Fight the New Drug (00:00)
Kellye, thank you so much for joining me. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you first got into law enforcement?

Kellye Netz (00:05)
My name’s Kelly Netz. I am a detective sergeant right now. So I supervise the investigations bureau at my agency.

I have been interested in law enforcement since probably kindergarten. But then, growing up didn’t necessarily think it was something that I was maybe capable of, or it was just very foreign. I don’t have any family in law enforcement. So even though I thought it sounded cool, didn’t really think it was actually gonna turn into anything…until 911 happened.

I was in high school, and I think that was probably a really pivotal time for me of just watching the police officers running into the buildings and the police helping people. And I think that’s when I decided, like, I’m actually gonna try to do that, even though it was I’d really never been in a fight.

I wasn’t like super into fitness, or some of the other things that were really popular for people who were looking at a law enforcement career. I’ve obviously had to get into fitness and had to make some changes, but that’s kind of how it started.

Fight the New Drug (01:42)
It sounded like you were really motivated by helping people ultimately, which is which is wonderful.

Did you always expect to work in crimes against children, or what led you to specialize in that area of investigation?

Kellye Netz (01:56)
That definitely wasn’t something that I went into law enforcement thinking that was going to be my area of expertise. I did definitely watch plenty of Law and Order.

Fight the New Drug (02:09)
As did I.

Kellye Netz (02:11)
And I think more it just tends to happen to women in law enforcement because we’re women. And when you work in just like a male-dominated field, a lot of the time the guys that you’re working with are younger and not super confident in talking to other women about sexual assault. And although there are men who are sexually assaulted, the vast majority of people that are reporting to law enforcement are women.

And so I think that’s kind of how it begins for a lot of women, just our male partners are constantly saying, “Will you just just talk to her, like you you’ll do such a better job. She’ll be so much more comfortable.”

And so you start with interviewing a lot of sex assault victims. And then kind of the natural progression from there is you just also start talking to the kids and handling those as well. And once you’ve done the interview then trying to pass the investigation back to your partner oftentimes isn’t very smooth. So a lot of the time I just ended up with them for that reason. And I didn’t mind.

Fight the New Drug (02:48)
And you’ve spent years now interviewing and investigating people who have committed sexual offences against children. Before we dive in too deep, what are some of the biggest misconceptions people have about who those offenders are?

Kellye Netz (03:02)
So coming into this, I was definitely surprised by the closeness of the relationship of the majority of the offenders. I think TV portrays it as a lot of like stranger assault being very common because that’s maybe the more like mysterious and needs an investigation to make TV. So I think that makes a lot of people think that stranger assault is very common.

I have had very few, if any, especially against children, that involved a stranger. Most, the vast majority, is a close family member or some other really trusted adult, like a daycare or babysitter, or an older sibling of a friend. That’s way more common than I would have thought it was before I started doing this job. And I definitely did not realize how many children are actually just abused by their own parents. That was something that was very surprising to me. And still is, honestly.

Fight the New Drug (04:19)
Yeah. It’s really devastating. And I think you made such a good point about what we see in in TV and movies. It is that heightened stranger mystery. And it’s, I think, alarming for a lot of people to learn how close to home these events often occur.

Kellye Netz (04:36)
Yeah, I think that a lot of especially child sexual abuse requires extensive grooming, and whether that grooming occurs just when the child is very young and their parent starts doing a certain behavior with them and then it just normalizes it for the child, or there’s a lot of relationship building before the abuse will actually take place. And so in the case of a stranger, you obviously don’t have that, so kids are less susceptible to that, and parents don’t really let their kids so much be in situations where they’re gonna be with a stranger, so.

Fight the New Drug (05:19)
Though we certainly know about kind of online access to strangers for communication, and we can talk a bit more about that in a moment.

One thing you’ve said, yeah, one thing you’ve said is that pornography addiction is, you know, a common thread that you’ve seen in many of these cases. What first made you notice that pattern?

Kellye Netz (05:42)
I think that I noticed it just because people’s stories were just kind of repetitive. Obviously, the exact circumstances are different in every situation, but a lot of the time I noticed that people were saying that that that these actions that they took against a child were fueled by pornography addiction turning into a lot of the time drug or alcohol addiction. We see a lot of of these struggles go hand in hand.

