The shame in the North Country?

The last couple of years, I’ve been keeping a kind of informal mental tally of all the sex crimes reported in our broadcasts and in the region’s newspapers.

An sickening number of these allegations — and convictions — involve men who are entertaining themselves with pornographic images of children.

A terrifying number of these cases involve men who actually tried to predate on young people.

There are, of course, the high-profile cases, including the conviction of former Assemblyman Chris Ortloff from Plattsburgh for trying to arrange a tryst with two little girls.

His case offered a particularly horrific insight into the mental state of one such predator.

In Saranac Lake, the director of the local youth center has been fired and faces criminal charges that he raped a 13-year-old girl.

Then there’s Plattsburgh celebrity Raymond “Foxy” Gagnon who faces trial soon on kiddy-porn charges.

And then there’s the state police academy trainer in Rutland, Vermont, who committed suicide recently, a day after his home computer was seized.

Investigators had accused him of using his academy computer to look at child porn.

It’s important to say that people are innocent until proven guilty; and we’ve had some cases in the North Country where the facts didn’t bear out the accusations.

Surrounding these prominently-reported allegations are the weekly — sometimes, it seems, daily — reports of other arrests for child-sex or child-porn charges.

We’re just beginning our investigation into this bleak phenomenon. Is there truly an uptick in sexual crimes against children? If so, why?

Or is it only better reporting, better investigation by the media? Is this, in fact, a scourge we’ve lived with for a long time?

Are schools and other child-care organizations doing everything possible to screen predators?

We like to think of ourselves as a tight-knit, small-town culture. And there’s a lot of truth to that self-image.

But my sense is that we have to do much much better with this fundamental challenge: protecting children and identifying the predators who live among us.