Safeguarding Podcast – the Supply & Demand of Live Streamed Child Sex Abuse with IJM’s John Tanagho

By Neil Fairbrother

In this safeguarding podcast John Tanagho of the International Justice Mission, IJM, discusses the Supply and Demand of privacy-enabled encrypted “Pay Per View & Direct” live streaming of child sexual abuse. Which are the Demand-side countries and which are the Supply-side countries? What are the socio-economic factors that create a market for predators to exploit in the undetectable privacy of end-to-end encrypted streaming services such as Zoom and the scale and growth of this trafficking phenomena and what could be done about it.

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/safetonetfoundation/SafeToNet_Foundation_Safeguarding_Podcast_with_John_Tanangho_IJM.mp3

There’s a lightly edited for legibility transcript below for those that can’t use podcasts, or for those that simply prefer to read.

Intro

Welcome to another edition of the SafeToNet Foundation Safeguarding podcast with Neil Fairbrother, exploring the law, culture and technology of safeguarding children online

Neil Fairbrother

In this edition, we’re looking at supply and demand, which are topics usually spoken about in the worlds of economics or business, but almost unbelievably they also apply to the online sexual abuse and trafficking of children. To help us understand this and to discuss a recent report on the topic I’m joined from the Philippines by John Tanagho of the International Justice Mission or IJM. John, welcome to the podcast.

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

Hi Neil. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast.

Neil Fairbrother

It’s my pleasure, John, could you give us a brief resumé please of your background, so our listeners from around the world have an understanding of where you are coming from?

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

Sure. Well, I’ve been serving with International Justice Mission for six years in the Philippines, I’m working on our projects to protect children from sex trafficking and online sexual exploitation of children. Prior to that I worked as a social worker for two years and then as a lawyer for six years, and then the last six years in the NGO space. So I feel like I’ve been blessed to have you know, a variety of experiences.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Thank you for that. Who is the IJM? The International Justice Mission?

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

IJM is a global non-profit organization and we partner with governments to protect vulnerable populations from violence. We’ve been working primarily in the developing world for about 23 years, coming alongside justice systems to enhance and strengthen the justice system’s capacity to enforce laws against human trafficking, violence against women and children, or in the case of the Philippines, laws criminalizing online sexual exploitation of children.

And so IJM’s entire model is based on ending impunity, and we believe that if you can replace impunity for crime with accountability, then you can deter criminals and you can actually create protection. You can create places where children are safe from being harmed in the first place, because those who would harm them think twice because they know that there’s a high risk of them being held accountable.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. So it’s all about creating an environment where deterrent is effective?

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

That’s correct. Yes. Ensuring that there’s a strong rule of law. And we’ve really seen through our prevalence studies in several countries, the Philippines, Cambodia, and elsewhere that where you look into a system, a justice system, where generally speaking people are not held accountable for human trafficking or sexual exploitation of children and you can replace that environment of impunity with effective law enforcement, people are being arrested, prosecuted, convicted then it changes the environment entirely.

And we’ve seen prevalence reductions up to a 86% reduction of prevalence of child sex trafficking in the regions where we worked in the Philippines based on comparing baseline studies with end line prevalence studies.

Neil Fairbrother

Now you recently published a report which focused on the Philippines called “Online Sexual Exploitation of Children in the Philippines”. What was the purpose of this report?

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

So we were really trying to accomplish three things. The first objective was to measure the prevalence of online sexual exploitation of children. And the way that IJM defines OSEC is we basically are focused on the production of new child sexual abuse materials, whether in live streaming, in photos or videos. And so we wanted to measure the prevalence of that in the Philippines.

We also wanted to take a look at some of the case files to measure the nature of OSEC. Basically looking at the typology, the type of victims, the type of event offenders, so we could understand more about it. And all of that was geared towards getting a baseline for the, you know, the criminology of OSEC right now, so that we could then measure up reduction in prevalence, you know, in years to come.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Now you mentioned in the report OSEC and you gave a brief definition of OSEC there. But your definition also includes a financial aspect. So can we expand on that a little bit? What is the financial aspect of OSEC and how does that differ from something like CSE, Child Sexual Exploitation, or CSAM Child Sexual Abuse Material?

