The case that affected me the most while working with the Detectives was a child pornography case. Officers recovered 50 hard drives worth of child pornography in one man's possession. The job of the detectives, and me... as their intern, was to go through all of the hard drives and find the 5 worst pictures or videos. How does one look through the thousands of horrible things on those hard drives and determine which 5 are the worst of the bunch? It was a long and arduous process which involved many disturbing hours of looking at things that should not under any circumstance, even exist in this world.
Child pornography should not only piss you off, but should make you want to hunt down these sons of bitches and castrate them, or torture them or lock them away forever.... so that they can never hurt a child again, and can never ruin another person's life. As I went through the material on these hard drives and saw the horrendous things adults force children to do, I felt a very distinct need to hunt down every person who owns, has distributed, or made child pornography and remove them from the face of the earth. My maternal instincts kicked into gear and I immediately wanted to rescue these tortured children. The worst part is knowing that most of these children will never be rescued from their life of hell and will continue to have to do these perverse things, until they are too old to be in child porn anymore. And what's even worse, is that many of these children will grown up to be abusers of children themselves, because that is how the cycle of violence works.
As my heart was breaking over these terrible acts, I noticed that the worst 5 on each hard drive had some similar characteristics. Massachusetts charges people more harshly if the pictures or videos depict certain things. There are 7 of these characteristics, but I only know a few. Bestiality, bondage, urination and incest are three of the characteristics that allow the lawyers to add more time to the offender's sentence. Disgusting, yes? Well, most of the pictures and videos chosen to show the jury had things like this on them. I was disturbed and upset. But in the line of work that I want to be part of, you cannot be bothered by things like that. You have to bear it, and get through the 50 hard drives, and have to understand that looking through all that material is the only way to put a criminal behind bars for at least a little while.
I won't get into it here because I don't want to rant to you all about how much I absolutely hate what goes on in the courts when it comes to people who rape children, who fantasize about raping children, and the people who put children through this for profit. I have very strong feelings that would get very mean, rude and horrible if I started getting into them.
But what i will say is this. The people who rape and hurt children should get the same sentence that murderes get. Instead of just removing the child from the earth, they subject them to violence, ruin their childhoods, their innocence, their lives. This means that these children are being murdered... but left alive to live with the scars, the lasting memories of what they went through. If that isn't cruel... I don't know what is.
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