New Cases Prove “Online” Child Sexual Abuse Kills Children

There’s a new public safety alert out from the FBI and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, discussing an outbreak of child sexual abuse attacks on boys and teen boys, as young as 10, who are targeted, coerced, manipulated and groomed into sending explicit photos of themselves to predators… which are then used as extortion material to get money from the victims. Though the alert doesn’t say, we can safely assume that this material was sold to other pedophiles as well, as there is an incredibly lucrative market for this material and this is a common pattern in organized pedophilia. So far they have located over 3,000 victims and presumed there to be many more; this is one of the sad realities of working in the anti-pedophilia space, because many victims are never counted, and you know that whatever you can see, there are multiples that you don’t. We see of victim stories only what  gets through the thick mesh of societal shame, abusive environments, the school and church, and the criminal justice system; even though the FBI participated in this report, they are themselves one of the reasons why there is so much pedophilia and why pedophilia rings are allowed to happen, why so many victims fall through the cracks. 

Over 3,000 boys.

And they have found *dozens* of victim suicides associated with these cases. 

Child sexual abuse kills, even if it is happening online. 

This is why we must always say: pedophilia is murder and attempted murder, because when we don’t say that, it covers up the deadliness of child sexual abuse. Victims of pedophilia will be at greater chance of suicide throughout the rest of their lives, with at least 3x the number of suicide attempts. The mortality risk doesn’t end at suicide and also encompasses elevated risks of alcoholism, drug addiction and overdose, as well as the sometimes deadly domestic violence that often happens down the road as pedophilia victims are re-targeted by other predators. 

This proves what should already be obvious: there is no essential difference in child sexual abuse that happens online vs IRL. While with all crimes, severity is a factor, once you get to the point where children in both cases are actually DYING from it, as a predictable and repeatable outcome, there is very little reason to distinguish them except for procedural reasons like how we go about combatting pedophilia across mediums. 

I will note that this case is yet more documentation of the current attack structure of exploitation of children and young people, executed by pedophile rings, that we are seeing all over the globe. A sexual slavery ring out of Korea, documented in the Netflix documentary,  Cyber ​​Hell: Destroy the Nth Chatroom, attacked at least 100 women, including 26 minors forced into sexual slavery via blackmail with personal content; authorities believe 260,000 people paid to access the material. — this speaks to the tremendous market that there is for child sexual abuse material and how lucrative even one victim can be for pedophile rings.

This is notable because within the ecosystem of pedophiles and pedophile rings, pedophiles are often thought of as lone predators; but yet again in this case, you see that pedophiles actually are group offenders and offend in conspiracies, called rings, and sometimes very elaborate ones, at that. Pedophile rings share child sexual abuse material, but also organize to find and abuse children and teens together. And while sexual pleasure may be be one thing that predators get out of the abuse, the overall etiology of pedophilia is causing the hurt, abuse, suffering, ruin and death of children. Group activities include selling victims’ images or trying to extort them for money, sexually humiliating victims publicly, at such a sensitive and formative period, blackmailing them into providing more and more child sexual abuse material to the pedophile, putting on “live shows” with their targets as the attraction. The type of damage from the pedophile is not confined: this is a person who is hell-bent on destroying children for personal gratification and this is why the abuses of pedophiles are not confined to a very narrow range; they cause harm holistically and that is the focus on their lives as obsessed sadists. 

To this point, you should note with GREAT anger, that pedophilia often has a profit motive and involves a pedophile network of financial transactions, as pedophiles are willing to pay and be paid for access to children, for access to child sexual abuse material, that they will pay children to manipulate them into sexual acts, something that can be incredibly manipulative to all children but especially poor children. And in this current case, we see that they will try to get money out of children themselves. Pedophiles use children as an economic engine; in this case, in the Nth Room ring, predators were able to get 260,000 men paying them for access to sexual slavery, by abusing 100 women, at least a quarter of which were minor. Pedophiles are a market opportunity, a sales demographic, and significant money transacts through them, they both make a lot of money out of this and use money to obtain access to children.  

 In organized pedophilia, sexual abuse of children and teens are tied to an entire economic instrument; look at the Miss American contests, the Epstein ring, the US Women’s Gymnastics outbreak, Sandusky as well, and the tech companies that make money on images of young girls and themselves manipulate youth into posting more and more content in order to chase artificially designed dopamine hits.

 The dichotomy of online/offline has served to minimize MANY modern experiences of abuse, particularly sexual and domestic, and I would argue that this is the predominant reason the modifier “online” is deployed, to marginalize and minimize abuse experiences. Think of how “online bullying” or “online harassment” or “online stalking” or “internet grooming”, are considered subordinated to some other, unspecified, bullying or harassment or abuse. Meanwhile, pedophiles have been doing huge amounts of damage to teens without ever being in the same physical room. Child sexual abuse that kills is happening online, and it still isn’t considered “real life”. Pedophiles are doing everything in their power to find new and better ways to give children a trauma they may never recover from, may die of. And that is not considered seriously in a world view of an offline/online dichotomy for abuse. 

