# Nobody wants to be the minister in charge of introducing the penis registry



## GAP (8 May 2007)

Humorous Title, but a serious subject.

Body-parts registry proposed to fight child porn
Sought by RCMP; Databank would include images of rings, scars, moles
Joseph Brean National Post Tuesday, May 08, 2007
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TORONTO - The head of the RCMP's child exploitation co-ordination centre wants to create a national "body parts registry" to help police link sexual abusers to specific child porn images, but privacy considerations and jittery politicians have so far foiled the effort.

Canada's two-year-old national sex offender registry "works great if you get a face, but we're finding that we don't get faces," Superintendent Earla-Kim Mc- Coll told a conference of police officers and Crown prosecutors yesterday at the University of Toronto's law school.

Faces aside, investigators rarely find child porn images that include any clear identifying information about the abuser, but many include images of such things as watches, rings, tattoos, moles, body hair, scars or other distinctive marks, she said.

Supt. McColl's agency, the National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre (NCECC), which coordinates child exploitation investigations in Canada and deals with international requests for assistance, conducted a survey of child porn images and found that one in four contained at least one identifiable mark on an abuser. As of yet, however, there is no systematic way for Canadian authorities to compile and compare this information. Files from the sex-offender registry might include descriptive notes, but not pictures of body parts other than the face.

The Canadian picture contrasts, for example, with the practice of the Bundeskriminalamt, the German national police force, which takes full body photographs of sex offenders -- not just mug shots of the face -- so that future investigators can compare these with new or newly discovered child porn images.

Part of the solution, Supt. Mc- Coll said, would be a searchable "body parts registry," in which all those distinctive marks could be correlated with specific images, even if the identity of the offender is not known. She said her superiors used to laugh at this idea, but have since come to see its potential value. At the moment, though, it remains more a wish than a plan.

Paul Gillespie, a retired detective- sergeant with the Toronto Police Service's sex crimes unit who now works with Microsoft developing computer software for child exploitation investigations, described the problem like this: "Nobody wants to be the minister in charge of introducing the penis registry."
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