Twenty-eight children have been rescued from abusive situations as part of a law enforcement crackdown on child porn that led to the arrests of close to 60 violators.
The month-long Operation Janus was conducted by the FBI Dallas Division’s Child Exploitation Task Force and the North Texas Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force between Jan. 16 and Feb. 16. During this period, law enforcement agencies in North Texas used computer crime investigators to identify and rescue child victims as well as arrest abusers trafficking illegal content of kids forced to commit sexual acts. In total, Operation Janus rescued 28 children from online sexual abuse, with 59 offenders facing more than 80 criminal charges.
Investigators are continuing to analyze electronic devices and terabytes of data seized as part of the operation. These will be examined forensically and might lead to a broader investigation involving more offenders.
“The people charged as a result of this operation preyed upon some of our most vulnerable, our children,” said Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia, according to a Feb. 17 press release by the Plano Texas Police Department.
“I applaud the dedication of these task force groups, including members of the Dallas Police Department, to bring these suspects to justice. We will never stop working to identify, locate and apprehend these predators to make our community safer for our children.”
Many of the arrests made under Operation Janus were the result of leads generated via reporting to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said Detective Jeff Rich from the Plano Police Department.
“Electronic service providers, the services you might use on cell phones or your computers, detect contraband material on their servers and they report that to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children who then forward that information to the [a]ffected law enforcement agencies,” he said, according to NBC.
Operation Janus involved the cooperation of 33 law enforcement agencies in Texas that Rich organized. Speaking to CBS News, Rich said that child exploitative material is becoming “more and more prevalent” due to people’s ability to share such data electronically.
Jennifer Hohman, an advocate who helps children and women subjected to sex trafficking, pointed out that people involved in child pornography and sex trafficking can come from all walks of life, including executives, first responders, and educators.
“These are individuals that we’ve told our children are safe. Teachers, firemen, nurses, and so that’s extremely concerning in this particular operation. What do we tell our kids? Nobody’s safe? Right? So that’s why we have to educate. It just makes you wonder, where the hell the world is going?” she said to NBC.
According to a 2021 report by the Internet Watch Foundation, the United States was found to host 21 percent of child sexual abuse URLs subjected to the analysis, up from 5 percent in 2020.
“Prior to 2000, and the rise of the internet, the United States’ National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) believed the global distribution of CSAM to be largely contained,” the report said. CSAM refers to Child Sexual Abuse Material.
“By early 2000, however, the internet became a breeding ground for child predators, resulting in an explosion in the global distribution of CSAM. In early 2000, the average age of a child involved in CSAM was 12 (it is now a mere eight).”
In 2021, CyberTipline, NCMEC’s centralized reporting system for online child exploitation, reported receiving more than 29.3 million reports of CSAM, up by over 72 percent from 16.94 million in 2019.