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.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing