Army vets who were injured during service don’t have to stop fighting. There is a new initiative called The Hero Rescue Corps, a government-funded project that teaches them to hunt child predators…
The program began in 2013. The Hero (Human Exploitation Rescue Operative) Corps teaches the vets in cyber forensics and then places them in Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) field offices. There have been 100 veterans placed in the program to date. This mission helps potentially thousands of victimized children in America. It also helps the vets themselves by offering them a new purpose and way to serve their country.
They are trained to examine evidence of child porn and stop porn traffickers. Jabryeth ‘J’ Christian is the CEO of the National Association to Protect Children (Protect). He says, “In one second [the veteran’s] entire life changed. When that happens, I know from personal experience, you start to wonder, what can I now do? And once you find this opportunity, you know it’s truly your opportunity to step back into that role.”
Videos on the official Hero Corps site feature testimonies by a number of veterans-turned-crime-fighters. In one official video, a veteran identified only as Shannon says, “I physically couldn’t do my job any longer. And I had to tell the guys I’d laughed and bled and sweated with that I can’t do the job any more, and that was really, really a tough pill to swallow for me.” He later says,”When you go in, and you serve a warrant, and the bad guy — your target — figures out why you’re there, and you watch the color flush from his face, it makes you feel so good, knowing that [this] person is done hurting kids.”
According to The Demand Project, which fights child abuse, The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reviewed 17.3 million images and videos of suspected child pornography in 2011. That’s four times more than 2007. It also says that a study by the center found that 40 percent of people who were arrested for possession of child pornography had also raped children. CNN quotes a study by the University of New Hampshire that put the proportion of ‘hands-on offenders’ among child porn owners at 55 percent.
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