The tragic result of suicide should show no other proof than that pedophiles are inflicting deadly harm through iPhones alone, that technology is just a medium for sexual abuse itself, and that “online” sexual abuse, is sexual abuse with the same outcomes for children, even in encounters that do not result in a physical attack at any point. Child sexual predators are still able to sexually abuse children to the point of death without physically touching them — the impact of the attack is not dampened by the fact that it was mediated by a social app. The psychic pain and trauma experienced by a pedophile victim is terrible, and we are still caught up in this real world/online dichotomy even as the Metaverse creeps closer and closer and more evidence comes out every day that pedophiles kill kids from “online”. Who does this dichotomy most serve? It’s actually pedophiles and tech companies that benefit the most, because the devastating child predation is hidden under the idea that “online” isn’t “real.”  Especially because pedophiles are able to extort and manipulate children into performing physically sexually violent acts on themselves, so the physical abuse IS actually still occurring in many many cases. 

Pedophiles will use technology as much as they can to abuse, exactly because of the way justice is conceived of in this country, their “online” acts are far less likely to get them caught and imprisoned. We know that pedophiles will go to great lengths to avoid getting caught by anyone or being criminalized under the legal code in any way. They are cowards and they want long careers, these are serial predators — 20% of child sexual offenders have 10-40 victims. They will move to areas with lower ages of consent, or groom teens online right until the bare minimum legal requirement is met when they can make the physical attack — 16, 17, 18, all teenagers still, yet a pedophile attacking a teenager is widely considered legal and fine. Using all of these online services, many anonymous to some degree, is anther way that pedophiles can avoid capture; the internet has been a huge boon for them for ease of attack, scale of attack and the ability to hurt children very severely and never be held to account. 

 There is an ever-rising tide of child sexual exploitation online. Pedophiles are organizing in gangs like this one, to groom, manipulate, extort, exploit, violate and harm. They are getting increasingly more adept, savvy, and networked, while efforts to combat child sexual abuse, have not not similarly increased. The predators are coming up with extremely effective techniques and clever manipulations: in this case, “cat fishing” their young targets by posing with fake accounts of similar-aged girls, attaining the explicit material under false premise and then revealing the extortion scheme. This is important because it speaks to the lengths that child sexual predators go to, in order to attain child sexual abuse material, in order to manipulate and exploit youth sexually. Even after receiving money from these CHILDREN in exchange not to release their photos, the predators released the material anyways; these crimes are highly sadistic, seeking the victim’s degradation and pain above all factors. 

We’re at a critical moment in the transformation of social media — the change in leadership at Twitter, and the rapidly accelerating arrival of the Metaverse, and of AI, will fundamentally change the online experience once more. How much thought is being put into the idea that the Metaverse might make child and teens even more vulnerable or it will make it even easier for pedophiles to inflict massive harm without capture, just one individual racking up hundreds of victims? We know that child sexual abusers are able to kill children using just an iPhone, a Facebook account and a Telegraph download; will the Metaverse be exposing new vulnerabilities, will children be easier to exploit, or will new types of exploitation occur? How does the form factor of child sexual abuse adapt, how will pedophiles adapt to new technologies? How does this change how we fight them, how will it change the outcomes and traumas and thus how we need to treat a new generation of pedophile victims? The new Photo Booth-style AIs are already being used to create child sexual abuse images, some of the first adopters of crypto were pedophiles due to their need to transact anonymously… and this is just the incredibly early days of consumer access of these types of technology. Will haptic technology, such as the body suits that have been built for “gaming”, allow someone to even more effectively physically harm or even molest a child? Will AI make it easier to lure children in and to construct catfish identities that increase the success rate of grooming attempts? Or create sexual AI experiences with text-to-video and text-to-image that will be harmful and traumatizing? Will widespread adoption of crypto by non-technical pedophiles make it increasingly easier for pedophiles to transact to and from children and their rings, enabling a scale of pedophile organization we haven’t seen before? As technology attaches and fuses more and more with our physical bodies, what are the implications for sexual abuse? 

In the months and years to come, there will be more debates than ever before about digital experiences and what they mean, what we should do about them, where we are in danger from them, and how to weigh these things. I would strongly encourage us to make sure that the experiences of child sexual abuse victims, and the mandate to protect children from sexual abuse, are held central to how we reason about platforms and cause/effect and how these platforms should be managed, and what our approach to abuse on them, should be. 

There is no greater duty that we have as a field, and a society, than to protect children from pedophiles. Combatting pedophiles and protecting children is one of the most fundamental social contracts tech companies should have with their users. Time and time again, they have disregarded these social contracts even as their products become the first and often primary tools for pedophilic abuse. Our response must go beyond beseeching companies whose profits depend on never doing the right thing, platforms that have covered up use by pedophiles for decades and continued to get rich off of children and teens while feeding them to predators. 

It is too late for tech to do the right thing about pedophiles; it is an industry that must be fundamentally stripped of the ability to profit on them, and of influence and control over children.

Far too many children are getting hurt on these platforms, and that alone is a reason why we need to take over the tech industry and build something new, something that isn’t based on manipulating and abusing children as a business model.