In the spring of 2016, a Victoria police detective went into an online chatroom, posing as a 26-year-old single mother with a five-year-old daughter.
She expressed an interest in incest and “family fun” to those chatting online. A man named Daddy14 responded to her post, and during the next seven weeks, engaged in graphic and disturbing conversations about the sex acts he’d like to perform with the mother and her child.
The man, later identified as 61-year-old Brian Steve Bandura of Edmonton, soon decided to put his fantasies into action, and booked a hotel room for a weekend in Victoria at the end of May.
But instead of arriving to meet a woman who’d fulfill his sexual desires, he was taken into custody by Victoria police, who found an assortment of items inside his car, including paddles, chains, whips, ropes and probes with electric currents. They also found images of very young girls on his phone.
For the sole detective dedicated to investigating such crimes in Victoria, the arrest felt great.
“It was very satisfying to be able to identify him and actually grab him when he came,” said Det. Mark MacPhail, VicPD’s Internet child exploitation investigator.
“That’s our goal is to try to save children.”
According to police, Internet child exploitation is more common than most people think and is an area of crime that’s on the rise. In 2015, the B.C. Integrated Child Exploitation Team (ICE), found 1,228 unique instances of child pornography exchanged in the province online through peer-to-peer file sharing during a six-month period. An inspector with the RCMP called the extent of the problem “disturbing.”
In Victoria, officers often receive information from BC ICE to begin hunting for possible offenders in the region and find victims. MacPhail’s case load currently sits at 18 files.
He can’t get into details on how police investigate such crimes, but said the investigations take time to identify offenders, build a rapport and determine if they are actually in Victoria. The bulk of offenders MacPhail has arrested have never had any dealings with police and come from all walks of life.
Viewing the graphic images and videos of children being sexually abused is no easy task. In one of the cases MacPhail investigated, a teacher was abusing young boys and writing disturbing stories about it online. Even for a seasoned detective, the stories were difficult to read.
“I always look at it as I should never turn away from that because that child is being abused in front of me and there’s something I can see or hear that would help me identify who that is and who’s doing that,” said MacPhail. “The nice thing about being in this unit is I have lots of people to talk to. To be able to talk to people about it is pretty important for me. It helps a lot.”
Sgt. Kristi Ross, head of the Victoria police special victims unit, is on the flip side of the investigations, sitting down with victims and hearing the chilling details about their childhood abuse. Many victims are now adults struggling to cope with the fact their abuse has been chronicled for people to look at world-wide.
Ross can’t help but feel empathy for the victims and do something to help them heal, even though nothing can change what happened. Rescuing children from the hands of an abuser is what keeps her going.
With Internet child exploitation on the rise, Ross said it’s more important than ever for adults to talk to children about who they’re chatting with online, and to recognize the signs if a child is being abused.
Catching the offenders and identifying victims is a never-ending challenge for police that often involves a collaborative approach with multiple jurisdictions, but it’s also been the most rewarding work of Ross’ 18-year career.
“Nothing has mattered more...You talk about the re-victimization of these children. They are not the ones logging on, they’re just put in front of a camera, as young as infants and into whatever age, and their abuse is being put out there,” said Ross. “You’re looking at real life sexual abuse of a child. There’s nothing more violent in the world than that.”
In December, Bandura was sentenced to 18 months in jail followed by three years probation after pleading guilty to communicating with a person electronically to make arrangements to commit a sexual offence against a child. He was also among 14 men arrested in October 2016 for online child sexual exploitation in northern Alberta.
For more information on programs and services to reduce child victimization visit the Canadian Centre for Child Protection at protectchildren.ca.