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

Sure. So, OSEC is a form of human trafficking or modern slavery and basically what you have is sex offenders around the world are willing to pay a trafficker in another country to sexually abuse and exploit children anew, right, in live streaming or to create new CSEM, Child Sexual Exploitation Materials.

And so this is a commercial form of sexual exploitation of children, where the criminal who is with the child, sometimes it’s family members or neighbours, they are financially motivated. And so they are willing to livestream the abuse of children over and over again to paying child sex offenders in demand-side countries like the US, the UK, Australia, and so on.

And so we’ve seen in our cases that these sex offenders will pay anywhere between, you know, $10 or $20 up to a £100 or $200 per livestream of children being sexually abused, sometimes very, very young children. And sometimes they’ll abuse children online for years before they’re caught and they’ll spend thousands and thousands of dollars over several years paying for this abuse.

So it’s really a form of human trafficking and IJM believes that both the offender, you know, the demand side offenders, sitting in their home in the UK who is directing the abuse, paying for it, commissioning it and the offender sitting in the Philippines who’s, you know, actually physically sexually abusing the child and streaming it. They’re both engaging in human trafficking. It’s just different aspects of the crime.

Neil Fairbrother

You have a very neat diagram that encapsulate sort of this in the report, with the Philippines in the centre and a character called Velma in the middle of it. Who is Velma?

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

So Velma is a pseudonym for an OSEC trafficker in the Philippines and she was connecting online mostly through social media platforms and the surface web with paying sex offenders around the world. And some of the offenders who were arrested were in Germany, in Australia and you can see in the diagram you know, the connection with other countries where offenders are being investigated. And basically it’s a typical scenario where you have a trafficker in the Philippines or another source-side country, who’s abusing children and creating new child sexual abuse materials, or livestreams for dozens of child sex offenders around the world in dozens of countries who were paying for the abuse.

Neil Fairbrother

One of the features of this diagram that leapt off the page for me was that the character Velma, who is the trafficker, not only has a number of child victims under her control, but is linked to 10 additional suspected traffickers, all of whom presumably have got also a number of children under their control. So this thing spreads out like a web.

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

Yeah, that’s right. Both the traffickers in a country like the Philippines and also the demand-side sex offenders in a country like the UK, they’re oftentimes connected with other like-minded offenders and so the traffickers will sometimes refer sex offenders to one another.

Let’s say that there’s a sex offender in the UK who is offering, you know, money to see boys sexually abused, but the trafficker he’s engaging with doesn’t have access to boys. She only has access to young girls. Well, she might, you know, in a gesture of goodwill to this, you know, customer of hers, she might say, “Oh, you know what, I’ve got a friend or a neighbour or a sister, she’s got access to boys. So let me put you in touch with her or with him”.

So there’s a network there, they’re connected to one another. And then the same thing with the demand-side sex offenders, they will get referred to traffickers you know, from within paedophile networks. And so we’ve seen that when law enforcement are able to arrest one offender, let’s say in the Philippines, usually when they do their investigation and forensic analysis, they’re able to identify dozens of other traffickers and demand-side sex offenders, and then those lead to outgoing referrals and additional investigation. So it’s certainly a web as you said, Neil.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Now you said in your introduction to the report that it focused on three areas, the first of which was to estimate the baseline prevalence of internet based child sexual exploitation, and OSEC in the Philippines. And to do this, you used something called a “Mark Recapture” methodology. What is “Mark Recapture”?

