"Could harm be caused? Absolutely," says the 45-year-old Gillespie. "Would it be more harm than would be caused for the rest of her life if we didn't do anything? We don't know. We're trying to determine the best thing to do."
Gillespie has been on that knife's edge since the Child Exploitation Section was created four years ago. The Toronto police seized more than 2 million pictures and videos of child sexual abuse in 2003. So far, the world's law agencies have identified fewer than 500 of the children.
"We're doing a terrible job," he says in his office at police headquarters. "Five hundred kids of 50,000? What is that?"
Their work is a daily sojourn to the underworld. Gillespie has a team of 10 men and six women who spend hours in front of their computers, extracting leads, writing warrants and sifting photos for clues. The payoff is the day they get to kick down a door and take the "bad guy" away. The mood is light and the humor often off-color to ease the horror.
On one wall is a "Star Trek" poster with investigators' faces substituted for the Starship Enterprise crew. But even that alludes to a dark fact of their work: All but one of the offenders they have arrested in the last four years was a hard-core Trekkie.
Det. Constable Warren Bulmer slips on a Klingon sash and shield they confiscated in a recent raid. "It has something to do with a fantasy world where mutants and monsters have power and where the usual rules don't apply," Bulmer reflects. "But beyond that, I can't really explain it."
That is one of the biggest challenges of the Child Exploitation Section's work. They need to get inside the minds of the victims and the perpetrators to find them, but there is only so far they can -- or want to -- go.
Sitting in front of two computers in a blue suit and gold tie, Det. Constable Paul Krawczyk starts the day as a 13-year-old girl. Within minutes of his entering a chat room on education, and without asking for them, men are e-mailing nude pictures. "It's always the same," he says. "After two minutes, here come the body parts."
Sometimes, he can set up a meeting with a likely offender within half an hour; others take months to be drawn out.
By lunchtime, he is a pedophile conversing with a fellow "pedo" on the other side of the world about their shared interest. "R u active?" he asks, meaning do you abuse kids. "Yea," the message comes back. "Seven [years old] and 2."
