Help from other countries
The real extent of online child abuse in the country is hard to ascertain. In many cases, OSEC is a secret crime, one that usually has no witnesses.
IJM reported that 793 OSEC victims were rescued in law enforcement operations from 2011 to May 2020. About half were under 12 years old and 57% of the perpetrators were relatives or close family friends of the victims. The youngest was a three-month-old infant.
IJM is part of PICACC, an alliance also composed of the PNP and the National Bureau of Investigation, as well as the UK’s National Crime Agency, the Dutch National Police and the Australian Federal Police.
The total number for 2020 was not yet available as of posting. (The NBI declined to provide data to PCIJ, citing confidentiality.)
OSEC was once run by organized criminal syndicates but it turned into a cottage industry in the past decade, with perpetrators driven by poverty and aided by technological advancements that allowed easy connection to paying customers.
A cheap web camera and an internet connection are basically what they need to set it up.
Widespread English proficiency among Filipinos is another factor why OSEC thrives.
The countries where the paying customers come from have come to help the Philippines address the problem.
The DOJ receives cyber tip line reports from the NCMEC, for example.
The organization established by the US Congress receives millions of reports of child sexual abuse and exploitation from social networking and electronic service companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter and more.
The tips typically include the IP addresses of Filipino facilitators and other perpetrators of abuse.
A study published by IJM in 2020 showed that 64% of OSEC cases filed in the Philippines from 2014 to 2017 were initiated by referrals from international law enforcement agencies. Most cases came from the US or Scandinavian nations (22%), Australia (12%), UK (7%), Canada and New Zealand (2%).
“Referrals from foreign law enforcement counterparts have exploded during the pandemic. Kids are forced to stay at home and many people lost their jobs,” said Lt. Noeralyn Tamayo, a PICACC Philippine police deputy.
Remittance centers
One way the crime is being tracked is through the remittance centers. The financial service providers that allowed the country’s army of overseas Fipino workers to easily send money to their relatives back home have also been used by foreigners abusing Filipino children online to pay the facilitators.
The Philippine government’s Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) has required remittance centers to submit suspicious transaction reports (STRs) based on a study containing a “typology” of OSEC-related transactions.
AMLC Executive Director Mel Georgie Racela said the typology was essentially a list of red flags that should prompt financial institutions to report a transaction as suspicious and related to OSEC.
“What you’ll do is scrub that database to determine whether or not your customers are part of that study and then you will report an STR on those customers or persons of interest in the study,” Racela told the PCIJ.
For example: If the amount of money sent to the Philippines was worth at least P2,500, came from a country under the AMLC’s watchlist on OSEC, and did not come from a relative, the compliance officers of remittance centers, banks and electronic money apps can flag these transactions and send them to the AMLC for investigation. The AMLC sends these reports to law enforcement agencies like the PNP and NBI.
From January 2019 to June 2020, remittances from the US recorded the most number and the highest value of suspicious transactions – 10,927 reports involving P39.6 billion.
Recipients of these suspicious transactions were mostly in the provinces of Rizal, Cebu, Davao del Sur, Bohol, Iloilo, Bulacan, Quezon, and the cities of Taguig and Manila.
From 2015 to 2018, about 3,000 persons of interest in child trafficking and exploitation were referred to the AMLC for money laundering probes, Racela said .
“We did an update to cover 2019 to the first half of 2020. So that’s one and a half years, and you’ll be interested to know that persons of interest increased from 3,000 to 23,000 only for that period. So adding it up, it would be 26,000 POIs,” Racela told PCIJ.
The AMLC has yet to publish a new study, but Racela said they were also expecting an “exponential increase.”
Cat-and-mouse operations
Since the PNP hatched its first operation against OSEC in 2015, it has rescued 680 children sexually trafficked online in 202 operations.
From March 2020 to May 2021 alone, police rescued 245 kids in 75 different operations.
“I get the creeps. I am distressed for the victims,” said Police Lt. Col. Lucrecio Rodrigueza Jr.
“This country prides itself with the maxim: ‘Ang kabataan ang pag-asa ng bayan (the youth is the hope of the nation),’ but because of these crimes, not only are we destroying the future of these kids, we’re also destroying our country’s future,” he said.
