by Mary Aiken
The government of the Philippines estimates that there are as many as one hundred thousand children in the country who are forced into the webcam sex trade. Legally, the creation of an avatar like Sweetie to lure predators can be considered a form of entrapment in some jurisdictions, so this sort of practice does trouble me. But many countries, like the Philippines, in an effort to fight online abuse and the escalation of webcam sex trafficking, are changing their laws.
Sexual deviants who are drawn to children are broadly described in two ways: content or Internet offenders and contact offenders. One type is looking for content, or images of children, while the other is seeking physical contact with a child. The Internet facilitates both. How?
In the old days, a contact offender had to fly to the Philippines or Thailand to engage in sex with a child. Now they find their children online—in what is called technologically facilitated abuse—and by visiting forums and sites where pedophiles share information and a spirit of camaraderie.
“Cyberspace allows people with truly pathological traits to find similar comrades who reinforce their problem,” John Suler wrote in Psychology of the Digital Age: Humans Become Electric. As discussed in chapter 1, the mathematics of online behavior comes into play. Due to the effects of online syndication and escalation, the availability of like-minded collaborators in a new environment, which socializes and normalizes the deviant behavior, compounded by the effects of online disinhibition and anonymity, it is likely that an individual with a predisposition for pedophilia may find that behavior harder than ever to control. Additionally, people with criminal intent are able to access victims more easily.
Once upon a time, a content abuser who collected indecent images of children had to keep a secret stash in a box hidden in the attic. Now the amount of material available to this population is rapidly growing, thanks to the ease of taking digital images with mobile phones and computers and then sending or posting them online. While child pornography is the legal term used, children’s advocates prefer child abuse material (CAM), which removes any implication of consent of the child or a benign relationship with adult pornographic practices. Ten years ago, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) received thousands of images. In 2012 alone, the center received nearly 20 million images. As of 2016, the NCMEC archives had grown to a total of 139 million photographs in its Child Victim Identification Program. When a sample of images was assessed, 70 percent were classified as child pornography, 16 percent were described as online enticement, and 14 percent were classified as self-production. In other words, they were selfies—or sexts.
Interestingly, the profile of the average offender has changed in recent years. I suspect this has to do with technology as well. In the past decade there’s been an emergence of younger online offenders. Some reports indicate that an increasing number of them are under the age of eighteen. What would cause such a phenomenon? Does the access to pornography online have anything to do with it, or more simply, the impact of an adult online environment on children?
Back in 2010, when I was researching online child abuse material and cowriting a paper with INTERPOL assistant director Michael “Mick” Moran, I came across interesting information in the studies. An inappropriate sexualized event in early childhood has been reported by some contact and online offenders. This alone makes me seriously concerned about children looking at adult material online, because I would argue that the viewing of inappropriate content itself qualifies as an “early inappropriate sexualized event.” If so, the potential consequences could be tragic. As a society, we need to stop and really think about this.
Now, after the darkness of this difficult subject, I think it’s time for some good news: Sweetie isn’t the only clever development in recent years to fight pedophilia. Increasingly, the solution to technology-facilitated deviancy lies with technology itself.
“Every Image Is a Crime Scene”
For three long years, INTERPOL had been trying to catch a particular pedophile—a man who had posted more than two hundred photographs online that showed him sexually abusing young boys. All told, there were a dozen different boys in the photographs, their ages ranging from early teens to—and this is difficult stuff—as young as six years old. Judging from the features of the boys and a content analysis of the images, the location of these crimes appeared to be Southeast Asia.
Posting was a daring move for the pedophile, except that, in each of the shocking photographs, the face of the man had been digitally swirled, rendering his identity a total mystery.
Mick Moran was a detective at INTERPOL and working in the Crimes Against Children unit at the time of the investigation in 2007. Mick is a big, gregarious bloke, a former Irish Guard who shoots from the hip and is unrelenting in his quest to catch predators of children. He and I met around that time, and he invited me to become involved in research with the INTERPOL Specialists Group. He has a memorable saying about indecent images of a child or minor: “Every image is a crime scene.”
You know how forensics experts comb over a crime scene to find evidence? Moran’s team does brilliant analysis of child-abuse images to crack his cases. So when he was put in charge of the INTERPOL investigation of the pedophile with the “swirled” photographs online, Moran sent the images to a German lab, where cutting-edge technology was used to unscramble the features of the offender’s face.
Acting quickly, an unprecedented global manhunt was launched. An INTERPOL worldwide appeal received nearly 350 tips from the public within days. Five sources on three continents—including confirmation from a member of the predator’s own family—identified the man as Christopher Paul Neil, a substitute schoolteacher from British Columbia and a former chaplain and counselor with the Royal Canadian Air Cadets in Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan. Neil had left his studies for the priesthood (I know what you’re thinking) to move to Asia, where he taught English for five years.
