Atention PBBM: Philippines Is Distant 3rd in Sextortion of Children

By Oggie Medina

I attended a recent virtual press briefing in New York City’s Foreign Press Center on transnational sextortion of children, and the report was alarming.

President Bongbong Marcos must take note of this situation to prevent exploitation of Filipino minors.

I listened to US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State David Bedard who oversees the Office of Europe and Asia Programs in the counter-crime arm Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. He recently discussed the U.S.-sponsored resolution adopted by the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice that focused on disrupting criminal networks and holding perpetrators of transnational sex – of child sextortion accountable.

Mr. Bedard was in New York recently to attend a conference on combating child exploitation, which was hosted by the Tim Tebow Foundation in coordination with the Canadian Centre for Child Protection and the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.

“As governments and entities from outside the public sector gathered to discuss child exploitation, I wanted to highlight one of the most urgent and fastest growing threats to children worldwide, which is transnational sextortion,” said Bedard during a press briefing.

Sextortion is the use of explicit images as leverage for blackmail and is not a new crime. “What is new is the rapid rise of financially motivated transnational form that specifically targets children. In just a few years, it has exploded in scale and lethality.”

Mr. Bedard explained how sextortion works. “An offender creates a fake online identity, so often posing as a young woman on social media or a gaming platform or any other number of sites, and targets a teenage boy. After quickly gaining the child’s trust, the offender persuades him to share an explicit image; the offender threatens to send that image to his friends, to his family, to his school, to his community unless he pays that offender. The psychological pressure is instant and crushing. In documented cases, children have died by suicide within hours of contact – hours, not days.”

The cumulative effect is industrial in scale: “So thousands of children targeted simultaneously across dozens of countries by hundreds of independent actors, all running the same playbook. You don’t always need to be a part of an organized crime group to participate in this. These criminals also use artificial intelligence. They generate deep fakes of children; they exploit social media, gaming platforms, and crypto-messaging apps to reach victims across borders. Wherever in the world they can find a victim, they will exploit that. They launder their proceeds through cryptocurrency, and they operate from countries where, correctly in too many cases, no one will come after them.”

Mr. Bedard further pointed out that “the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has a lot of great data and a lot of resources, and certainly direct you there as well. They publish their data online. I mentioned Cote d’Ivoire and Nigeria being the top two; kind of a distant third is Philippines, and fourth would be India. And then – Philippines would be third and then India fourth. And the last piece, you mentioned boys being the targets. That’s what we’re seeing in the data. I certainly don’t want to say that there aren’t female victims or young girls aren’t being victimized as well, but in the data and some of the more extreme cases that we’re seeing when it comes to suicide of children, that’s predominately boys.

He said that, “If we’re able to save one child from sextortion and one child from taking their own life, I consider that a success of the programs we’re putting forward. I can look into kind of if we have stronger data. But I think that that’s kind of the testament or the line that I would like to put in the sand, that if we get after this problem together, working with our Philippines counterparts and saving one American child’s life, one Philippine child’s life, or just protecting them from the crime, I think that’s a success.”