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

It’s a complicated you know, research methodology, but I’ll just to try to explain it simply. So it’s used to overlap measures to estimate population size, and it has its roots in wildlife studies. Essentially it takes a look at the number of IP addresses that were used for child sexual exploitation and then it looks at the totality of IP addresses that were used for any form of internet child exploitation. So you know, it’s basically, it’s looking at samples, a prevalence of a population or, or a crime in this case.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Now, as far as I understand it, many perpetrators on the demand-side of this trade, if that’s what we want to call it, use tools such as the Tor browser, which anonymise where they’re from. It’s a network that, when you’re in the Philippines, it will appear as if you’re from the US via three or four other countries. So how valid is analysing IP addresses when people are using tools such as the Tor browser?

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

Yeah, so that’s a really good question. We in our research study, IJM analysed IP addresses in the Philippines of the source-side offenders or the traffickers and so generally speaking, you know, we were able to you know, just take a look at those. So certainly if someone was using Tor you know, to mask their IP address location then, you know, that’s obviously a factor that would impact the reliability of the data.

But from our understanding, what we saw is a significant increase in the IP addresses that were being used for internet based child sexual exploitation. In fact, it rose sharply from 2014 to 2017. And so even if there was some anonymising along the way it would not have accounted for the entirety of the sharp increase.

Neil Fairbrother

So you might be seeing a marked increase, but the accuracy of where that increase in traffic is coming from might be obscured… increasingly?

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

It is certainly possible that Tor would impact you know, the reliability of IP address locations. That’s correct.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Now the second area of report was to assess the nature of OSEC in the Philippines during the baseline time period. And to do this, you conducted some in-depth case file reviews. What did those case file reviews reveal? And what was the baseline time period? Was this the 2014 to 2017, the three year period, you mentioned earlier?

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

Yeah, that’s correct. We looked at 92 cases of the Philippine anti-trafficking units who were focused on investigating online sexual exploitation of children. And we were able to identify, you know, findings related to the OSEC victim typology, the OSEC trafficker typology, and then the demand side sex offenders, and really it was, it was incredibly helpful what we learned.

So, for example, for the victims, we learned that over half of the victims were 12 years old or younger. The median age was only 11 years old, and 9% of the children who were sexually abused were three years old or younger and that’s at the time of rescue. And what we know is based on the research, these victims were abused on average for two years and sometimes as long as four years before they were identified and safeguarded.

And so it’s really significant in terms of our recommendations coming out of the study, which a lot of them centre on improving the detection and reporting of OSEC, especially on the technology platforms where it’s happening, because what we learned is that these victims were abused for years before they were identified.

Neil Fairbrother

Yes. And in some cases they’re actually adult by the time they’re…

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

That’s true. Yeah. There were some victims who were rescued, they were already in their in their late teens or their twenties. And then, you know, upon being interviewed by, by police, we realized they’ve been abused for three years, you know, since they were children or four years.

And so I think that the urgent nature of online sexual exploitation of children is that it’s not just a child who’s been abused one time, and then his or her image or video is shared, you know, dozens of times on the internet, or thousands of times. It’s a child that’s being held in a form of slavery and repeatedly sexually abused and exploited in live streaming, to create new depictions of sexual abuse.

And so at IJM, we really believe that combating the live streaming and the production of new child sexual abuse materials should be the top priority of technology platforms and the tech sector, and also the financial sector, which is, you know, abused to facilitate payments of this, because we’re talking about children who are being repeatedly abused, and that’s what we saw based on our research.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. And the third area of your report was to examine the Philippines as a global hotspot for OSEC during the baseline time period, which was based on an analysis of data involving incidents of “Online Enticement”. What is “Online Enticement”?

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

So basically Online Enticement is a broad category that the US a National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children uses to, you know, there’s different categories when an ESP provides a “cyber tip” so they could provide a “cyber tip”…

Neil Fairbrother

And an ESP is what?

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

An Electronic Service Provider, so any social media platform or basically any provider online, so it could be something Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and so on. And so Online Enticement is a broad category. It’s basically trying to capture you know, if there’s some form of criminality, not just sharing child sexual abuse materials, but it’s really trying to somehow produce or create them.

