Virginia is confronting a new kind of child molester, one who cruises the Internet rather than parks and playgrounds.

The response has been sweeping: Tough talk from politicians. An estimated $2.5 million in federal funding to a Bedford County enforcement program. Even a superstar athlete who has joined the fight against online predators.

Yet the true scope of the problem remains unclear.

Meeting last week in Roanoke, a task force created by Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell continued to look for ways to fight the sexual solicitation of children and the spread of child pornography over the Internet. The panel is cut from the same philosophical cloth as Operation Safe Childhood, a national initiative.

"It is not an exaggeration to say that we are in the midst of an epidemic of sexual abuse and exploitation of our children," U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told a crowd when he unveiled his Safe Childhood project in May.

But while federal prosecutions are rising rapidly, Virginia and local numbers that prove Gonzales' point are hard to come by.

Over the past four years, there were at least 170 convictions in state courts for child pornography and online solicitation, according to the Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission, which first began compiling statistics this summer at McDonnell's request.

That's an average of less than one case a year for each city and county in Virginia.

Arrests on federal charges across the country increased by more than 2,000 percent over the past decade, from 68 in 1996 to 1,649 in 2005. Fifty-six of those arrests were made in the Roanoke-based Western District of Virginia.

That's an average of almost six cases a year for an area that stretches from Winchester to Lynchburg to Wytheville and beyond.

And while arrests are up, no one seems sure exactly why. Is it because there are more pedophiles cruising the net? Or is it because more police officers are going online to catch them?

Cyber stings

Technology makes the world move faster, from the way we shop to the way we communicate. The same holds true for sex crimes, as evidenced by the following e-mail exchange between two people who had never met:

trianglelover: you sound to me like you wanna be a bad girl ... lol

kira_kicks: maybe lol

trianglelover: mmm

kira_kicks: never been one b4 not sure how

trianglelover: well if ya wanna be one ... I'll show ya ... lol.

As it turned out, trianglelover was George Porter, a 46-year-old Hopewell man who thought he was corresponding with a 13-year-old girl. But kira_kicks was really a police officer, and Porter was arrested last year after he stepped off a Greyhound bus in Roanoke on his way to what he thought was a motel room rendezvous.

The online sting that led to Porter's arrest is a method police are using more frequently as they attempt to find pedophiles in cyberspace before pedophiles find real victims in the community.

Porter, who called himself an Internet addict, was sentenced in January to 10 years in prison for attempting to arrange the sexual liaison and possessing electronic images of child pornography on his computer.

Technology has done more than just revolutionize the way child pornography is produced, distributed and viewed. It has also united what used to be a community of outcasts.

"Before the Internet, it was difficult and risky for child exploiters ... to share images, which left the child pornography industry relegated to small black markets in underground bookstores or secret mailings," stated a Department of Justice report released earlier this year. "Today, the Internet has provided these pedophiles with an accessible, convenient and anonymous means for interacting with their community and obtaining illicit material."

One study showed that 88 percent of child pornography discovered by law enforcement was stored on hard drives and disks as opposed to hard copies, according to FBI profiler Kathleen Canning.

Canning and other investigators say collectors of child pornography images can rapidly begin to want more and more explicit images.

"It is an epidemic only because of what I've understood to be the very addictive nature of child pornography. I have heard it described as addictive as crack," McDonnell said. "These folks just continue to consume child pornography images in huge quantities."

Imprecise data

At any given time, 50,000 sexual predators are prowling the Internet, looking for children.

It's an alarming figure, and one that Gonzales has cited in speeches and studies. Virginia's attorney general has used the statistic, too.

Problem is, the source was not an official study -- it was a "Dateline NBC" segment.

Dateline reporter Chris Hansen, who first used the figure in one of his broadcasts and has since stopped using it, said it was couched as just an estimate.

McDonnell said he stopped using the figure after he noticed a footnote in Gonzales' Project Safe Childhood booklet attributing it to "Dateline."

"But I think your point is good there," he said. "There aren't really any great statistics out there to tell you what the scope of the problem is."

McDonnell discovered that himself when he first started his task force. A lack of comprehensive statewide figures led him to commission the study by the sentencing commission. Even now, the numbers prepared by the commission include only cases in which solicitation or child pornography was the primary offense; any cases that also included more serious charges, such as forcible sodomy or rape, are left uncounted.

The fact that many sex offenses go unreported makes it even more difficult to measure the true extent of Internet sex crimes.

And with so many police officers joining the chase -- state and local police are sometimes assisted by federal agencies such as the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Postal Service and the Internal Revenue Service -- one case can be counted as several.

"There's so much out there and it's so voluminous. Certainly it's bigger than the FBI can handle or postal or whoever," said Lawrence Barry, chief division counsel for the FBI in Richmond. "If we have a joint case, we'll claim a stat and another agency will claim a stat as well, so there's overlap."

But for whatever confusion it might cause, the cooperation also gives authorities more flexibility in deciding whether to try a case in state or federal court.

"No one cares who gets them," said FBI Special Agent Katherine Kelley, who used to work sex crimes in Roanoke. "Whoever has the heavier hammer is who should prosecute them."

