Henry Austin, NBC News contributor posted:

A virtual 10-year-old Filipino girl named "Sweetie" helped researchers identify 1,000 adults who were willing to pay children to perform sexual acts online, according to a charity.

Thousands of would-be predators asked a girl to perform sex acts online unaware that she was actually a computer-generated digital decoy named "Sweetie" created by a charity.

In little more than two months, more than 1,000 people were identified by children's rights group Terre des Hommes after they offered money to the fake profile for a variety of sex acts. They included 254 Americans.

Overall, almost 20,000 people made approaches to the virtual girl -- who was modeled on a 10-year-old -- but the charity was unable to track them all down.
“The child predators doing this now feel that the law doesn’t apply to them,” said Hans Guyt, director of campaigns at Terre des Hommes Netherlands. “The Internet is free, but not lawless."
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He added that real children were often forced into remote commercial child sexual exploitation -- or "webcam child sex tourism" -- by adults or extreme poverty.
“Sometimes they have to testify against their own family, which is almost an impossible thing to do for a child,” Guyt added. "Once a child has become a victim of sexual abuse, rehabilitation can take many years. It is along, painful, and labor-intensive process for children to overcome the trauma."

Using methods similar to Dateline NBC's "To Catch a Predator," the researchers worked from a building in Amsterdam during the summer. “Sweetie” was placed in public Internet chat rooms and the charity's investigators waited for her to be approached.

"Sweetie" was deluged with requests for sexual webcam performances and while the would-be predators interacted with the virtual girl, researchers gathered information about their identities.


Terre des Hommes

An example of a chat room where an would-be predator approached a digital decoy called "Sweetie."

The details of the 999 men and one woman that they managed to identify have now been passed on Interpol. However, police will only be able to prosecute suspects if they gather their own evidence.

“The United Nations has established laws that make this child abuse nearly universally illegal,” Guyt said. “The biggest problem is that the police don’t take action until child victims file reports, but children almost never report these crimes. We want governments to adopt pro-active investigation policies that give law enforcement agencies the mandate to actively patrol public Internet hot spots where this child abuse is taking place every day.”

An Interpol spokesperson said the agency was aware of the investigation and that Dutch authorities would provide the charity's evidence after conducting their own assessment.

While this article is not marxist and consistently erases class, I do think it is a good thing that a real child does not have to be used as bait in this type of investigation. However, since globalization will inevitably force standardization, it is important to analyze local practice in regards to sexual relationships.

To simply survey the issue from the perspective of the technology used, and not the subject matter, I find it problematic that this could be used to create a fake person of alternative sexuality, or even of race different from the target audience. While in this case I find the cause noble, it could be used to terrible ends, for example a fake gay man resulting in persecution of the intended target by the local power structure, whether it be as sophisticated as a government or basic as tribe leader.

To analyze from the perpective of pedophilia, this creates a different set of issues, though mostly benign in my opinion. The best case scenario results in countries, of which this behavior is illegal, taking legal action against the offenders. In the worst case scenario, this information will be passed to an indifferent government or local power structure. Something about 3D printing. fart

Edited by dipshit420 (Nov. 5, 2013 16:24:02)

ilmdge posted:

in conclusion theres like a billion people out there that sexually exploit children online and nothing's happening to any of them

yeah that's why the globalization factor has to be considered. We get used to dealing with shitty people where we live, when shitty people live all over the world in various percentages of the total local populations.
The video explains that as internet access because available to more of the worlds population and the cost continues to drop, it will only allow more of these shitty people to access the web, and it's continuing existence tends to signal that this is a thing that is ok.

roseweird posted:

maybe the problem isn't the internet

it may not be The Problem, but it is currently inseparable from The Problem

ed:


ahaha

Edited by postposting (Nov. 6, 2013 01:15:31)

daddyholes posted:

it's creepy and very unusual for this sort of story and i don't understand the point, i could make a few guesses as to why but they would just be guesses based on my biases, such as that many men are really leering perverts who envy pedophiles or many men want to see how young the kid looked so they can absolve their own pedophilic tendencies by clearing the kid's image as "too young" for them

Alternatively, it's the most accurate way to show who these people thought was on the other end of the internet chat. If a case was brought against one of them, the picture and log would be extremely important.