THE challenge is to provide children like “Sweetie” with a normal childhood and a safe environment so they may grow to pursue their dreams.
Webcam child sex tourism emerged last year as a new way of abusing the Internet after a Netherlands organization discovered this phenomenon with the use of a computer-generated 10-year-old Filipino girl named “Sweetie” to track predators online.
After the “Sweetie” project, the Terre Des Hommes Netherlands, a child protection agency, identified more than a thousand pedophiles from over 70 countries and turned over the information to international law enforcement agencies.
The group discovered how Filipino children are denied their childhood and forced into sexual activities, at times with the prodding of relatives. These children are told this is safe as no touching is involved in webcam child sex tourism and this is a quick way to earn for the family. Most of the clients in webcam child sex tourism are people in first world countries.
Five months after the group’s disclosure of its findings in November last year, there has been no update on the status of charges filed against online predators and policy decisions made to strengthen laws protecting children.
The Terre Des Hommes Netherlands asked people to sign an online petition for an international crackdown on webcam child sex tourism. The petition said such crackdown will “require announcing a plan for intercepting potential predators in public chat rooms, initiating prosecutions and challenging intermediaries who enable and profit from this vile trade.”
More than this petition, there are other actions that can be taken online and offline to put a stop to webcam child exploitation. They are:
1) Keep the story going. Continue the monitoring of arrests of predators and raids on Philippine houses that have become havens for these illegal sexual activities.
– Google map to plot raids and arrests made in Philippines communities
– IFTTT recipe to capture all news related to webcam child sex tourism in the Philippines (supply side) and abroad (demand side) and add the data to a Google spreadsheet
– Article on how communities are able to address this problem
2) Provide stiffer penalty or consider as an aggravating circumstance the use of the Internet or webcam in the crime of child exploitation or when a family member is involved in pushing a child to have online sex.
3) Invite Anonymous or set up a hackathon to create a program to catch online predators.
Thank you for this. I knew the event. In fact I used it as an example while I taught in Ankara. I did not know about the petition. Somehow I missed that. I added my name now. Thanks. It is so good that you mention also other ways of dealing with the issue, beyond petitions. I wonder to what extent they can be effective.
Thanks for signing the petition, Mine. Yes, there can be many ways to address the problem and the least journalists can do is to keep the discussion going.
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This is an excellent example of a story and set of actions. Here you take the Solutions Journalism approach by raising our awareness about an ongoing campaign and pointing us to an existing petition. But you also suggest other options for action, appealing to tech- and data-savvy readers to help map the issue; you also call for policymakers to change penal code around webcam child sex tourism. This represents a wide audience of differing powers or capabilities: sign the petition, code something to help with documentation, and change law. I think we want to consider all of those options, but I also wonder if efficacy is blunted with multiple different types of actions in a single document. I honestly don’t know; I’m just thinking aloud here.