Protect children from livestreamed sexual abuse – now

A Florida man is serving life in prison for sending roughly $130,000 over a decade to criminals in the Philippines to direct the live rape of children as young as 12. Shocking, but according to The New York Times, also common, with the Times finding 100 federal criminal cases of men paying to watch the livestreaming of child sexual abuse. According to US law enforcement and the Philippine financial investigations unit, Americans are the “number one consumers” of this horrific abuse.

Last November, a 59-year-old French citizen began serving a 25-year sentence for “complicity in aggravated human trafficking,” after ordering, directing and consuming online live sexual assaults of Filipino children as young as five-years-old over a nine-year period. He was arrested in San Francisco, an animator for Disney and Pixar.

But not a single day behind bars can erase the deep trauma that either offender inflicted on potentially hundreds of children – over a collective 19 years. And while US and French authorities should be praised for bringing offenders to justice, we all must face the fact that global tech and financial systems are failing children at alarming rates.

“The most powerful companies in the world are enabling the sexual abuse of a child to be livestreamed on the internet,” according to Sara Gardner, who leads the Heat Initiative.

And they had plenty of time to do something, with the abuse lasting 10 and nine years, respectively.

That is ample time for tech companies to raise the alarm – if they were detecting anything – and for financial institutions to spot glaringly obvious patterns of suspicious transactions for child sexual exploitation – 50,000 euros’ worth of small, irregular payments to dozens of recipients in the Philippines.

It would be one thing if offenders used sophisticated technology to hide their abuses, resorted to the dark web or untraceable payment platforms. But according to New York Times’ investigative journalist Michael Keller, offenders are using apps easily available on Apple and Google app stores.

Far from being isolated cases, Europol calls live video child abuse “a persistent threat” that “stands out as the main form of commercial sexual exploitation of children and as a major source” of new child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Nearly half a million children are impacted by this crime in the Philippines alone, with victims in Colombia, the US, UK, Romania and elsewhere, and demand-side offenders in the US, UK, Australia, Canada and the EU.

Effective and efficient justice systems are essential to hold offenders accountable, protect victims and reduce prevalence. But with US law enforcement reporting having only “infiltrated .0001 percent of the actual abuse that’s occurring,” more must be done upstream with technological prevention.

The status quo of allowing perpetrators to produce and stream child sexual abuse live without detection, reporting or disruption is technologically indefensible and enabling the crime on a mass scale. While it requires tradeoffs and transparency, we must leave no tool unused in our collective global efforts to stop violence against children.

So, what can we expect from industry?

According to Sharon Pursey, co-founder of safety tech firm SafeToNet, “Technology exists that can detect and block child sexual abuse from being digitally created or consumed via images, video or livestream. Artificial intelligence, machine learning tools can detect new abusive content and be dropped onto applications, networks or Operating Systems (OS) of smart devices, preventing devices from rendering illegal sexual images of children.”

Ruby and Joy, Filipino survivors of what the US Department of Justice calls “virtual child sex trafficking,” demand that governments require tech companies to make their platforms “safe by design” and “prevent, detect, report and remove child sexual abuse produced or shared on their sites...”

There’s no doubt that the wealthiest companies in the world can use technology – signals, AI and other tools – to disrupt and report abuse on their apps, platforms and devices.

Again, the technology already exists to do this, according to global experts.  “Technologies to detect child sexual abuse material have advanced rapidly, and many platforms remain largely or completely unprotected, which enables their use by abusers. This is often positioned as a choice between privacy and safety, but the latest technologies block abuse content without compromising user privacy. We believe platforms can, and should, be doing more,” reports Ian Stevenson, chair of the Online Safety Tech Industry Association.

And now is the time. Over 120 governments, survivor groups, civil society and corporations attended last November’s Global Ministerial Conference for Ending Violence Against Children in Bogotá and pledged to strengthen child protection offline and online, including the Philippines. 

The Philippines pledged to develop a multi-sectoral strategic plan, which incorporates safety by design principle, to combat Online Sexual Abuse or Exploitation of Children and Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation Materials (OSAEC-CSAEM). This plan identified specific and measurable outputs in four key result areas, including prevention. The Philippine government could begin by enforcing provisions of Republic Act 11930 (the Anti-OSAEC and Anti-CSAEM Act of 2023) requiring tech companies to “install mechanisms or measures designed to prevent, detect, respond or report” child sexual abuse and exploitation material and “install available technology, program(s) or software to ensure that access to or streaming of violations of this Act will be removed, blocked or filtered.”

With strong leadership and decisive action, the Philippines is positioned to be a global leader in combatting OSAEC-CSAEM. President Marcos reaffirmed this commitment at the National Summit co-organized by IJM in September 2024, stating: “I have said it before, and I will say it again: this administration will do everything – we will spare no effort – to combat these heinous crimes against our children.”

The good news about OSAEC is that we can end it. We don’t have to live in a world where young children are defenseless to sexual violence and abuse online, or where our internet sites and group chats are poisoned with child sexual abuse material. A robust, highly effective justice system response, along with tech and financial platforms treating livestreamed child sexual abuse as an active crime scene, will protect millions of children in the Philippines and worldwide.

We must demand an end to the status quo and work for a world where all children can grow up safe, where our apps and platforms are “safe by design,” where our digital, not only in the Philippines but worldwide, is inhospitable to child sexual abuse and where our devices – especially our phones – are incompatible with child sexual abuse or exploitation material.

*      *      *

John Tabagho is executive director of the International Justice Mission-Center to End Online Sexual Exploitation of Children.