How Americans Are Bankrolling Child Sexual Abuse In Philippines

Nearly half a million children in the Philippines are being coerced into producing sexual content for paying customers, most of them from the United States. American buyers sent over $7 million to the Philippines for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) content between 2020 and 2022, according to a CNN investigation. 

The Southeast Asian archipelagic nation, with a population of over 117 million, has become a global hotspot for the financially motivated development of livestreamed child sexual exploitation-- one of the fastest-growing crimes online. According to a 2023 report from the International Justice Mission (IJM), a non-profit that protects people in poverty against violence, one in 100 Filipino children are trafficked to produce such content.

Such content is sold for a few dollars through messaging-app groups, mostly to men in Western countries. The United States was also the top buyer of CSAM content from the country between 2015 and 2023, according to the Philippine Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC). 

And while Western men may be watching the child abuse, police in the Philippines say that it is mostly female family members who are offering up their victims.

Of the 50 women who were arrested last year for sexually abusing and exploiting children online, 32 were the victims' mothers, CNN reported, citing the Philippine National Police data. 

"The only reason they're abusing a child and livestreaming it is because someone in the US is willing to pay for that abuse," John Tanagho, executive director of IJM's Centre to End Online Sexual Exploitation of Children, told the American publication. 

Patterns of Abuse

CNN also talked to the victims, most of whom were forced into the industry when they were as young as five years old.  

Kate, name changed, said that when she was 13 years old, her adoptive sister put her in front of a camera for the first time. It was the height of Covid, and Kate's father had just lost his job.

To keep the family afloat, her adoptive older sister, who has been doing sex work online for some time, asked Kate to take over a few of her clients she was too busy to see. Soon, two of her neighbours, who were in a similar line of work, would borrow Kate occasionally when their clients requested someone younger, she told the publication. 

The girl said the abuse started by play-acting as the client's girlfriend, checking in on them, and asking them about their day. Soon, they would ask her to play dress-up and ask her to use sex toys while they watched. They would also tell her about their fantasies about strangling her and whipping her, with one American telling her that he wanted to violate her with his gun.

Isa, another victim, was told that some victims would say sorry to her after the abuse and seek mercy from God. Now 14, Isa lives with her cousins in a shelter after being rescued from their aunties who were livestreaming their abuse.

Isa told CNN that she was too young to understand why men wanted to see her naked, but when her aunties filmed her at bath time, she knew it was because foreign men had told them to.

One of her aunts adopted the performer name "Lollie Pop", a widely known term for CSAM, clearly advertising the children she had access to, including Isa and her cousins, some of whom were as young as five. 

CNN got access to her WhatsApp messages, where she talked to clients using the alias Rosy. In one such text, she asked a Swiss national if he wanted to see videos of young girls. "You cannot find that on the internet… coz it's a minor," she reportedly said. 

According to Isa, men she was forced to perform for were in different time zones and expected her to be available at all hours. Her aunties would often pull her out of bed in the middle of the night to perform for them. 

"There were foreigners on the phone. When they would call, that's when they needed me," she recalled.

She said her aunties would tell her and her cousins to keep the abuse a secret -- a heavy burden on children who struggled to grasp what they were doing, only knowing it felt wrong. 

Are Curbs Working?

Despite global curbs on the consumption of CSAM, the content can be easily accessed online, with just a few clicks from public websites to private group chats selling explicit content.

Investigations have found several Telegram groups advertising CSAM, where users can either buy existing content or contact the admin with more specific requests for abuse.