Kiddy porn in the closet. What NOT to find spring cleaning.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I feel ill and it has been several hours since this horrifying discovery.

I was helping my boyfriend clean out the bedroom of his cousin that lived with him and his parents for several years after the death of the cousin’s parents. His cousin is very much like a brother to my boyfriend, and a son to his parents. I have known him for years, and find him to be a wonderful guy.

The whole of my boyfriends family are pack rats. The amount of clutter in their house is amazing though it is relatively organized. I have been the swift wind of de-clutterization helping my boyfriend rid his parent’s house of years of accumulated crap. Much of what we find has been untouched for years, as evidenced by finding Worksheets from my boyfriend’s kindergarten days in their home office, my boyfriend is 25, so the worksheets have been sitting at the bottom of a pile of papers for several decades. So when my boyfriends cousin went off to college, graduated, and then got married, his bedroom remained largely untouched. Most of his junk is amassed in large piles of crap. We have been bailing out that room over the course of weeks, finding all manner of old stuff, like secret stashes of teenage love letters, an RPG he made when he was ten, Playskool toys… You name it, he kept it. This is not unusual for the entire family.

I was going through a box of folders filled with school writings. I couldn’t just dump everything because he is less organized then the rest of the family. We found his passport mixed in with 5 year old college physics homework for example. I found a folder in that box stuffed with porn.

I started to laugh at first, because this isn’t something terribly unusual to find in a guys room. I paged through it for prime harrasment material. Something to tease him mercilessly about. Most were pictures printed off on what must have been his computer, some stories, nothing unusal. I noticed most of the picures were of a “Lolita” or “Barely Legal” type variety. Still… nothing terribly unusual. Next page?

Straight up, flat out, kiddy porn.

Thumbnails of many different kids and adults. I don’t think I looked at that page for more than ten seconds, but the images are burned indelibly across my brain. I am disturbed, nauseated, and wondering what to do about it.

My boyfriend saw it when I did, when I dropped the folder in shock. He is equally horrified. That was the only page in the folder that was of definitely young children, everything after it was what looked like xeroxed copies of a penthouse story book.

We destroyed the papers. Burned them to ash and gone, there is no evidence remaining of this. We certainly couldn’t leave the pictures there, nor could we transport them to ask his cousin what the heck was going on.

The pictures were obviously from some website, and the pictures that were from the legal “Barely Legal” website had a date on the bottom when they were printed. That date would have put the cousin at the age of 14. The papers looked to be all from about the same time period (roughly the same color of aging on the papers) and were under a pile of other boxes that hadn’t been shifted in years as testified to by the amount of dust and other crap on top.

We finished cleaning out the rest of the room, and found nothing else of note. The question is, what the hell do we do now?

And what do I do to get those horrible images out of my brain? I’m on the verge of a panic attack here because I just can’t stop seeing it…

2

I think it would be much more cause for concern if it was a complete stash of kiddie porn. A pedophile would likely have an entire collection, not one page of kiddie porn out of thousands of otherwise normal pages of porn. I don’t think anyone is .01% a child molester. For all you know he printed it out, when he was 14, because he wanted to show his friends how shocking and gross it was. Or he was printing it along with a bunch of other ‘‘Barely Legal’’ stuff and didn’t realize that was mixed in. Remember, if he was 14, ‘‘Barely Legal’’ would still be older than he was, so it by no means shows a proclivity for young girls the way it might for a 50 year old man. He may have just hit ‘‘print all’’ and all these years had no idea that page was in there.

I’m not blaming you for being disturbed, because those were photos of victimized kids and anyone with a soul would find them shocking and horrifying. But I don’t personally see any reason to conclude that your boyfriend’s beloved cousin is a pedophile.

3

While I concur that he might not be I’m going to go with the straightforward version here and say you’ve got at least to consider calling the sheriff on this one. At a minimum you can talk to them about options. It could be that a ghost image of his current hard drive is called for to check for any current…habits.

I’m utterly with you on how shocking such things can be. In my career as a journalist I have had to, a few times, speak with a LEO about such a case and be shown images of such. We’re not talking about pix of nine year old girls nude, here, we’re talking nine year old girls being penetrated. It twists you all up inside for days afterward.

