THE INTERSECTION BETWEEN CHILD EXPLOITATION AND TECHNOLOGY

Wendy Cheng 2020

Charlotte, a young Californian girl of fifteen, became close friends with Michelle. Like most epic sisterhoods, their friendship was built on a shared love of local boba shops, exchanging pictures of bizarre hairstyles, and discussing school problems. Although Michelle was initially a stranger, she soon brightened Charlotte’s school life with a sense of joy. This story has the potential to be a warmhearted and inspiring tale of friendship. However, missing from this narrative are four crucial facts: 1) Michelle is a man from Texas in his mid-fifties; 2) Michelle became friends with Charlotte by tracking her private information on Facebook; 3) In the next few months, Michelle will lure Charlotte to take a nude photo, then repeat this cycle of harassment to obtain more pornographic material; 4) This story is not isolated, it is the reality of how millions of children’s bodies become merchandise as a result of online traffickers. 

From the United States to the Philippines, a soaring number of teenagers are being groomed through online chats, fueled by the global rise of cheap, high-speed internet and mobile phone ownership, particularly in technologically developing countries. Additionally, the increasing use of social media has facilitated exploiters in quickly and anonymously communicating with potential victims. Furthermore, with the greater demands for privacy in place, offenders can change their identities within a second, along with their avatars. The pool of potential victims has therefore expanded rather than decreased. Groomers worldwide have used technology to expose the vulnerabilities of us and the people living around us. We need to protect ourselves by using the same weapon: technology. 

Section 1: The prevalence of child exploitation in the digital age

When determining how often trafficking and grooming occurs, people are often misled by the word “traffick.” We believe victims must be locked in cages and boxes, shipped across oceans and borders to have been “trafficked.” Perhaps this is one of the reasons why we think of trafficking as so infrequent and distant. However, anyone forced to do something under another’s demand is considered a modern slave. Grooming is a process of exploiting trust to sexually use another’s body while leveraging fear and shame to keep the victim silent.  

  This kind of insidious behavior is not new; it existed long before the emergence of cellphones; however, the Internet has extended the groomer’s reach. When Kate, the mother of a 13-year-old boy, opened her son’s Fortnite and Minecraft Discord,  she saw the sexualized chats that unfolded. The imagery in these messages grew increasingly disturbing, moving from pornographic illustrations to photos of actual children being abused. When Kate asked her son the gamer’s identity in the chat, he replied that it was a friend of someone. “But then I realized he wasn’t a friend of anybody,” said Kate. 

However, the chat’s content is less concerning than how easy it is for a sex groomer to become part of a child’s life. The criminals strike up a conversation and gradually build trust. Often they pose as children, confiding in their victims with false stories of hardship or self-loathing. Their goal, typically, is to dupe children into sharing sexually explicit photos and videos of themselves — which they use as blackmail for more imagery, much of it increasingly graphic and violent. Potential incidents of grooming can occur while playing games with strangers. With millions of young gamers surfing the Internet, we often fail to notice where and when some of them fall into this black hole of shame and fear. 

  A report by the International Labor Organization reported that on any given day of 2016, 40.3 million people were forced to live as modern slaves. Footage of the exploited bodies of 28,000 middle school students, pharmacy workers, and single mothers was shared online every minute. 4.8 million people per year had been forced into sexual exploitation, and over a million victims were children. In the United States alone, the National Center on Missing and Exploited Children received 8.2 million reports a year. Children as young as infants are subject to commercial sexual exploitation, where rape clips are sold across all 50 states. As the Minnesota Human Trafficking Task Force calculated in 2019, 30% of the cases concerned children under 12 years old, and about 50% of these cases involved the parents or caregivers as alleged offenders. The “millions” and “children” in the statistics denote the worst news because technology and the Internet are doubling these numbers. A 12-year-old child in your neighborhood could become a slave right in his/her bedroom, and all that is needed is a little box with Wi-Fi. The speed and accessibility of the Internet have made traffickers rampant online, and with the lack of controls in place to monitor this, child trafficking is going unchecked. The New York Times reported that the tech industry had made only little efforts to combat the wave of child sexual abuse imagery on the Internet. 

  As grooming has become more prevalent, it has also successfully led to trafficking and exploitation. Today, 94% of kids ages 3-18 have home internet access, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. With the increase in remote learning, children are spending 50% more time on their screens. Especially since the online environment has built an unsupervised environment for children, they are generally more willing to share information with strangers, trusting offenders as friends. In truth, the victims are not to blame. Traffickers specifically select their victims through social media posts, using their information to disguise themselves as being the same age and having similar interests. Within several messages in which they share their problems and open up about issues, they can gain trust and empathy. 

