The FBI’s efforts to combat child sexual abuse are as half-hearted as its efforts to combat terrorism

of the hard-working-or-hardly-working-amirite department

The FBI keeps telling anyone who will listen that it wants more accountability. Despite its failure to end organized crime or even diminish the power of international drug cartels, the FBI is always asking for more, especially if it means more funding and surveillance powers.

It positioned itself as an integral part of the national security apparatus, using its manpower and expertise to track down and arrest potential terrorists. But the job seemed too difficult, so the FBI soon began to satisfy itself by assigning agents to laptops and encouraging them to radicalize the most ignorant or needy people they encountered online, handing them minimum sentences of 25 years.

This lack of effort has carried over into the work on child abuse. Child abuse and terrorism are the things that FBI directors cite as the reason that encryption should be abolished now. But these abuses and terrorism are the things that the FBI worst in addressing it. We are well aware that the FBI has a horrible habit of congratulating itself on convincing people to become terrorists. On the other end of that spectrum, there is another problem that the FBI is not addressing well — a problem that seems to have more to do with the FBI’s lack of interest than with the supposed “obstacles” (which always means encryption) that officers encounter when investigating these cases.

The FBI should better handle reports of child sexual abuse. After all, it was recently successfully sued by several victims of sexual abuse committed by USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar. You’d think that would be a wake-up call. But as a recent report (PDF) from the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General indicates, the agency is still largely asleep at the wheel.

In an investigation into the FBI’s failure to swiftly investigate Nassar, the inspector general found that serious problems persist that put allegations of child sexual abuse at risk of slipping through the cracks as overworked agents juggle dozens of cases at once. In one case, a victim continued to be abused for 15 months after the FBI first received a tip about a registered sex offender, the report said.

And that’s not an outlier. There’s more detail in the report that shows that reports of child sexual abuse regularly fade into the background, despite the FBI’s public claims (again, often associated with calls to end encryption) that this is one of the crimes the FBI really, truly, deeply cares about.

But all the concern in the world is useless if that supposed “concern” doesn’t extend to basic things like allocating more manpower and resources to address this problem. The FBI clearly knows that the problem needs more of both. But it has decided to do less with less, which sends the message that the FBI isn’t as concerned about this problem as it publicly claims.

While the FBI acknowledged mistakes, it cited the “overwhelming” burden on agents charged with investigating crimes against children, given the conduct involved, the influx of tips to police, the increased use of encrypted technology to conceal the crimes and budget cuts.

The inspector general cited one agent who was conducting about 60 investigations at a time and said special agents “must constantly sort through their caseload.”

So the FBI is clearly aware of the problem. They don’t have enough people assigned to handle these cases. And they should have made some adjustments after they were indicted for handling the Nassar case so poorly. But their responses are blaming everyone for things that only the FBI can control: agents and their workloads.

So far, the FBI has made zero changes. The inspector general’s recommendations include stunningly obvious things like this:

(we) recommend that the FBI develop an enterprise-wide strategy to address the increasing volume of Crimes Against Children/Human Trafficking (CAC/HT) cases and ensure that CAC/HT agents have the appropriate support and resources to manage their assigned cases.

This is a problem the FBI should have addressed long ago. Instead, the FBI has chosen to bury overworked investigators in cases — something that has, of course, resulted in the proliferation of child abuse and human trafficking victims.

Considering that this branch of the FBI is both overstaffed and understaffed, it hardly makes sense that the FBI and the Justice Department spend so much time complaining about the potential drop in reports about social media services forwarded to the company by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NMCEC). The alleged disappearance of these reports was part and parcel of the FBI’s anti-encryption agitation, fueled by claims that things like the addition of end-to-end encryption to Facebook’s Messenger service would allow child sex offenders to go undetected and/or unpunished.

But this report makes it clear that there is a good chance that these criminals will go undetected or unpunished, even without the addition of encryption. And while some agents and offices are trying to make a dent in the millions of NMCEC tips the FBI receives, the FBI — as a whole — is still not taking this problem seriously.

(W)e found that the number of CAC/HT (assessments and substantiated investigations) cases opened and FBI leads established has increased. Fifteen field offices proposed to realign Funded Staffing Levels (FSL) across programs and increase the number of special agents assigned to the CAC/HT threat by 19 in FY 2023. Only one of these requests, for one agent, was approved. Seven field offices appealed the decision to deny the realignment, but none of these appeals were successful.

If the FBI took this as seriously as they claim, changes would have already been made. Instead, crimes against children are treated as less important than other activities of the agents, many of which are focused on two wars that the FBI cannot possibly win: the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. While children are still being victimized, FBI agents are talking people into committing acts of terrorism and assisting multiple levels of law enforcement in drug wars that seem more focused on how much property can be seized, rather than anything that might actually deter the flow of drugs through the country.

The FBI needs to do better. Not only are they under-delivering, they can hardly be bothered to over-promise unless there is money at stake. Americans are paying for this substandard level of service. And everything in this report indicates that the FBI simply does not care enough about the problem to actually do anything about it.

Posted under: child sexual abuse, doj, failure, fbi