Molester Told to Help Victims

A San Diego man convicted of traveling to the Philippines to have sex with teenage boys was ordered Tuesday to pay more than $16,000 restitution that will be used to provide medical, psychological and occupational therapy to his victims.

Edilberto Datan, 61, is serving a 17-year prison sentence for violating the 2003 Protect Act, a federal law enacted to curb international sex tourism.

“One of the extraordinary things about this case is that we were able to locate the victims,” Assistant U.S. Atty. Rupa Goswami said.

Most children ensnared in the international sex trade remain nameless, faceless victims, investigators said.

Datan, a retired state real estate auditor, was arrested in November 2004, when he arrived at Los Angeles International Airport on a flight from the Philippines. He previously had been suspected of downloading child pornography from the Internet, Goswami said.

Searching his luggage, customs inspectors found computer memory sticks containing nearly 100 sexually explicit images of underage Filipino boys.

When questioned about the photos, Datan said the boys were members of a dance troupe who came to his hotel room in Cebu to visit and shower. He denied any inappropriate behavior.

In March, however, he pleaded guilty to engaging in sexual conduct with minors and with producing child pornography outside the United States. U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner in Los Angeles sentenced him to 17 years in prison.

“The hardest part of the case was locating his victims,” Goswami said Tuesday.

Armed with only copies of the photographs, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators and the Philippine National Police fanned out across Cebu Island until they were able to find eight of his victims, who were 14 and 15 when the crimes occurred.

Under an arrangement worked out by the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles and U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement officials, the restitution payments and the boys’ treatment will be overseen by the international humanitarian organization World Vision.

“Every day, children are sexually exploited by men from the United States in places like the Philippines, Cambodia and Costa Rica,” said Joseph Mettimano, director of World Vision’s child sex terrorism project.

“While the restitution cannot undo the damage that has been done, it will provide much-needed counseling and other services for some of the young boys who were assaulted.”

Datan’s arrest grew out of Operation Predator, an ongoing effort by the immigration and customs enforcement agency to track down child sex predators in the United States and overseas. Since the initiative was launched in 2003, agents have arrested more than 6,200 individuals, including more than 1,000 in California, on a host of charges, mostly for lewd conduct and downloading child pornography from the Internet.

Also in 1993, President George H.W. Bush signed into law the Protect Act, which is an acronym for Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to End the Exploitation of Children Today.

Besides mandating stiffer penalties, the law made it a crime, punishable by at least 15 years in prison, to produce child pornography abroad. Datan was prosecuted under that section of the act.

Goswami said the law also eliminated legal barriers that made it exceptionally difficult to prosecute international sex tourists.

Mettimano, who has helped victims of child sex tourism for the last decade, said that since the passage of the law, federal agents have arrested more than 20 people on charges of engaging in international sex tourism. In the 10 previous years, he said, there were two or three arrests.