Manhunt spreads for 200 adult consumers of child rape videos
Sopuruchi Onwuka
International dragnet of investigations is running to bring about 200 adult consumers of child rape videos originating from the poor neighborhoods in the Philippines.
The investigation is enhanced by a unique technology provided by the Child Rescue Coalition (CRC) which is also participating in the campaign.
The paedophiles allegedly paid between £10 and £15 pounds to watch live streamed videos of children as young as three years being raped by crime rings that exploit trafficked children. And the bust into the dark internet child pornography has sparked off the biggest international police investigation of its kind.
According to the online reports reviewed by The Oracle Today, details of the suspects are now being passed to police forces around the world for arrests, questioning and possible charges for exploiting vulnerable children and fuelling abuse.
Investigators from 10 countries including the UK, US, France and Germany used the most advanced technology to analyse tens of thousands of abuse images and 10 million lines of online conversations between 12,000 suspected criminal accounts over five days.
An investor in the international police manhunt described the offences of the porn consumers as “rape by proxy.”
Because the abuse is live-streamed, there are no direct images of the victims except those saved by the perpetrators, but the investigators were still able to identify 197 suspected buyers of the live-streamed feeds by cross-referencing payments, geographical information, phone numbers and computer chats.
Investigators are able to determine that the paedophiles pay as little as £10 to £15 to the Philippines-based traffickers who organize the online child sexual abuse, sometimes using their own children.
It is estimated that nearly 500,000 Filipino children were trafficked to produce new child sexual abuse material in 2022, with the majority of victims found to be aged between three and 12 years old.
The US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) received more than 32 million reports of child sexual abuse material from around the world in 2022, an 87 percent increase on 2019.
In the UK,the National Crime Agency (NCA) estimates there are between 680,000 and 830,000 adult offenders who pose varying degrees of risk to children, equivalent to 1.3 per cent to 1.6 per cent of the adult population.
The NCA said research suggested one in 10 children experienced child abuse before the age of 16 in the UK, while the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse suggested this occurred to one in six girls and one in 20 boys.
A former UK detective chief inspector specialising in online child abuse, Phil Attwood, said the abuse amounted to “rape by proxy” in which traffickers exploited the extreme poverty of people in the Philippines.
Mr Attwood, the director of impact at the Child Rescue Coalition (CRC), which provides the technology, said the five-day “sprint” in which investigators from around the world analysed the data had provided vital information to track down and help bring to justice nearly 200 of the worst offenders.
The investigators analysed data which investigators across the world had gathered over 12 years. Every time a paedophile or trafficker is arrested, their digital footprint such as chats, financial data, locations and IP addresses is used to generate more leads.
This had enabled investigators to pinpoint 100 accounts selling pay-per-view access to the abuse to sex offenders in some 24 countries. From this, the software provided by CRC helped investigators identify the 197 suspects.
A report by United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) and International Justice Mission identified the Philippines as the centre for the production of the child sex abuse materials.
