Between 2017 and last year, the numbers of sexual exploitation cases involving children reported by local governments pointed to a growing trend.
Seventy-two percent of the cases involved online crime, with most of the victims being junior-high school students. While this group’s share in overall cases has been growing, elementary-school students are the fastest growing group among the victims.
It is heartbreaking to see the innocent faces of children and think that they might become the victims of abuse without even being aware of it.
The dissemination of images and videos of teenage girls and boys, as well as young children, is becoming increasingly common. Examples are the “Nth Room” online sexual exploitation case in South Korea — which drew the attention of the country’s presidential office — as well as similar cases in Taiwan.
Police should pay special attention to these crimes.
The three main channels for sexual exploitation of children are social media, messaging apps and Internet platforms, and the five most common methods are emotional deception, emotional blackmail, intimidation, solicitation and online trading of indecent material.
The vast majority of cases include making or disseminating indecent videos and then using intimidation to coerce the victim into performing intolerable acts.
Education authorities at every level are working hard to increase public awareness and provide more information about online security, including how to strengthen parents’ and children’s online security competence. The measures include online security training in junior-high school textbooks, inviting experts to schools to explain the legal ramifications and building dedicated information security Web sites.
A closer analysis of which children are targeted online shows that many of the victims are low-performers in school. This indicates that educational tools aimed at preventing online sex crime help raise awareness among most students, but have a limited effect on low-performers.
Solving this problem requires measures that forcefully prevent perpetrators from pursuing potential targets. Police patroling the Internet could be a big help in reaching that goal.
Police have over the past few years achieved great success in fighting crime by using Internet patrols to break up drug trafficking rings, find private arms caches, and prevent infighting among organized crime groups, fraud, gambling and so on.
Hopefully, National Police Agency Director-General Chen Ja-chin (陳家欽) will assign additional police officers to the Internet patrols and set up a task force dedicated to cybercrime targeting children. That would help stop potential offenders before they can cause any harm.
Such a task force would amount to a mobile, dynamic Internet surveillance monitor. Its efforts would surely have an impact on cybercrime aimed at disadvantaged children.
Tsao Yao-chun is a researcher at the Chinese Association of Public Affairs Management and an external expert at the Government Defense Integrity Index.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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