Britain’s child protection agency sounded the alarm on Friday over pedophiles’ use of blackmail to force their victims into handing over sexually explicit images, money or performing sex acts live online via webcam.
The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center said that 184 children in the UK had been subjected to some form of online sexual blackmail over the past two years. The agency said that six shame-stricken children subsequently seriously harmed themselves or tried to take their own lives as a result. One committed suicide.
“These offenders are cowards,” the agency’s deputy chief executive Andy Baker said in a statement. “They hide behind a screen and in many cases make hollow threats which they know they will never act on because by sharing these images will only bring the police closer to them.”
An agency spokeswoman identified the suicide victim as 17-year-old Daniel Perry from Scotland, who killed himself in July after he was tricked into thinking he was chatting with a girl around his own age.
The BBC said that he took his own life after being warned that his video conversations would be circulated to his friends and family if he did not pay up.
The practice of using cameras — fastened to many children’s personal computer or integrated into their smartphones — to solicit abusive photos and video is not new, although the agency’s disclosure put a rare face to the abuse.
Online blackmail “is a continuation of what was already happening for a long time in the terrestrial world,” said Laura Huey, a cyberpolicing expert at the University of Western Ontario who was not involved with the agency’s research.
Huey said in an e-mail that she had recently been interviewing adult victims of sexual abuse — all of them predating the rise of the Internet — and said that in their experiences blackmail was a “recurring theme.”
Asked how realistic the agency’s figures were, she said “there’s no way of telling.”
“This is an especially dark area because sexual offenses go unreported because victims don’t report. They’re intimidated for a variety of reasons. They feel ashamed and scared, and — particularly with young children — they may not fully understand the nature of their exploitation,” she said.
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the