Toronto's growth industry: pornography. (Canada).

Toronto--At the end of January, Toronto learned that it had a growth industry it knew very little about. A nuclear physicist who once worked with top-secret military files was arrested at his North York home and charged with making and possessing child pornography involving children as young as six months old. His name is Blair Evans, and he has already served a jail sentence of eight months for child pornography in Ottawa in 1999. Police found computers, CDs, videotapes, and photos depicting more than 10,000 children in his possession.

Staff Inspector Gary Ellis, of Toronto's sexual assault squad, said, "I would call child porn an epidemic in the city." Police Chief Julian Fantino said that we have not realized how pervasive this whole problem is and how the Internet and technology are taking it beyond the bounds of our own communities; the Evans case came to light, for example, when a New Zealand police officer who was chatting online undercover came across information which he could relay to Toronto authorities. Police said that they have identified at least 200 people who have distributed or are currently distributing child pornography in the city.

Is it innocent fun? Staff Sergeant Paul Gillespie described the experience of examining the seized materials as "sickening." "All you have to see is one image and you'll never be the same. There's no warm and fuzzy way to explain the look of terror on a 4-year-old's face when he is being sodomized." Staff Inspector Ellis said that "These 200,000 images of children...represent tens of thousands of individual children as young as six months old being abused in the most horrendous ways."

Ellis called child pornography an epidemic in the city of Toronto: "We are one of the centres in the world for distributing pornography. It's our hidden crime; it's our hidden shame as a community." Even looking at the material, he said, victimizes the children involved; some of the images show children being tortured in the most unimaginable ways. "If we can't protect our children," Fantino declared, "then we should, as a society, fly the white flag of surrender because all is lost" (Toronto Sun, Star, N. Post, Jan 22/01).