Neil was working in South Korea but fled to Bangkok when the manhunt began. “I know the Thai authorities,” Moran told the media, “[and] all the countries in this region—Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand—I know they have all been alerted.” Border controls were in place and a collaborative effort to find Neil resulted in his arrest by Thai police.
INTERPOL announced in a statement that the operation would “serve as a warning to pedophiles that the power of the Internet, and public revulsion, would leave no hiding place.” In the end, the very technology that was publicizing Neil’s crimes brought him down.
“The irony that we used the Internet to publicize our message is not lost,” Moran said.
It’s a fact that technology has made it easier for pedophiles and other sexual deviants, but what can give us hope is the commitment and resourcefulness of individuals in law enforcement worldwide, like Mick and so many others I’ve met in the course of my work, dedicated to fighting the escalating problem of child abuse materials online. Together, with innovative new technologies and the determination of inspirational people like Sharon Cooper, a forensic pediatrician at NCMEC, and the creative vigilantes at Terre des Hommes and other NGOs and nonprofits devoted to saving as many children as possible, I feel confident that more pedophiles and other predators who market and trade child abuse material will be stopped. Outwitting those who prey on children is something we can cheer about in this dark world.
Although this vigilante stuff can definitely go too far, as in the instance of the unfortunate pediatrician in South Wales whose house was sprayed with graffiti by vandals.
Police confirmed that the attack was prompted by confusion over the words pedophile and pediatrician.
So, vigilantes, please watch your spelling.
Frankenstein + The Little Girl
All the gathered knowledge of human civilization is available by using Google, Bing, Yahoo, and the other search engines, and very soon all the books ever published throughout recorded history. The researching and self-teaching potential is awesome.
But not for a y
oung child. Not even for children who are eight to twelve, even though a U.S. study reports that a large number of them are regularly conducting searches on Google.
The essential problem lies with the search algorithms. They are designed to speedily deliver listings of the most frequently searched phrases. Extreme content and scary scenarios, which always draw the most adult eyeballs, can be presented first—regardless of the searcher’s age—due to the popularity of the sensational information.
So when a ten-year-old girl sits down in front of a computer and enters a word into the beguilingly empty search box, then presses “Return,” that’s when she is suddenly interfacing with machine intelligence. Almost anything becomes possible at this point—either by an accidental landing on an inappropriate site or by the profound power of a child’s curiosity. Some of the listings could be truly irresistible to a young child. In school and on the playground, as well as online, word of mouth is responsible for half of the traffic to various sites, including problematic ones. You don’t have to be a psychologist or expert on child development to know that children in this age group are frequently most interested in sharing the names of sites with inappropriate content—and daring one another to visit.
The technology that’s facilitating the ten-year-old girl’s search, as intelligent as it is, has no awareness that it is providing information to a ten-year-old. As a society, we haven’t focused enough on the ethics of connecting machine or artificial intelligence with a child. When a man-built machine harms a human being, who is responsible? Is it industry, the designer of the technology, or the owner of the machine? (The first recorded death by robot was in 1979, when an assembly-line worker for Ford Motor Company was killed instantly when a robot’s arm slammed him.)
It reminds me of that scene in the classic 1931 film Frankenstein, when the monster makes friends with a little girl who is picking flowers by a lake. The whole thing seems very sweet until he throws her into the water and she drowns.
Mary Shelley wrote her book Frankenstein amid the confusion and fears of industrialization—and speculated about what science might bring in the future. It is a perfect example of the power of fiction to present and illustrate a complex historical shift more effectively than dozens of nonfiction accounts. Would Shelley ever have imagined how the algorithms of search would bring machine intelligence into everyday life?
And where does this digital Frankenstein monster, online search, take the girl? While participating in an advisory group in Ireland to provide guidance about Internet governance, I was asked to study the offerings of legal but age-inappropriate content that could be accessed easily online by children. Believe me, it includes a great deal more than pornography and extreme violence.
It is actually very easy to find websites that promote drug-taking and alcohol abuse in the form of competitive drinking games. One troubling social media trend, neknominate, apparently started in Australia and swept the rest of the social media world in 2014. Other sites offer aggressive behavior in the form of extreme hostility: racism, hate speech, anti-LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) attitudes, or expression of extremist political views and attempts at radicalization. And let’s not forget the pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia sites (so popular that there’s even slang abbreviations for these: “pro-ana” and “pro-mia”) that promote life-threatening eating disorders as a lifestyle option. Worst of all, there are many self-harm (cutting) and suicide websites that target young people and provide a forum where they can meet other kids who engage in self-harm and therefore reinforce and normalize the behavior.
Imagine our ten-year-old girl discovering one of those sites. Perhaps she’s been hearing a lot about obesity at school and on TV. U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama has been a vocal activist on the subject, and obesity has been a trending topic for the past few years. Developmentally, a ten-year-old girl is beginning to think about herself in a new way—in relation to the other girls at school, and in comparison with the girls she sees online, in magazines, and on TV. She knows she’s a little chubby. Her aunts and grandmother are always pinching her apple-cheeks and telling her so. Is she obese? She may worry about that, so she enters the word “thin” and finds links to pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia sites (sometimes described as “thinspiration”) within seconds.