So it could capture grooming for instance where an offender is engaging directly with a child, but what we found when we analysed the NCMEC “cyber tip”s is that none of the cyber tips captured livestream abuse. So when we analysed the cyber tips, not one of them could we tell that it was focused on live streaming. And so basically what we realized from that is you know, the tech sector is not actually identifying or detecting children who are being abused in live streaming or in new production. Primarily what they’re identifying is old materials that are being shared, or more recently they’re identifying grooming, but previously not really.

And so that’s a problem, you know, when it comes to our research study, because we weren’t able to measure the prevalence of OSEC. But imagine the problem that poses for law enforcement, when they get a” cyber tip”, but then it doesn’t give them enough information to know that this is a child who’s being abused right now in live streaming or in a new production.

So that was really kind of essentially the non-finding, that we weren’t able to measure prevalence. It turned out to be one of the most important findings, which is that the tech sector is really not able right now, or they’re not currently detecting, livestreamed abuse.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Now you’ve mentioned some of the findings already or touched on some of them, but I’d just like to drill into one or two of them if I may. So in terms of the estimated number or prevalence rate of IP addresses which we’ve spoken about, used for CSE, Child Sexual Exploitation, each month, that grew more than 12 fold between 2014 and 2017. That gives us an idea of the growth factor. In terms of scale there are 48,000 cases a week, which is about a quarter of a million or 250,000 a year, of IP addresses being reported, as opposed to 43 offline case-based reports a year, which is a massive imbalance, it’s asymmetric. The online seems to be an absolute firehose. Is it out of control?

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

Absolutely. I mean, online sexual exploitation of children is an epidemic. There are so many cases, not only for the Philippines, but, but other source side countries like Thailand, Cambodia, India and so many other countries and it’s all being driven by the demand side. You know, you talked about the economic nature of this crime. Well, when you have child sex offenders who are going online and essentially waving, you know, £50 or €50 or a hundred dollars in the face of traffickers, primarily in the developing world, there’s a huge economic imbalance there, right? A huge disparity between the traffickers in the Philippines and the demand side sex offenders. And so when they’re waving around that money you know, it’s driving the production of new child sexual abuse materials, it’s driving the new sexual abuse of children in live streaming.

And I think the issue we really have to get at is one of impunity, right? Because right now, generally speaking, online sex offenders who are engaging in this crime are not held accountable. I mean, even in countries like the UK, the US or Australia where law enforcement is really doing everything that it can to investigate these cases. I mean, you see, you know, the National Crime Agency’s numbers and they’re, you know, investigating thousands of cases a month and the arrests are off the charts. Same thing with Australia. But when the UK estimates that just in the UK there are 300,000 UK citizens who pose a threat to children, including online. I mean, that’s just a massive number, right? And so OSEC is an epidemic right now globally.

I think what we need to see is the global community governments, law enforcement NGOs, the tech sector respond to OSEC with the same kind of urgency that we see people responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, where people are pouring in billions of dollars to identify a solution, to protect people from COVID-19, where governments are doing everything they can to protect people from the spread of this virus. While I would say that online sexual exploitation of children is just as urgent. I mean, just last year in 2019, you had US-based ESPs report 69 million photos and videos of child sexual exploitation material. And that’s not even capturing lived streamed abuse.

Neil Fairbrother

Yes. Live livestream abuse has a particular characteristic in that it is temporary in nature. It’s transitory, and it’s hard to identify because of course it’s encrypted. So how can a service provider drill into that, to find out what’s going on? It seems like an impossible thing to do.

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

I would say it’s definitely not impossible. I mean, with advances in computer vision and machine learning and applications of artificial intelligence I’m certain that the tech sector can develop and deploy innovative technologies that can detect newly produced CSAM including in live video streams.

Neil Fairbrother

It’s not just the fact that it’s newly produced. As you rightly said, the existing tools such as PhotoDNA or PhotoDNA for Video are very good at doing what they do but they are there to find republished, recycled existing material, not real time new material. Doing it in doing it in real time, particularly on an end-to-end encrypted platform seems… I mean, the whole point of encryption is that you can’t break into it, to see what’s going on.