And you just really hear the same kind of outline of the story over and over, where it’s, “I started this one thing, it led to this, I wasn’t feeling satisfied with just that anymore.” So I added blank, whether that’s drugs or alcohol or what I’ll call like darker porn, aside from what I will call regular porn.

And so you just can kind of see that over and over and over in a lot of cases.

Fight the New Drug (06:49)
We know that the research about pornography shows that escalation within a pornography habit of on its own. So someone may start out watching what you called quote-unquote regular porn, but that can escalate into someone needing, you know, more hardcore pornography. And often in cases of child sexual abuse use, I would assume sometimes that leads to material including minors. Is that something that is pretty common?

Kellye Netz (07:18)
Yes, that’s very common. And excuse my generalities. I’m…I don’t condone pornography viewing in any way. I’m just gonna call it regular porn for the sake of the conversation. But yeah, definitely see, even a lot of the time, the group part of the grooming will be like, let’s take a picture. I want you to wear this outfit. You’re gonna look so cute. And that’s especially prevalent with older teens who are online.

And that’s an easy way for predators to get especially teens into creating pornographic material, what we call CSAM, child sexual abuse material.

Fight the New Drug (08:06)
Right. And when someone is arrested for possession of CSAM or child sexual abuse material, commonly known as child pornography, you know, many people assume that they must have always been looking for that material. Is that typically what you found?

Kellye Netz (08:22)
No, not at all. I every great once in a while you’ll come across someone who just gen— just they genuinely struggle with an attraction to children. But that’s really rare.

The majority of people that we encounter who are viewing, downloading, sharing CSAM online did not start out that way. Typically, it starts with just, I’d say any consumption is not good, but an overconsumption of pornography. And they just kind of become numb to it. And their relationships, you know, they’re they’re watching, looking at so much.

That’s when I think a lot of people start using drugs or alcohol to try to make themselves feel more excited. And when that’s not really working, they start looking to other types of pornography, whether that’s CSAM or bestiality or other things that could maybe help them achieve the way that they felt back when they first started viewing pornography.

Fight the New Drug (09:32)
When you interview offenders, do they tend to describe this as a sudden shift or a gradual progression over months or years, going from that kind of quote-unquote regular or more common pornography to these stages you just mentioned?

Kellye Netz (09:48)
Generally, the progression of getting there is longer, but then once they see it, it’s usually very fast. A lot of people that I’ve interviewed have described like accidentally downloading something that they thought was going to be regular porn and it was CSAM, and then they just couldn’t stop.

It’s very easy for people to get CSAM now, very easy to get pornography in general. And so I think a lot of people will start with just regular social media porn, you know, even site any site. I mean really, we have cases that start on any social media site and then from there once they’ve gotten into that, they just start getting exposed to more and more, and once they get sent an image of CSAM it seems to like be something new and exciting, and they then very quickly delve into that.

Fight the New Drug (10:51)
Yeah.

And when, you know, these adult predators are arrested after years of an escalating behavior, as we’ve spoken a little bit about, how do they typically respond?

Kellye Netz (11:02)
You know, it’s funny, I I’ve been surprised by this, but a lot of them are actually relieved.

It’s the same thing. I I guess I don’t know why it surprised me. We see that a lot in confession. When someone confesses, you can just a lot of the time, see a physical change in their body. They feel so good that they have just gotten this out. It was this thing inside of them; they didn’t want it. It’s unnatural that they’ve had this lie or this secret. And the same thing then has applied with all of our CSAM investigations.

For the most part, people are really honest about it, and will say, “Yes, I did that. This is how it started.”

We’ve had people that I just think, man, like you did not have to tell us all of that, you know, how it started and why and how it’s affected you, but people a lot of the time are just really ready to get it out and be done with it. I think it’s hard for people to come up with a way to move past it on their own. And so when there’s this huge pivotal incident where now it’s been exposed, a lot of people are relieved.

Fight the New Drug (12:21)
Yeah. And we’ve heard that as well over the years with individuals that we’ve spoken to as well.

Without identifying anyone specifically, could you walk us through one case that really illustrates the progression from the beginning to the end?

Kellye Netz (12:36)
So as far as a typical investigation would go, all social media providers are supposed to report to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

So all the US-based, for the most part, are reporting as they’re supposed to. So we receive what are called cyber tips from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that were brought to their attention by whatever the social media site is.

So when we get that initial tip, we do some investigation, figure out if the person lives in our jurisdiction, who they are, what they’re looking at.

