Pedophiles in Our Midst

Take a good long look at Brian Doyle, deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security. Alleged pedophile.

He could be your neighbor, your babysitter, your youth minister, your grocery check-out guy, your best friend's husband. He could be anyone you know. Not exactly a big, flashing sign that says "alleged pedophile" around this guy's neck, is there?

The fact that a Bush administration Department of Homeland Security official was arrested yesterday for attempting to solicit sex from a 14-year-old girl over the internet is a shock for some people. But it shouldn't be.

The fact that this arrest also happened on the day that Justin Berry was testifying about his abuse at the hands of internet sexual predators before Congress makes this all the more horrid, in my mind -- the juxtaposition between Brian Doyle and Justin Berry is just painful when you read the news articles side by side. Taylor Marsh has a fantastic article about this -- it's a tough read but a necessary one to understand the mindset behind this sort of behavior.

Warning: I'm going into a bit of detail below, and I didn't want it to come as a shock for anyone. Know what you face and face it head on.

I've prosecuted a number of pedophiles in my time, as well as participated in ongoing probation supervision for already convicted sexual predators, and there is one thing about which I am absolutely certain: You can never cure a pedophile. You can work with them, you can do aggressive therapy to help them control urges, you can do any number of things that require them to limit contact with children and porn, but there is no cure.

Most pedophiles that I've had to deal with in my legal career were molested themselves as children. A lot of them grew up in families where they were routinely molested by a parent or step-parent, and they grew up thinking this sort of behavior is normal. Not every person who is sexually molested becomes a pedophile, and I wish I knew where that switch gets flipped for some people and not others.

But ultimately it is all about power or the thrill of the hunt, or both, depending on the pedophile. Controlling your victim becomes everything. And almost every pedophile that I've ever had the misfortune of supervising or prosecuting had a long, long history of being a sexual predator. Most pedophiles don't just molest one child (as if that weren't bad enough). I attended a prosecutor's seminar on sexual predators when I was a practicing attorney and was told that the average pedophile has hundreds (yes, hundreds) of victims over a lifetime.

Brian Doyle was sloppy, which means on some level he wanted to get caught. He allegedly informed the undercover cop posing as a 14-year-old that he worked for the Department of Homeland Security. He gave her his cell phone number, a phone issued by the DHS. He was chatting online with the undercover officer at his home in Maryland when officers arrived to arrest him.

Here's what's in store for Mr. Doyle: His computer will have been seized by those police officers. They will comb through the hard drive of that computer for every single chat he has had with a child. They will track down as many of those children as possible to determine whether or not they have had sexual relations with him. They will comb through the hard drive for any child pornography that may exist thereon, and he faces federal criminal charges if there is any (and there likely is, considering that's a fairly usual find in this type of case). There is a criminal count for each picture. There are definitely Florida state charges, since it was a Florida state investigation that caught Mr. Doyle.

The Washington Post reports:

Brian J. Doyle, 55, was arrested at his Silver Spring home at 7:45 p.m. and charged with seven counts of using a computer to seduce a child and 16 counts of transmitting harmful materials to a minor, according to a sheriff's office statement.

…

Doyle was online at the time awaiting what he thought was a nude image of a girl who had lymphoma, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said in an interview with Fox News' "On the Record With Greta Van Susteren." "We wanted to make sure he was using that computer and talking to detectives at the time of the arrest," Judd said.

…

According to the sheriff's office, Doyle initiated a sexually explicit conversation with the detective on March 12 in response to an internet profile of a 14-year-old girl.

Doyle allegedly sent pornographic movie clips, nonpornographic photos of himself and instant messages from his AOL account, the police statement said. The sheriff's office alleged that Doyle "on many occasions" instructed the undercover detective to perform a sexual act while thinking of him and described explicit acts he wished to perform.

I know you are sitting there at your computer thinking "ewwww," and you are right to do so. But you have to face the fact that this sort of thing goes on every day, all over this country before you understand the need to be vigilant in protecting your own children from these sorts of predators. These are seasoned cops, though, who knew to catch him online while they did the arrest, so they had a contemporaneous record and could verify immediately that his prints were on the keyboard from the chatting, giving him no loophole argument for getting around the charges.