THE PAEDOPHILE HUNTERS

Every day they witness crimes against children more horrifying than most of us could cope with. Meet the warrior women on the frontline of the war against child exploitation.

- Alexandra Carlton

It was a cold day at a chilling crime scene when digital forensic examiner Jennifer Garcia set up her laptop and began looking through files of child exploitation material that detectives had found at an unassuming suburban home in a regional New South Wales town.

In her support role to the Australian Federal Police’s (AFP) Child Protection Unit in Sydney, Garcia gathers evidence from places where it is suspected child abuse material is being viewed, shared or produced. To build a case against the suspects, she compiles as much as she can on the spot from computers, mobile phones and hard drives.

On this occasion, the first video she looked at was timestamped from only the day before. It contained sexual acts between a grown man and a child too horrifying to describe. Garcia took a deep breath and looked up from her work. The man in the video was sitting directly opposite her. And the young child in the video was sitting right across from him. Garcia says the moment was one of intense shock, despite the fact that she’d viewed thousands of other pictures and videos of child predators performing abhorrent acts against children in her six years in the job. “I’m a person. I’m a female. I have a child of my own,” she says of that moment. “You look at that man and you are honestly so filled with rage. You have a job to do, but you’re human as well.”