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

Well, and I think, you know, you bring up a really good point because for example I believe Facebook has reported in the UK independent government inquiry, they are, you know, using detection tools to detect you know, potentially suicidal children in live streams. But of course those live streams are presumably public live streams on the Facebook platform, not on Messenger or, you know, or WhatsApp.

I think when you talk about the question of privacy, you know, industry should really acknowledge and protect the privacy interests of victimized children, not only those of users. I mean, if you think about it, victims have a paramount privacy interest in their own live streamed abuse or new child sexual exploitation materials that depict the most horrific moments of their life.

And honestly, I think that’s a piece of the data privacy, you know, debate that’s missing because honestly, I can’t think of data or materials that need more privacy protection than videos, photos, and live streams of children being raped and sexually abused. I mean, is there anything more private than that?

And yet to date the whole privacy conversation, and even the debate on end-to-end encryption is primarily focused on user privacy or the data of users, but what about the data and the privacy of a three year old child, who’s not a user but their abuse is being streamed on these platforms. I think the tech sector has a responsibility to protect the privacy of victimized children.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Talking about data, one of the other findings that you discovered were inconsistencies in the quality of the data from the cyber tip line reports, the open-ended text fields, the descriptors that are used in the cyber tip line reports is completely inconsistent and random, which makes it impossible to analyse, I think. So what does this tell us about international standards and cooperation?

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

Yeah, so I think the challenge right now is that many tech companies are only reporting the minimum amount of information that they’re required to report, while other technology companies and electronic service providers are providing all available associated information or additional information that’s allowed by law. So there’s a discrepancy here, where some companies only provide the minimum required. Others are going beyond the minimum, still within the range of what’s allowed to be provided to, for example, NCMEC or other providers. So I think that’s really the challenge.

What we need to see is for tech companies to be required to provide, you know, a higher quality information to make cyber tips and other reports of law enforcement, more useful to law enforcement to identify and rescue victims. Now, right now, there isn’t regulation that that requires them to do that.

There’s you know, the regulation right now, for example, in the US and you know, we’re talking about the cyber tip line, it only requires the techs tech companies to report a suspected CSAM that they come across, but it doesn’t, it doesn’t require them to report anything else. For example, associated chat logs or, you know, to do a deep dive into that user going back two months, three months, six months. So I think right now we need the tech sector to make the ethical choice and choose to report to lawful authorities all available associated information as allowed by law, rather than just the minimum required.

Neil Fairbrother

Does the EARN IT Act, which is currently going through the Senate, go far enough in that respect?

John Tanagho, IJM International Justice Mission

Well, you know, right now there’s three Bills pending in the US Congress. The EARN IT Act is one of them, there are two others that would also, you know, improve funding for law enforcement and NCMEC. I think the EARN IT Act is definitely a step in the right direction in the sense that it seeks to, you know, create best practices through a multidisciplinary commission, and that includes the tech sector. I think if you can create best practices, then presumably you will certainly improve what information is provided.

But I think separate from the EARN IT Act, in addition to that, we need to see governments, you know, pass mandatory reporting legislation, right across the board because any platform, any tech sector platform you know, that’s based in any country can be used to perpetrate live streaming abuse, or the sharing and production of new child sexual abuse materials.

I think we need some consistent standards globally where you know, it’s not just this country here that’s regulating, or this country there, but really we need, you know, global standards that require technology platforms and also financial sector platforms to proactively detect and report child sexual exploitation that’s happening on their platform. So certainly all States should enact national legislation requiring ESPs to detect report and speedily removed CSEM. But I think we would also need to see some kind of international instruments that would support that.

Neil Fairbrother

Could that come from a modification of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, particularly Section 16.2, for example.

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

Yeah, I think it could, I think Section 16.2, which is, you know, looking at Peace, Justice and, you know Strong Institutions, is definitely focused on violence against women and children, including online, including child sexual abuse and exploitation. So I think that’s one mechanism.

