In the largest international police operation of its kind, nearly 200 paedophiles in the Philippines were identified after paying to watch live-streamed sexual assault of minors.
Details about the suspects are now being sent on to police departments around the world so that they can be questioned and potentially charged with exploiting vulnerable youngsters and fueling abuse, which one sexual abuse investigator characterised as “rape by proxy”.
Over the course of five days, investigators from ten nations, including the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and Germany, utilised cutting-edge technology to examine tens of thousands of abuse photographs and ten million lines of online communications between 12,000 suspected criminal accounts.
Because the abuse is live-streamed, there are no direct images of the victims other than those saved by the perpetrators. However, investigators were able to identify 197 suspected buyers of the live-streamed feeds by cross-referencing payments, geographical information, phone numbers, and computer chats.
Paedophiles pay as low as £10 to £15 to traffickers headquartered in the Philippines who plan online child sexual abuse, often with their own children.
Phil Attwood, a former UK detective chief inspector who specialises in internet child abuse, described the abuse as “rape by proxy” in which traffickers took advantage of people’s acute poverty in the Philippines.
Mr. Attwood, the director of impact at the Child Rescue Coalition (CRC), which offers the technology, stated that the five-day “sprint” in which investigators from all around the world evaluated the data gave critical information for locating and prosecuting over 200 of the worst offenders.
The investigators reviewed data obtained over a 12-year period by investigators around the world. Every time a paedophile or trafficker is apprehended, their digital footprint, including chats, financial data, locations, and IP addresses, is exploited to create new leads.
This allowed detectives to identify 100 accounts selling pay-per-view access to the mistreatment of sex offenders in 24 nations. The software offered by CRC assisted detectives in identifying the 197 suspects.
According to a report released by the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) and the International Justice Mission, the Philippines is the primary producer of child sex abuse materials.
It is anticipated that almost 500,000 Filipino children were trafficked in 2022 to produce new child sexual assault material, with the bulk of victims aged three to twelve years old.
In 2022, the US-based National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) received more over 32 million reports of child sexual abuse material from throughout the world, representing an 87 percent increase over 2019.
In the United Kingdom, the National Crime Agency (NCA) believes that there are between 680,000 and 830,000 adult criminals who offer varied degrees of risk to children, accounting for 1.3% to 1.6% of the total adult population.
According to the NCA, one in ten children in the UK have experienced child abuse before the age of 16, while the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse reports that one in six females and one in twenty boys have.