While arrests for Internet crimes against children are on the rise, the suspicious stranger whom many parents fear the most may not, in fact, be the greatest threat to their young sons and daughters.

According to a study by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 38 percent of child abusers were parents, 33 percent were family friends and just 9 percent were the result of online enticement.

Statistics in Virginia show a similar pattern: Of the 4,326 child victims seen by sexual assault crisis centers from 2000 to 2004, just 7 percent were assaulted by strangers, according to the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance.

"I think the general public has a misunderstanding about what poses the most threat to children," said Kate McCord, public awareness manager for the alliance. "Not that stranger danger is not something that children should be protected from. But the primary threat to children are the people who care for them on a day-to-day basis."

At least by some measures, things could be getting better instead of worse. After conducting a survey that found one in five children were subjected to an unwanted sexual solicitation online in 1999 and 2000, the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire recently did a follow-up study.

It found that one in seven children had received an unwanted sexual solicitation in 2005. The decrease from five years ago could be due to a greater awareness among young people about the dangers of the Internet and chat rooms in particular. "Many youth described chat rooms as unpleasant places attracting unsavory people," the report stated.

Although online solicitations were down last year, the report found an increase in the number of children -- 34 percent of those surveyed -- who were exposed to unwanted sexually graphic images, either by surfing the Web or in e-mails sent to them.

Exploiting the issue?

In the 1980s and early 1990s, when the crack epidemic was spawning drive-by shootings and social decay in many inner-city neighborhoods, lawmakers across the country responded with tougher laws, including mandatory minimum prison sentences.

More recently -- with children being abducted, molested and sometimes killed in high-profile cases that dominate the 24-hour news cycle -- law-and-order legislators have shifted their attention from drug dealers to pedophiles.

In South Carolina, the House recently voted to allow the death penalty for some child molesters. In Georgia, a new law bars sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of any place where children regularly gather.

And in Virginia, the General Assembly this year passed a law championed by McDonnell that imposes a mandatory sentence of 25 years in prison for first-time offenders who molest children in the commission of an abduction or burglary. One proposal being considered by McDonnell's task force is a mandatory sentence of at least 5 years for producers of child pornography.

Despite all the attention, sex crimes across the country have actually been declining for years now.

Cases of sex abuse involving juveniles dropped by 79 percent between 1993 and 2003, according to national survey data analyzed by the Crimes Against Children Research Center. In Virginia, sex offenses involving children reported to the state police have remained stable over the past five years.

Still, upwardly mobile politicians can score points with the public by cracking down on child molesters. But does all the talk of an "epidemic" and the need for tougher laws create more fear in the community than is justified?

"There's nothing that gets the public riled up more than the prospect of sex offenders running loose in the community, and if you can promote that perception and generate that fear, it will work well as a political tool," said Dan Maccallair, executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a California-based group that stresses alternatives to incarceration.

"We need to have laws, obviously, to prevent people from sexually exploiting children," Maccallair said. "But what we're seeing is the exploitation of the issue by people running for office."

McDonnell responded: "Everybody is entitled to their own opinion. My job is to be a top public safety official. I was a prosecutor back in '90 and '91. I prosecuted in juvenile court and I prosecuted sex offenders, and there was no more devastating victim that I saw than someone molested as a child.

"It has been a passion for me for an awful long time to try and do something about sex offenders. I have five children of my own, and it is something that is for me extremely important."

'Identify and tag'

It is difficult to say how much money is devoted to child pornography and solicitation investigations because most law enforcement agencies do not keep track of anything that specific. However, according to Catherine Sanders with the Department of Justice, the DOJ has distributed $80 million in grants to Internet Crimes Against Children task forces across the country.

Operation Blue Ridge Thunder in Bedford County, which is one of those task forces, has received about $2.5 million since its inception in 1998. The operation -- which includes NBA superstar Shaquille O'Neal as a reserve sheriff's deputy -- has made about 150 arrests since then, Sanders said.

Many of Blue Ridge Thunder's arrests stem from online stings, which officials justify with the rationale that predators should be captured before they molest a child.

Even if the offender is only convicted of a misdemeanor, success comes in "identifying and tagging" them, said Bedford County Commonwealth's Attorney Randy Krantz, who prosecutes Blue Ridge Thunder cases.

Though some defense attorneys have concerns about entrapment -- law enforcement drawing the defendant into a crime they had no intention of committing -- those challenges don't tend to hold up.

"The people who are out there trolling and looking, by the language that they use, most of them sort of seal their own fate," said Roanoke defense attorney Deborah Caldwell-Bono.

And while police obviously make false statements, so do the people they investigate.

Despite what an Internet cruiser might say about himself online to a potential victim, "He's not 6 foot 3 and tall, dark and handsome," Caldwell-Bono said. "He's a bald, short, fat guy in his 50s."

Laurence Hammack can be reached at 981-3239 or laurence.hammack@roanoke.com

Lindsey Nair can be reachedat 981-3343 or lindsey.nair@roanoke.com