A lot of the time, the images that flagged and caused the report to be generated in the first place will be included. So that’s kind of on our side how things get started. And then from there, we usually will serve a search warrant, contact the person, and do an interview. And then during that interview, is when we try to really get into with the the person’s life, how they got started, how they have now found themselves in this interview with us, with a warrant being served at their home and/or their place of business. We’ve done that too.

A lot of people will describe just starting that just started with porn. They were bored, they were lonely, they started looking at porn. A lot of it isn’t even what I would necessarily consider porn if I talk to a lot of people who just like started with Instagram or other pretty innocuous social media where they were seeing something that was attractive to them. For the sake of the conversation, we’ll say, like girls in bikinis. And then they just started looking for more. And that’s when they start visiting kind of mainstream porn sites.

When I first started, we actually had like a special computer that was like to go on the dark web, and it would try to share CSAM with other people that were using the dark web, but I mean that technology is defunct now because you can just get porn anywhere. And so that’s how I think a lot of our cases get started, and a lot of people get into it.

A lot of people, at that point during that interview, is when they disclose sex abuse they experienced as a child. We definitely, we let them talk about that. It doesn’t really influence what happens with the case, but you know, as law enforcement, our mission is to do good. And if someone feels comfortable talking to us about some sexual abuse that they experienced, that’s become just this twisted thing in their life that’s now controlling their thoughts, their behaviors, how they spend their time because they’ve become addicted to pornography. And now they actually find themselves in legal trouble because they’re viewing CSAM. We let them talk about all of that. I think it helps people a lot to be able to just get all of that out.

Fight the New Drug (15:55)
Yeah, absolutely. Do any of these individuals ever say things like, you know, “I never thought I’d end up here?” Like, are they, you mentioned they express relief in being able to confess, but are they kind of surprised at how deep they’ve gotten into things?

Kellye Netz (16:12)
Yes, I think especially as we work through that interview and the kind of the case progresses and I think they start to come I mean, I I would almost describe that a lot of them are just so wholly consumed by this obsessive drive to consume porn that they don’t realize that everything around them has like burned down. Their relationships are destroyed, they’ve lost their job.

One young man I was talking to, like his car didn’t run, but it didn’t matter because he hadn’t left the house in weeks. Because he’d just been in his room viewing porn. So, I think as the they start to come out of that, there’s definitely the shock factor of, “I don’t actually have any friends anymore because I ghosted all of them so that I could stay home and look at porn.”

And marriages destroyed, you know, you’ll look at a family from the outside, and you see, okay, like a husband, wife, nice house, kids, and then when you start to kinda dig into it, and you’re like thinking, am I investigating the wrong person? Like, this doesn’t make sense from the outside. And then you start digging in, and you see, no, actually, like dad’s living in the basement, parents’ relationship is not working out, marriage is not good at this point, because the need for porn has taken over and nothing else matters. It’s the same as with drugs or alcohol, where nothing else matters.

Fight the New Drug (17:49)
Yeah. You mentioned that a lot of your tips come from reports from social media platforms reporting to the National Center on Missing and Exploited Children. Are there individuals engaging in this behavior who are not integrated into social media? And if so, how are they being caught? How are they, you know, being found out in your system?

Kellye Netz (18:11)
Because a lot of those people who aren’t necessarily on social media sites, now we live in such a computer-dominated world that even people who aren’t necessarily using social media are still using like digital storage. So a lot of our cases that don’t come from social media will come from like Dropbox, any any really cloud-based storage provider- Verizon, their storage provider, or Synchronous, they report to us same as social media. So even if someone is just storing something on their device and they think it’s not on social media, it’s just on my phone like it’s not; it’s in the cloud, and so that’s a lot of the time how they’ll come to us.

Every great once in a while, we’ll have a case that’s just reported from the community that they saw someone doing something or they found something in their uncle’s belongings that’s concerning, but those are pretty rare. Now even the people that we contact who are using just like really old computers, they’re still using cloud-based storage. So all it takes is one image.

Fight the New Drug (19:28)
Yeah. Which is, I think, so good to know. You know, for any listeners who are unfamiliar with this, it seems so scary with the way that technology has evolved. And it’s so good to know that there are so many paths that can help catch perpetrators and protect children as well.

You mentioned some ways that, you know, technology’s changed from when you first started, and having a specific computer to catch people and now some of the things we’ve just spoken about. Are there other ways that changes in technology or the internet have changed the progression that you’ve seen today compared to early in your career?

