‘Memories are the things you don’t want to take home.’ - DI Jon Rouse.
It's not often that I hold the police up as heroes, but the case of Detective Inspector Jon Rouse of the Queensland Police Service, demands an exception. Retiring after 40 years’ police service, DI Rouse has been at the front line of child sexual abuse prevention for over over a generation. A pioneer in the field, Rouse and his team Task Force Argos, work in the most harrowing areas of law enforcement: victim ID, where they desperately attempt to identity and find the children being sexually abused on film, and also go online in the web’s darkest corners to pose as child sex predators and lure the actual criminals into sophisticated global police traps that would go on to ensnare thousands of offenders, and prevent untold numbers of sexual crimes against children.
Don’t, for a moment, think that these tactics are some kind of ‘entrapment’. Entrapment, which is illegal, exists when the police use a tactic that causes a person to commit a crime, that they wouldn’t have, had it not been for the actions of the police. People who lurk around the internet grooming children and raping them on camera to share with their networks of sick perverts, do not fall into this category. If it so happens that the ‘child’ on the other end of the line turns out to be a police officer, then that is just tough shit.
In the video below, DI Rouse explains at least some of his motivation, and for me it’s something that was very familiar. The phone call from an adult victim of childhood sexual abuse, the sobbing, the desperation and - for the person on the other end of the line - the overwhelming sense of helplessness.
What Jon Rouse did was go on to become one of Australia and the world’s leading police experts on child abuse prevention. From the video, you get a glimpse of the great personal cost paid for that service. He will have seen and heard some terrible things.
‘Courage’ can be defined as, seeing a situation, realising that it threatens your safety and proceeding anyway, for the good of others. By any measure, Jon Rouse and all his colleagues at Task Force Argos can be marked as brave people doing vital work.
Thank you for your service, DI Rouse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MF1pFcUnvU
Please consider a donation to Bravehearts, the child abuse prevention charity.