  Online groomers make their victim feel trapped, even if they don’t see their victims in person. They use deception and blackmail to pressure their victims into relinquishing control of their own bodies. Unfortunately, this is only the beginning of a more extensive operation involving in-person meetings in public places, and these children will eventually be forced into a whole new world of exploitation. 

Section 2: Proposed solutions and effective strategies

Given the prevalence and destructiveness of child trafficking, something must be done. Nevertheless, statistics show that schools and parents are struggling to address these issues adequately. Children are taught to “avoid suspicious, poor men” when both men and women from all social levels are selling or buying children’s bodies online. Parents and teachers maintain that “you are responsible for your own body,” despite the fact that one in four girls and one in six boys will be sexually abused before turning 18. These solutions are insufficient at addressing the root of the problem. The biggest issue is that we are expecting children to police themselves. We are expecting them to be wary of all of the messages they are sent. We are expecting a 12-year-old girl to defeat an adult male with time, money, experience, and a sophisticated plan that has successfully lured millions of other children just like her into the global sex industry. Finally, we are expecting them to recover from the shame and guilt of exploitation. Children are not responsible; we are. 

  Instead, to find an immediate solution, we need to fight technology with technology. More specifically, we need to target specific issues surrounding the online sex exploitation system. Imagine a leaking water pipe polluting the pure water around it. We need first to fill the holes in the water pipe, preventing further pollution of pure water before we eliminate the origin of the pollution.  In the case of online sex trafficking, the posting and re-posting of inappropriate images of child abuse is the polluted water, and the origin is the hidden groomers. 

  In March of 2020, a coalition of leading tech companies, including Google, Apple, and Twitter, launched Project Protect, agreeing to a new principle put forth by five governments to prevent the spread of online child exploitation. In the agreement,  97 governments, 25 tech companies, and 30 civil society organizations from the WePROTECT Global Alliance will adopt strategies that have already been promoted by companies such as Facebook and YouTube, identifying and stopping the spread of abusive content on their platforms. Facebook has amplified its child exploitation task force with new programs that prevent both posting and re-posting of child pornography. Initially, the company used PhotoDNA, a photo-matching technology, to identify the sharing of nude photos and alert both the NCMEC (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children) and the company branch. Facebook will stop the images from spreading and share them with NCMEC, where they will transfer the information to appropriate law enforcement agencies across the globe to find and protect the victims. Now, building on the previous photo-matching technology, Facebook applies artificial intelligence to proactively detect child nudity and previously unknown sexual content with filters. The new technology can more quickly identify this content and report it to NCMEC and remove inappropriate images before they spread. 

  Amidst these efforts by leading social media companies to prevent the spread of child exploitation, Microsoft has taken a unique approach. They launched Project Artemis, an initiative to prevent the creation of child pornography in the first place; in short, stopping grooming at its cradle, texting. “Project Artemis,” which detects online predators to lure children for sexual purposes, has addressed and reported to organizations such as NCMEC. The technique is applied to historical text-based chat conversations, where artificial intelligence evaluates and rates conversation characteristics. This rating can then be used to determine whether the content should be examined by human moderators, who would then identify imminent threats and refer them to law enforcement. Both Project Protect and Project Artemis stand as significant role models that offer a feasible solution to this mass pollution. Several other companies have since made moves to prevent this polluted, multi-billion industry from expanding. With technology, the safety of children no longer hinges on the actions of the children themselves. AI and actual online workers are building walls to isolate groomers from youths. The victims can now know that the technologies of hundreds of tech companies are protecting them and that this experience is nothing to be ashamed of.

Conclusion

Together with education, volunteer hotlines and tech companies provide hopes of a future eradication of online child exploitation. A future in which children could enjoy the privilege of gaming and exploring online without the fear of illegal traffickers. However, even the future cannot satisfy everyone. With the COVID-19 outbreak, we witnessed firsthand how choosing not to wear a mask became a right, despite the danger placed on others. Similarly, people enjoy online anonymity and freedom from censorship, which reduces social pressures. The tension between unrestricted internet freedom and the prevention of online grooming and sexual exploitation will continue to rise. As further studies and investigations are undertaken, I myself am left to wonder whether Charlotte would advocate for the kind of freedom that jeopardized the control of her own body.