Kellye Netz (20:04)
I think just the volume alone has changed. That investigating CSAM cases when I first started, it was rare. You know, we had that computer, it was just over in the corner doing its job, but that it would actually like get a hit that someone was trying to share something was really unusual.

The volume of what’s available online now has just changed the the job. I get several of these cases a week. They don’t all turn into something. But even in a small city, small agency like ours, we’re getting a couple a week, and I think it’s really just a volume issue. The internet has made everything so accessible, and there’s so many different sites and so much social media and so much cloud storage that now it’s literally a full-time job.

Fight the New Drug (21:02)
Yeah. I wanna ask you about, you know, we often hear the claim that AI is great because if people can make AI CSAM or AI child sexual abuse material, then that will eliminate the problem of perpetrators acting out and abusing children in real life. Can you speak to that claim?

Kellye Netz (21:23)
Yeah, one, it’s not gonna stop hands-on offending for sure, because it’s AI. So it’s just gonna continue to feed that need for more. So if I’m viewing CSAM of a real kid or a fake real kid, it’s not gonna make any difference to me as to what it causes me to need more of.

So if I’m viewing AI CSAM and the opportunity is there to become a hands-on offender or continue being a hands-on offender, the AI is just gonna feed it in the same way that real CSAM feeds it. And then the other piece of that that I would argue is it doesn’t matter if it’s real or fake, it’s still destructive to the mind of the viewer in the same way.

If the whole purpose of AI is to look real, then there’s really no difference in what it’s doing to the viewer’s brain. And then the consequences of that, you know, how it causes their attitude to change, their desires to change, their life to fall apart around them. It’s all the same. It doesn’t matter for them, viewing it, if it’s AI or not.

Fight the New Drug (22:49)
Also know that for AI to generate images, it has to learn from real images as well. So exploitation is still part of the equation regardless.

Kellye Netz (23:00)
Yeah, absolutely.

Fight the New Drug (23:02)
Are there ways that AI and and more modern technology is helping to you know, find exploited children, catch perpetrators? Are there ways that it’s making your job easier given the vast volume you spoke about earlier of content online?

Kellye Netz (23:27)
Yeah, it’s definitely headed that way. I mean, right now, a lot of the images that are able to be identified by social media providers are from like hash matching. which has works great when it works, but the issue is that there has to already be an assigned hash value to an image. So if you’re constantly having new images, then it’s not necessarily going to catch that in the filter.

Fight the New Drug (23:55)
Right. For someone who doesn’t know what that is, can you describe hash hash matching?

Kellye Netz (24:00)
It’s basically like a long series of characters that has been assigned to an image that like identifies that specific image. If the image is modified, then the hash value will change as well. So it’s basically like a serial number for an image, would be like a very layman’s way of trying to explain that.

But now with AI coming on the scene, there’s definitely companies out there that are looking to like relieve a lot of the burden from social media providers, from website people that run websites, to relieve that human burden that’s on us to actually be viewing it on law enforcement; that’s a huge part of our job, is we actually have to look at it.

So if AI is able to relieve some of that burden in the future, that could be a huge positive for the mental health of the investigators, of the people who work for these social media sites who are actually having to check just because something flags in their system, it still is then looked at by a human to confirm, yes, that is actually CCM. Social media definitely doesn’t want to be reporting like everything

Every once in a while things will get through. I’ve definitely opened some images that I was thinking were gonna be CSAM, and then I just sort of like laughed because they were not. So if AI is able to streamline some of that process and prevent that really like traumatic brain injury that investigators and viewers who are doing it for a good reason as their job that we suffer, then I…that’s a huge win for AI.

Fight the New Drug (25:51)
Yeah, absolutely. You know, we’ve seen reports that criminal networks are increasingly using mainstream social media to direct users towards CSAM. Has the scale of these investigations changed during your career, and if so, in what ways?

Kellye Netz (26:06)
Yeah, I think that’s that’s really common. We get a lot of people whose communication starts on mainstream social media and and then moves. It’s very common in a chat to see a predator say, “let’s go over to WhatsApp or let’s go over to Telegram,” knowing that those are encrypted or they’re not US-based or whatever the reason is is for the preference. But yeah, that that’s super common. It definitely makes things difficult. There is, there’s so much social media now that it’s hard to learn all the sites.