That’s why I say you should hand this one off to appropriate authorities for examination. They can do it anonymously if you ask them to. Your boyfriends cousin need never know it was you guys who set off the investigation. If the examination finds nothing then you’ll be fairly certain it was an idiot kid thing and you can sleep better. And if they DO find something you’ll have taken at least a small step to making sure no children have to go through that sort of thing again.

4

I wouldn’t call the authorities absent further evidence. I would definitely be disturbed, but keep in mind that he was 14 at the time. And it wasn’t like you found him under the mattress that he’s currently sleeping on. They obviously hadn’t been viewed in several years.

Hopefully he wasn’t tittilated by the images as much as curious and repulsed. Seemingly normal people seek out really repulsive stuff all the time – murder victim pictures, the Daniel Pearl beheading, etc. It’s how Rotten.com makes money!

So, ick, but hope that he’s gotten over it.

5

I had a very creppy co-worker who was always touching children who came into the office. One time I saw him in the office with a little girl in his lap with a hand on her butt. I finally reported him anonymously because it was creeping me out.

He died suddenly and when we cleaned out his desk we found three files of kiddy porn. I shudder when I think of what he might have been doing.

6

One piece of paper, dating back 10 or 20 years, in a house full of paper … don’t think it’s damning enough to call in the authorities – esp. since you’ve destroyed the “evidence.”

7

I agree that it isn’t enough to bring up to the authorities. It really does sound more like he had one page mixed in with a large amount of other stuff. Pedophiles tend to be into that, and that alone, and images of adults do nothing for them.

My condolences on seeing this. As Joaquin Phoenix’s character in the film 8mm said:

There are some things that you see, and you can’t unsee them.

8

Be careful when you consider the advice to call the authorities. If the police find images of child porn on his computer, he is looking at jail time. I know. A friend of mine’s son was in the exact same situation when he was a teenager. I don’t know what exactly was on his computer, but he was put in jail for 8 months and it has devastated his life. He is now a registered sex offender and has had the same menial job (from a family friend) for years because no one else will hire him.

I absolutely agree that behavior like that is reprehensible and child predators need to be stopped. I understand why you would feel responsible to stop him if there’s ever a chance he’s still interested in kiddie porn. A curious 14 year old is a far cry from a pedophile, and you and your boyfriend know him far better than we ever could.

What’s your boyfriend’s opinion? Will he confront his cousin?

9

This reminds me of a horrifying situation here in Connecticut. A homeowner started renovating his basement and found 50,000 slides and 100 films of child porn. The man who owned the house previously died in 1998 and was an endocrinologist with a local hospital who used his position to molest hundreds of children.

http://www.courant.com/news/health/hc-secondlook0308.artmar08,0,5075258.story

Truly sickening.

10

This is my feeling exactly. I’m sorry you had to see it, but it should end here.

11

I have to agree with** twickster** and **gaffa ** on this one – no notifying authorities on just this (now destroyed) evidence. Yes, for all you know he may still be doing it (IF he was the one: it may as well be material one of his teenage buddies gave him, with not much discrimination as to content), and that’s really worrisome but on what basis would you report him as a current suspect so he can be given the once-over?

Now, this is one single page out of many, downloaded back in his early teens? For all we know in this case it could be that it WAS “just a phase he’s going through”, or part of a youthful porn-exchange that included all sorts of materials, and not the gateway to a lifetime of CP and/or molestation. BUT, OTOH maybe it was the one page of that material that he accidentally forgot to destroy in a timely manner before he decided to limit himself to digital media instead of paper from there on – the thing is you and we DON’T KNOW one way or the other. That is terrible, is it not?

In any case, in your particular case, all trust in this person may have been destroyed. That may be just as painful as the actual images for you both and I can only offer my very distance-limited empathy that you had to experience this. (I myself tend to have a degree of lowered affect, that lets me look at or imagine some horrible things w/o being viscerally sickened.)