He joined a team that rescued eight children in Camarines Sur on May 7, in an operation that required officers to wear hazmat suits as protection against the coronavirus pandemic. He couldn’t shake the image of a two-month-old infant bawling in the arms of a police officer as they arrested the mother, Jocelyn, who exploited her 12-year-old daughter.
She had forced her to undress in front of a laptop while pedophiles from the US, Europe, Australia and even the Philippines asked her to spread her legs and perform sexual acts. Sometimes her mother guided her hands. Police suspected that a sex toy they found during the search was also used on the child.
He shuddered at the thought of what could have happened to the baby if a pedophile heard it wailing at the background of her sister’s live show.
The criminals are fast to adapt to increased monitoring from law enforcement agencies, however, underscoring the challenges in making significant gains against OSEC.
Perpetrators used to be concentrated in Metro Manila, where facilitators set up dens that looked like call centers. “Since more busts and raids have been conducted, they have dispersed into provinces,” said Police Maj. Joseph Villaran, ACG’s spokesman at the time of the interview. He now teaches digital forensics at the PNP Academy.
They’ve also changed their set up into guerilla-type operations, he said. “They make use of one computer nowadays, which makes it difficult [for law enforcers] because they have decentralized. Not only one person is handling the whole operation, they’ve multiplied,” he added.
An IJM heat map identified Metro Manila and Cebu as the areas with the most number of OSEC facilitators from 2010 to 2017.
In Pampanga and Lanao del Norte, at least six to 21 facilitators have been identified, while there were at least four in Cavite and Negros Occidental.
Bulacan, Batangas, Leyte, Bohol and Davao del Sur, had one to three facilitators each.
The toll on investigators
It’s a job that has taken its toll on investigators
There has been a surge in referrals and cyber tip line reports, but the WCPC remains understaffed.
The shortage is still manageable, according to Portento. But poring through horrendous images of abuse and exploitation has affected the officers’ emotional wellbeing.
“We can’t help but be emotionally affected, too. But we have to fight it,” Rodrigueza said.
WCPC has field units in Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao. This means that if the field unit in Visayas, which is located in Cebu City, needs to conduct an operation for OSEC in Tacloban City, agents need to travel for hours to get there.
The Women and Children Protection Desks in cities and municipalities mainly deal with cases of violence against women and children. They are not allowed to handle OSEC cases.
“Dealing with OSEC needs technical skills,” Portento said.
The typical training program in handling OSEC cases, both in operational and cybercrime capacities, is largely offered abroad. Aside from cybersecurity and operations, WCPC officers also work with foreign law enforcement agencies when Filipinos fall victim to trafficking schemes in other countries.
Right now, the PNP leadership and lobbyists are thinking of prodding Congress to turn the WCPC into the Women and Children’s Protection Group, which would mean increased staffing and more resources.
The WCPC investigators said the public also has a big role to play in fighting OSEC. It can stop an online culture where men fetishize children and contribute to their continued abuse, for example.
While females appear mainly responsible for facilitating the exploitation of children, males have been the target of pornsite channels that promote videos using search engine keywords that intentionally or unintentionally make sexual objects out of children, even if the actors in these videos aren’t children.
These porn sites have been the subject of investigations last year by the US media for allowing channels to monetize child rape content.
Police Maj. Lalaine Marty, a PNP child cybercrime protection officer, said these channels should not be allowed to monetize content that use such titles and keywords. People should cringe – not get sexually stimulated – when they see these materials, he said.
People should recognize that it’s not pornography. It’s abuse, she said. It’s a crime.
*Names of perpetrators are also withheld to protect the identity of their victims, with whom they are related. All quotes were translated into English.
*Neil Jayson Servallos, an M.A. Journalism student at the UST Graduate School, originally wrote this story for one of his reporting classes. It was expanded into a series with the editorial guidance of the PCIJ.
*Illustration by Alexandra Paredes
*This article is supported by the Judith Neilson Institute’s Asian Stories project, in collaboration with ABS-CBN News, the South China Morning Post, The Korea Times and Tempo in Indonesia.