the images showed Exchangeable image file format (EXIF) with Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates which indicated the files were produced in a specific area of the United Kingdom.
CVIP analysts quickly contacted the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) in the United Kingdom. The investigators with CEOP immediately started contacting local schools, medical facilities, Social Services and others in the hopes of identifying the female child. The child was identified when staff at one school recognized her.
Local Officers with the Metropolitan Police Service were provided with details and images of the female child and side view image of the suspect’s face. Open source searches on a Social Networking site conducted by CEOP located images of the suspect which appeared consistent with the sexually abusive images. The Officers and Social Workers from the local area went to the home of the female child where they interviewed her. She did not disclose victimization; however, she did provide the names of threeadditional children who may have been victimized by the suspect. Those children were interviewed, but they also did not disclose victimization.
With the information provided to law enforcement, the child’s 51-year-old father was arrested at his place of employment. He was interviewed, but gave no statement to law enforcement. Analysis of the suspect’s laptop revealed sexual abuse images of his daughter. That same day, the suspect was charged and placed into custody.
The suspect was sentenced in April 2012 to 15 years for molestation and distribution of child pornography. Even though the suspect has been sentenced, there is still work to be done by law enforcement. Email addresses of individuals with whom the suspect was trading the images were recovered by CEOP. They will be working aggressively to track down those individuals in the hopes of identifying more children.
NCMEC wishes to congratulate the agencies whose expeditious work and determination of finding the victim resulted in the identification and apprehension of this suspect. Law enforcement should be commended for removing multiple childrenfrom sexual abuse and
possibly preventing the harm to future victims. Specifically, we’d like to recognize the following agencies:
- US - Los Angeles Police Department
- UK - Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre
- UK - London Metropolitan Police Service
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