The other thing that’s hard is, on the back end, when we get records from social media, it doesn’t look at all like it does on the front end. And so that can be really hard to figure out, like how did this start, how was this image shared, because it looks very different on the back end than it does when the child is using it.

Fight the New Drug (27:14)
Right. I’m curious to know if OnlyFans has played a role in the work that you’re doing or if you’ve seen that. We often see in our work that is something that young people are saying, you know, I don’t need to go to college, I can start in OnlyFans, or that’s seen as a viable path forward for very young people. And is that something you’re encountering in your work at all?

Kellye Netz (27:39)
I wouldn’t say so much as the as young people talking about doing it, but acting out behaviors that they’ve seen, definitely. A lot of the CSAM that we get is just self-production, be that being that a lot of it is teens in the shower, dancing in a provocative way, you know, making the video of themselves. And in that, I think that’s been just very normalized from sites such as OnlyFans. So in that way, I would say yes, it’s definitely impacting them because it’s making behaviors that would have been taboo- no, that’s no longer the case.

Now that’s expected, it’s mainstream, everyone knows about it, talks about it, all their friends are doing it, and so that behavior is no longer something that they should think is a problem.

Fight the New Drug (28:08)
Yeah. And, for anyone who thinks that child sexual abuse isn’t something happening, you know, in their neighborhood, in their city, in their state, what would you say to those people?

Kellye Netz (28:21)
Oh, it’s happening. It’s happening all around, whether it’s online or in person. It’s there’s been plenty of cases that I thought, you know, this I can’t believe this is happening here. Kids that were going to school with my own kids that we would get a case on, and I just thought I who knew? Who knew? In our small town, in this small school that this was going on in such a terrible way?

And then the online, that’s just there’s definitely kids that your kids know, if not your own kids, who are engaged in unhealthy online relationships, who are discussing things of a sexual nature with complete strangers. Whether or not they know they’re strangers, who knows.

But if if it’s not your kids, it’s their friends. And so being aware of that and being able to ask your kids, you know, who are you talking to? Pop in on, you know, when they’re playing their video games, stand over their shoulder and look and ask, who is this person?

A lot of the time, parents are gonna find out that their kid doesn’t actually know who that is. It’s just someone who joined their group or it’s someone that another person brought in and said they knew, but they don’t actually know.

And I think I think people will be really surprised to find out how deep some of these issues go.

Fight the New Drug (29:53)
Kellye, is there anything else that you wanted to share today that we haven’t spoken about yet?

Kellye Netz (30:02)
I would really encourage people to have open conversations with their kids, even though it’s really awkward, but it’s only really awkward at first. Like if you can just get past like the first five minutes of the conversation, it will improve.

Once you’ve done it one time, now you can do it again. So now the next time you need to have another conversation. It’s not going to be as awkward, and you’ve already done it; everyone survived, so you can just continue to build those relationships.

There are a lot of things that are hard. Being a parent is probably the hardest. The responsibility that you have…If you choose to let your kid use a phone, you have an even bigger responsibility. But dive in.

It is well worth it to be confident in knowing what your kids are doing, how to help them, whether it becomes a online sexual abuse problem, whether it becomes a sextortion issue if they’re just being bullied you’re gonna not gonna know any of that until you really dive in and say who are you talking to what are you talking about like show me and and show a genuine interest, and most kids actually want to tell you they pretend like they don’t you know that they’ll give attitude but a lot of them especially the ones that are already in over their head they really want someone to know and someone to ask about it and even though they might have an attitude they’re glad that someone is asking and someone is paying attention.

Fight the New Drug (32:26)
Yeah. You know, we hear that often that kids are often more eager to have these conversations and have this information than parents are. Parents are often more uncomfortable than the kids are because kids want someone to answer these questions, and they want a safe person to talk to when things come up. And so I really want to encourage parents to make sure that you are that safe person for your kids.

There is a lot of scary stuff in this world, especially in the work that I I do, but especially the work that you do. And there are also so many great things and being able to be educated about things, being prepared and having these conversations with your kids can really go a long way.

Well, Kellye, thank you so much. It’s been so helpful and impactful to be able to speak with you and hear about the work that you do, and thank you for the work that you do. it is no small feat to be on the side of this that you are, and we’re so grateful to you and all of the individuals who are investigating and navigating child sexual abuse in the ways that you are. So thank you so much.