We also know from research done previously regarding television about the importance of children watching age-appropriate content. Young children can react very positively to age-appropriate shows and lessons—but will react just as negatively if the content is inappropriate for them. What kind of negative reaction? As I’ve said, studying the impact of pornography or violence on children is problematic to conduct due to the ethics of experimenting this way with the minds of minors. But when children are surveyed about their experiences online, we can draw some conclusions from the results. A child helpline in the U.K. survey in 2015 reported that one in ten children who were twelve to thirteen years old were “worried they might be addicted to porn.” One in five of those who were twelve to seventeen said they had seen pornographic images that had shocked or upset them, and disturbingly 12 percent said they had taken part in, or had made, a sexually explicit video.
More recently, an editorial by Alice Thomson in the Times of London highlights the ubiquity of hardcore pornography and what this could mean for children. One site, Porn Hub, had videos watched 87 billion times in 2015—the equivalent of twelve videos per person globally. As Thomson points out, police are struggling against a tide of offenses fueled by the easy availability of pornography, always just a few clicks away, even from children. In 2016, the governor of Utah, Gary Herbert, signed a resolution declaring a “public health crisis” due to its prevalence and easy access online. This is a societal crisis.
Content moderators of the Internet—adult individuals who are hired to remove beheadings, tortures, rapes, and child abuse images from search and social media sites—do report serious emotional fallout from what they’ve seen while doing their work. The ill effects on them—insomnia, anxiety, depression, recurrent nightmares—are very similar to those of people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, something we dramatized in a second-season episode of CSI: Cyber. The episode was called “5 Deadly Sins,” referring to the five types of content that social media companies pay to have removed (hate speech, porn, violence, drugs, trolling). I find it very disturbing that moderators are being used as human filters for extreme content. This is certainly an area crying out for a technology solution.
Moderators and deadly sins aside, we all know that the Internet offers a wide range of troubling material. Is it effective for parents to simply tell their young children not to explore there? I don’t think so. In a recent study, 69 percent of young people admitted to hiding their online activity from their parents.
Having secrets is natural for a child. Snooping and spying on their online lives—pouncing on their unattended cellphone to read their texts or checking their social media activity—is problematic. Studies show that children who have overbearing parents just learn to be more secretive. Worse than that, research shows that when those children run into trouble, the last people they will turn to are their overcontrolling parents. In other words, be vigilant but not a vigilante.
Here’s a real-world hypothetical situation: You say to a child, See that scary house on the hill up there? Don’t go there; it’s unsafe. What’s the first thing they will want to do?
A decade of online safety messaging may have fundamentally communicated to children that the Internet is unsafe—and therefore super-attractive. The study that looked at the online behavior of children in European countries showed that in just four years between two studies, from 2010 to 2014, as more children were using tablets and computers and became regular users of the Internet, eleven- to sixteen-year-olds were more likely to have received hate messages and been exposed to cyberbullying as well as self-harm and pro-anorexia sites.
This troubling escalation, which could result in more tragedies
and harmful experiences online, was mitigated by one very positive change: Children and adolescents in Europe were less likely to have made contact with a person online whom they hadn’t met face-to-face. This may show that the various awareness-raising programs and assemblies in schools about meeting strangers in the cyber environment have been effective. A cause for celebration.
The Predator in Your Home
A ten-year-old boy cares what his friends think. Going to sites with violent or sexual content and reporting back to friends what he’s seen or heard can increase his reputation among his peers. In a 2012 U.K. report for the National Centre for Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), young boys reported that coming to school with “regular” images of hardcore pornography on their phones wasn’t cool. But if a boy had an original image—like a picture of his very young girlfriend showing her breasts—that was cool, and so was he.
Young boys generating “original content”…This stopped me in my tracks when I read the study. Perhaps the fact that boys are sharing racy photos does not seem like a big deal to you. Boys being boys, right? But, in fact, the behavior reminded me of something far more troubling.
Some years back, when working on the online child-related sex offenders paper, I found that the hierarchical system or social structure of the offenders was very complex. In terms of child-related online sex offenders, the price of entry into higher levels of “closed” child abuse material trading groups was to generate an original indecent image of a child. It proved to other offenders that you weren’t a law-enforcement officer. And it proved you had access to a victim—and to original content. Now, very worryingly, it would appear that young boys are beginning to engage in similar behavior.
See how the lines keep moving? See how the cyber norms can shift? If the boys were trading images of Playboy Bunnies, it would seem almost innocent. What’s the difference now? They are trading naked and provocative images of real friends, girls from school and the neighborhood. This is children generating and distributing child pornography, albeit of themselves and their peers.