However, “pretend we didn’t see it” may not be an alternative either, if this has been so traumatic to you. As has been said there’s no way to unsee what has been seen, so if if the impact has been so disturbing that your and your boyfriend’s relations with him WILL be affected, the cousin WILL likely notice and wonder. So (and this advice should be valued taking into account the cost you paid me for it) it may be in order to, first, give yourselves some time to reflect and think, and then only if you just can’t see life going formward w/o some sort of closure, your boyfriend may have to discreetly and seriously bring up the issue with the cousin – no dramatics, just something along the lines of: “Man, I gotta discuss something dead serious with you. I’m talking so bad that things may not be able to go on as normal: When cleaning up your stuff AquaPura found something that really, really disturbed and upset her badly, …”

He could even have forgotten entirely about it and truly not know what you’re talking about. But it’ll be up to you to believe what he says about it or not IF it gets to that point of letting him know. It will be sad if the bonds of family are strained because of this, but actions, whether evil as such or just teenager-stupid, sometimes have dire consequences we have to live with.

12

That isn’t evidence. That’s a teenager being stupid and careless. My god, aren’t 14-year-olds allowed to be kids anymore? The child may be the father of the man but certainly the sins of an immature child shouldn’t be visited on the person he became.

(I wonder if we’d even be having this thread if the genders were flipped and a 14-year-old girl had printed off pictures of young boys.)

13

When working University Security, I busted a 12 year old boy for looking at (gay) porn in the library. The real disturbing part for me was finding another page open to one of those ‘friend finder’ pages. He was a 12 year old boy openly cruising the net looking for adult males to have sex with, from a college library computer.

We turned him over to the police after he refused to give his home phone number - a fortunate, but very recent change in the policy regarding minors.

14

I remember when that was in the news every morning …

I can’t imagine my mindset if it was mrAru and I that found it … it was horrifying enough just seeing it in the news.

15

Concur.

Reporting this could cause rather permanent damage to your boyfriend’s cousin’s life. Given the cousin’s age at the time I’m far less distressed by this than I might otherwise be and the presence of adult pornography (especially given its far greater frequency) really suggests that the cousin isn’t a classic pedophile. Personally I’d recommend vigilance around the cousin and kids just in case and, maybe, the boyfriend having a talk with him.

At the risk of playing armchair psychologist two degrees removed: Does the cousin have a history of normal romantic relationships?

16

My thoughts exactly. While it sucks that you had to see those images, i really don’t think this is anything to get worked up about, and certainly isn’t worth going to the cops over. He was 14, ferchrissakes, and had 1 page of this stuff among a whole bunch of regular porn.

When i was 14, there was a guy in my class who used to sneak off with his dad’s porn mags and bring them to school to show us. Some of these had stuff like pissing in each other’s mouth, which we were all simultaneously grossed out and fascinated by. He never brought child porn, but if he had, then our 14-year-old selves probably would have had pretty much the same reaction to them as to the other stuff, and it wouldn’t say anything about how we feel or act as adults.

17

I agree that it’s too late to involve the authorities, and that it probably wasn’t warranted. I still wouldn’t leave him alone with a child though, and I’d be very wary if I noticed that he seemed to date single mothers exclusively, or decided to lead a scout troup, or become a “Big Brother”.

Just sayin. Keep your eyes open.

18

Another vote for this. Frankly, the thought of destroying this boy’s life over something like this by reporting it makes me just as sick as child porn does.

Besides, the print out you got were thumbnails. A true pedo would have made full size pictures.

19

There are probably a lot of people out there who, when 14, found, looked at, and enjoyed illegal pictures of like-aged kids. Being attracted to people your own age is hardly weird. Still having these pictures because they sat untouched and forgotten is hardly weird. Unless I missed part of your post, you didn’t specify how old the subjects were. If they were outside of the age range that most normal horny 14-year-old boys would find sexually interesting (e.g. completely pre-pubescent), then there may be serious cause for concern. Consuming images of underage youth provides an impetus for production, so it’s clearly wrong. However, and 14-year-old wanting to see other 14-year-olds having sex is much closer to the normal range than if I wanted to see them, which would be in the “scary fucking creepy” category.

20

Regarding “unseeing” the images: the way I would think about it is that a child’s (or any human’s) body isn’t gross, evil, disgusting, etc. What’s gross, evil, and disgusting is that some monster decided to exploit their bodies and rob them of their innocence. So, I’d be bothered by seeing them too, and I definitely wouldn’t want to, but the reasons the images exist are far worse than the images themselves, and you already knew there was child porn in the world, as unfortunate as that is.