Kansas City, Mo. ? Possession of even one computer image of a child involved in a lewd act can mean years in federal prison and the lifelong label as a sex offender for a person caught with the material.

Yet every day, law enforcement officers across the nation see such images while they investigate the sexual exploitation of children over the Internet.

Even the most veteran investigators find exposure to the pictures of young children in a sexual abuse situation to be a gut-wrenching, but necessary, part of their job. But for others — especially those who aren’t trained to deal with the pictures they’re seeing — there is a fine line between investigating child porn and violating laws against possessing it.

“In general, you’re talking about secondary trauma,” said Marsha Gilmer-Tullis, a social worker at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “What you’ve got are images that are probably the most horrific things that anyone can imagine because you’re talking about children.

“It’s not always a matter of whether someone is aroused by it,” she said. “It may be that the image presents itself in one’s mind at an inopportune time, which can create an incredible amount of anxiety.”

But Ken Lanning, a private consultant who spent more than 30 years with the FBI, said he has seen several instances when someone investigating child pornography was charged with breaking the law.

“Have I been involved in hundreds of such cases? No,” said Lanning, who is a founding member of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children. “But I’ve seen a good number over the years. Sometimes it was a highly respected individual with a lot of experience, and sometimes it was someone on the fringes who was just starting to get involved.”

Fooling themselves

He said investigators can convince themselves they are doing a good thing by trying to uncover child porn, but many are fooling themselves about their intent.

“That could include law enforcement, but could also include concerned civilians, doctors, attorneys, researchers, reporters,” Lanning said. “In my experience, the most common, but still relatively rare, situation is for individuals when caught to claim they were doing an ‘investigation’ or ‘research.’ In most cases there is little or nothing to support their claim of doing legitimate work.”

Last month, a former Park City police officer was sentenced to nearly three years in prison after about 1,000 images of children being sexually exploited were found in his home. A former West Memphis, Ark., police officer was indicted in November on 13 counts of child porn, and a former South Tucson, Ariz., police officer was sentenced in November to 16 years of probation for child sex and pornography charges.

An ‘internal need’

In October, a former deputy prosecutor with the California attorney general’s office pleaded not guilty to possessing thousands of computer images of child pornography, and in September a former Pennsylvania state trooper was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison for possessing child porn.

“Many people assume that if someone is working with law enforcement, he must be a good person and have no sexual interest,” Lanning said. “That’s not necessarily the case. A lot of people who have this kind of interest have a tremendous internal need. Child molesters, a certain type of them, desperately need to believe they love and care for children.”

Screening process

Mick Covington, interim director of the Missouri Sheriff’s Association, said a majority of officers who investigate child pornography strictly abide by Missouri law and are dedicated to bringing child porn traffickers to justice.

“For every one that may fall by the wayside, you have 1,001 doing the job they’re supposed to be doing,” Covington said.

At the FBI computer forensics lab in Kansas City, where more than half of all cases deal with child pornography, agents undergo a thorough background check. Also, supervisors watch for signs that an agent is being negatively affected by the images he or she sees on a regular basis.

“They’re especially vulnerable when they have their own children,” FBI spokesman Jeff Lanza said. “Most agents that I’ve talked to that work with this stuff are hardened to the reality of these pictures, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t get to them.

“Someone’s got to do that work,” he said. “You can’t put together a case like this without looking at images of digital media.”