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.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.