And then any of the Special Rapporteurs coming out of the UN or the child representative to combat trafficking and persons. I think we have a lot of international mechanisms and platforms. I think what we need to see is the political will, and also the corporate will, that says “We are going to make it a priority to protect children online”. And we’re going to require that companies make their platforms safe by design. I mean, you think about, you know in the auto industry, for example, you’ve got, you know, safety by design built into cars, you’ve got antilock brakes, seatbelts, airbags, you don’t have the same thing online. You don’t have the same thing with the tech sector.

And I think we need that because you have to level the playing field across the board. You know, you can’t just focus on, you know, a few of the largest social media companies because the abuse will just be disrupted there, but it will migrate somewhere else. And so you really need government regulation that says across the board to level the playing field, this is what’s required of technology companies. This is what’s required of the financial sector. And I think if we can do that, we can significantly protect children from child sexual abuse and exploitation online.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay, now time is marching on, unfortunately. So now there are 10 recommendations that are made in the report, and unfortunately we simply don’t have time to go through all 10 of them, but I would like to focus on a couple of them. In one of them you “recommend that child protective measures and trauma informed care should be implemented throughout the prosecution process of offset cases to protect victims from re-traumatisation”. What is meant by “child protective measures” and “trauma informed care”?

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

So for child protective measures, the whole idea is for governments to secure justice in a prosecution without retraumatizing the survivor in the process. And so some of the measures that we have seen be particularly effective are one maximizing the use of digital evidence to elements of the case. I mean, with online sexual exploitation of children, the entire crime leaves a digital trail you know, from chat logs to photos and videos to referrals, there’s so much digital evidence. And so I think that’s one measure.

Another one is capturing the testimony of a child in a child friendly space outside of a courtroom where that testimony is captured in a video recording and can be used in court in lieu of the child’s testimony. And you can present the social worker or the police officer who did the interview of the child that could be the primary witness and then they could present the child’s testimony, the recording you know as an exhibit, for example, to their own testimony.

And then the third measure is plea bargaining. We’ve seen plea bargaining be significantly effective in the Philippines and protecting children from having to testify against the criminals who are often in their family members or their neighbours, right, and over 50% of these victims are 12 years old or younger. So it’s significantly protects them from re-traumatization, if the prosecution is able to secure a conviction through a plea agreement

Now what’s critical is that the plea agreement still results in a sentence that provides justice for the survivors, right? That it’s something that’s going to deter other offenders. So in the Philippines even if there’s a plea agreement, a trafficker will still be sentenced to usually up to 15 years in prison.

In other countries, actually in demand-side countries, what we’ve seen is offenders getting really low sentences, like one year or two years, even though they’ve directed the livestream abuse of children for two or three years, actually on hand.

So I think when we talk about trauma informed care, it’s really just approaching the prosecution, approaching the child, understanding that this is someone who has been traumatized. So how can we engage with them in a way that is respectful and sensitive, and doesn’t retraumatize them in the process of providing services.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. One of the other findings, which we’ve touched on already, was that of proactive detection of live streaming of OSEC. Now in the Philippines, there is a law, the Republic Act 9557, under section 9, where it says “…the internet service providers have a duty to monitor the content passing through their servers, notify the police of illegal content and provide authorities the particulars of users who gained or attempted to gain access to an internet address which contains any form of child pornography. All ESPs shall install available technology programs or software to ensure access to, or transmittable of, any form of child pornography.” Does this mean that service providers that are providing encrypted services, or otherwise, that transmit OSEC material are breaking local Philippine law?

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

That’s an excellent question. I actually don’t know the answer to that, because there’s no specific legislation that, for example, prohibits encrypted platforms in the Philippines. But it’s a really good question because the law does require the internet service providers to be able to filter and detect child sexual exploitation materials and even users who are trying to access those materials on their platforms.

I think there still needs to be a robust conversation with the tech sector to determine, you know, what they’re able to do right now with existing technology and what they would need to, you know, put resources into develop new technologies so that they can comply with this law because you’re right, it is a far reaching law but certainly well intentioned.

