The Covid-19 pandemic has caused loss of jobs for many Filipinos and while unemployment figures continue to surge, people are resorting to extremes by involving their children in sexual abuse for money – just to ward off starvation.
As a result, the Philippines has been tagged as the ‘global epicenter’ of livestream sexual trafficking of children, according to data from the US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the Philippine Internet Crimes Against Children Center (PICACC).
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A huge number of over 1.29 million images and videos of child abuse materials came from the Philippines in 2020, Technology companies reported while highlighting these figures as being more than triple the number in 2019 or before covid-19 struck the world.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) reported 202,605 cases (265% increase compared with the same period the previous year) between March 1 and May 24, 2020, while social networking giant Facebook found 279,166 images of child sexual abuse and similar content on its site from March to May 2020.
About women putting up their kids online for sexual abuse, the children’s own mother or another female relative is often the trafficker in many such cases in the Philippines, states a report by the Washington-based International Justice Mission (IJM).
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Col. Sheila Portento, who leads the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Division of the WCPC — the lead unit of the Philippine National Police (PNP) in dealing with OSEC — said that the mothers, however, often justified their actions by saying no harm came to the children due to no physical contact with the pedophiles.
The mothers would touch their children — in the way that their customers wanted them to — while also assuring their kids that this would not hurt them, Portento said while expressing curiosity about such mothers not being terrified about doing such things due to their lack of moral fiber.
The over one dozen inmates at the WCPC lock-up cell in Camp Crame were mothers who had sold their own children for sexual abuse online and one of them admitted to taking videos of her nine-year-old daughter performing oral sex on her father. Investigators found this video in the women’s storage disks while rescuing the daughter. (AW)
