SALT LAKE CITY — “This type of crime is not going away.”
That's the message from law enforcement as the investigation continues into a Layton charter school elementary school director accused of exploiting minors by distributing child pornography.
We spoke with organizations that shared what they have in the works to address an issue that seems to make headlines every week in Utah.
“For every one person that we catch, there are hundreds of people we don’t catch and there’s hundreds of similar conversations that are going on,” shared Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill.
Gill works with the Utah Children’s Justice Center Program and says these cases might be happening more often than people think.
“It is pervasive and it is persistent and it’s present in our community in numbers that sometimes we probably don’t think about,” he said.
Head of Utah charter school accused of distributing, possibly producing child pornography:
Jared Dallam Buckley is the lead director and superintendent at Leadership Learning Academy. His arrest report states that investigators found an account that was distributing and selling “child sexual abuse material,” which was traced to a phone belonging to Buckley.
I asked Sandra Barker with the FBI about whether they’re seeing an increase in similar cases.
“The Salt Lake City FBI’s Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force has seen a steady increase in the sexual exploitation of children over the past several years," she said through a statement. "The FBI takes a proactive approach…”
Gill shared the signs parents can look out for.
“Is the child showing signs of injuries that they can’t explain or won’t explain? Is the child’s behavior changing? Because children who have been abused can sometimes exhibit a very sporadic behavior, anger, frustration,” he said. “If they revert back to childhood. Bed wetting, thumb sucking, which can demonstrate that abuse or the desire to have safety.
“These are the kinds of things that we can start to look at.”
The Utah State Board of Education is working on several projects that will include additional resources for parents to help educate and enhance the safety of Utah students.
“As long as the internet is here, offenders who are going to want to prey on children and take advantage of them, that’s going to be here,” explained Sete Aulai, commander of the Utah Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, who on Wednesday announced the arrests of 15 to people using the internet to sexually exploit children.