And I think the whole purpose of the law is to put responsibility on the technology sector and say, “Hey, this abuse of children is happening on your platforms, so you need to develop tools to identify that and proactively detect and report it”, which is absolutely the right thing. That actually has to happen.

I think what needs to catch up to that is the tech sector, right? They need to innovate and they need to ensure that their products are safe by design. That means even if they’re encrypted, that they have still developed some kind of a tool or some kind of measures for example, like data sharing across industry data sharing, right. Are they able to use indicators or signals of live streaming OSEC, and then in some kind of across industry data sharing see if there’s a match with another platform or another provider so that they can take suspicious activity and elevate it to actually an actionable report.

So I think what the Philippine law, which is good, what it does is it puts the onus on the tech sector to innovate and find a way to protect children on your platform while you’re also protecting user privacy. The reality is Neil, we’re talking about you know, technology companies that have innovated to provide us with tools and resources that we couldn’t have even dreamed about 10 years ago or 15 years ago, right, so I think, you know, they they’ve put computers in our pockets. We can connect with anybody in the world, you know, using a small phone and so I’m certain that the tech sector can innovate and develop tools to protect children online. It’s just a matter of putting the resources towards it.

I think something like Project Protect, which is the technology coalition’s, you know, reinvigoration, holds promise and IJM is looking forward to seeing, you know, in the coming months and years, how project protect leads to, you know, the global tech sector doing everything that they can to protect children from livestreaming abuse, and also the production of new child sexual abuse material.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. President Rodrigo Duterte has an interesting point of view on many things. When it comes to child abuse, he himself claims that he was molested as a child. And yet on the other hand, he has a pretty forthright opinion when it comes to human rights, he gives some pretty short shrift, particularly when it comes to the fight against drugs. What direction or support do you have from the top of government to resolve this problem?

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

Yeah. You know, the Philippine government across the board has shown resolve in making, you know, fighting online sexual exploitation of children a priority. And just to give you, you know, some numbers, for example, the Philippine law enforcement has already rescued 669 victims of OSEC, arrested 256 suspects through 208 operations and 90 have been convicted already.

We’ve seen the Philippine Congress you know, significantly increase the budget for the lead law enforcement agency out of the Philippine national police, the Women and Children Protection Centre. So a few years ago they increased their budget up to over 120 million pesos annually. And we’ve also seen the Philippine government partner with the UK government, the National Crime Agency, with the Australian federal police and also with IJM in launching the Philippine Internet Crimes Against Children’s Centre, which is the first of its kind and it’s a place where referrals are coming in.

They’re being analysed, they’re leading to investigations and operations, even during the COVID-19 lockdown, Philippine law enforcement has conducted over 16 rescue operations just in the past few months and rescuing over 50 victims, I think close to 60 victims over half of them who were 12 years or younger. And then even during the lockdown, when, you know, courts are closed, they convicted an American OSEC offender, Timothy Deacon, who was living in the Philippines and, and several years ago was arrested. He was convicted through an e-Promulgation online. So certainly we have seen the Philippine government take a very strong stance against OSEC. And over the past few years, they’ve maintained their tier one status in the US Trafficking and Persons report.

I think the reality is it comes down to the frontline agencies, the police prosecutors, social services and so what we really would encourage, and IJM is happy to support and partner with source-side governments that are dealing with this problem, to come alongside them and share some of the successes we’ve seen in the Philippines and and see how we can help them strengthen their justice system response, because it’s certainly possible to protect children from this crime when you strengthen the holistic justice system response.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay, John, we’re going to have to leave it on that note. Thank you so much for your time. Absolutely fascinating discussion. The report is extremely good. It can be found, I think, on your website?

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

Yeah, that’s correct, IJM Dot org forward slash study.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. So thank you for that and well worth downloading and reading. And thanks once again for your time.

John Tanagho, International Justice Mission

Thank you so much, Neil.