2016 Phillipines: Pedos prey on impoverished Child sex exploitation and live-streaming abuse, some carried out by kids' own parents

How child sexual abuse became a family business in the Philippines

Tens of thousands of children believed to be victims of live-streaming abuse, some of it being carried out by their own parents

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“It is such a sad story. Such a poor family needing money,” said Hopkins. “Mum was educated to grade one. This is the irony of it – the mother was just as vulnerable. The eldest daughter had a higher level of education.

“I’ve heard of other cases where the elder kids had very much been part of it. They need psychological support to know that it is wrong.”

While no blame can ever be attributed to children in these cases, the Philippines is struggling to understand how to punish crimes where the victims are deeply entangled in their own abuse, especially if parents are putting pressure on them to find an income.

“It was the first time we heard of parents using their children,” said the middle-aged woman.

Authorities considered that operation in 2011 to be a one-off case. But the next month, another family was caught in the same area. Then more cases of live-streaming child abuse appeared in different parts of the Philippines.

Now, the United Nations says, there are tens of thousands of children believed to be involved in a rapidly expanding local child abuse industry already worth US$1bn.

In some areas, entire communities live off the business, abetted by increasing internet speeds, advancing cameraphone technology, and growing ease of money transfers across borders.

And while perpetrators used to download photos and videos to their hard drives – providing authorities with a virtual paper trail and usable evidence – criminals have found anonymity in encrypted live-streaming programs.

Stephanie McCourt, the south-east Asia liaison officer for the UK’s National Crime Agency, said the Philippines provided a perfect storm to allow the crime to develop, with its entrenched poverty and high level of internet access for a developing country. But there is one thing that she said was absolutely key: a widespread knowledge of the English language.

“They can communicate with offenders. After we’d been scratching our heads, the penny dropped,” she said. “That’s not to say that it won’t move to other countries … There is probably a huge amount we don’t know.”

It is hard to estimate the size of an industry involving small anonymous payments, roughly $5-$200 a show, conducted in people’s homes and mostly operated by families rather than large crime syndicates.

“We think that what we are seeing, what we are dealing with, is a small part of what is out there,” she said. “It is big money. Big business.”

Children are made to perform around the clock, with morning live-streams catering to Europeans and Americans, and later in the day, an Australian-based clientele.

The number of ongoing live-streaming criminal cases in the Philippines is rising, from 57 in 2013, growing to 89 in 2014, and up to 167 in 2015.

But those numbers belie the true scale, according to Det Supt Paul Hopkins, the head of the Australian Federal Police team in Manila who has spent the past two years investigating the crime. Wearing a short-sleeved, Filipino-style shirt, he described the size of the trade as “monstrous”.

That is not to say the perpetrators are only based there. The Dutch NGO Terre des Hommes analysed the industry by constructing a virtual 10-year-old Filipino girl called “Sweetie” and used the computer model to entrap more than 1,000 adults who paid for her to perform sex acts. The charity identified adults from more than 71 countries seeking out Sweetie’s services.

“If you do any research you’ll see it is from anywhere,” Hopkins said.

In the 2011 case, the police thought the children would welcome the operation. But the undercover agent says Nicole did not feel rescued; she felt betrayed.

“I know that she is angry with me,” the woman said.

Apart from the scene witnessed as the raid took place, police say they had a video showing the mother sexually abusing her children. It was submitted by an anonymous source from a western country who used his phone to film the abuse on his computer screen.

“It was a struggle for the children to try to understand what their parents did,” said the social worker, sitting in the house where they live. “When one would start crying, the other children would collectively cry. They always converged in a small huddle.”

Directly after the arrest, the eldest boy, 16 at the time, did appear to be in shock, the psychologist Rosemarie Gonato said, but not from the abuse. “He was quite traumatized by the rescue operation.”

The two younger daughters had no idea that the abuse was anything but normal. “They said it was a business in the neighbourhood. It seemed natural to be involved in this as the other children were doing it,” she said. Police found that it was the children who first heard about live-streaming as a money maker when playing with their friends.

While the children have flourished – on the wall are photos of them, the two eldest beaming while wearing graduation hats and gowns – they are still unable, five years later, to understand the crime.

One child, now 14, told the Guardian her parents wanted the best for them. “I’d like to stay here and finish my course. Then I’d like to go home,” she said.

Gonato said: “In all the sessions I had [with the children], they still wanted their parents to get out of jail.” A couple of years after the raid, the children wrote a letter to Gonato, which read: “We hope you find the ability to forgive our parents.”

Victims entangled in own abuse

On top of that, there are questions about whether a parental conviction is the best outcome for the victims. Both Gonato and the paediatrician who treated the children, Naomi Navarro-Poca, believe it is in the children’s interests to be reunited with their parents and live at home rather than in a shelter.

Even the prosecutor, who spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity to protect the identities of the children, said she was hoping for a plea bargain to get a reduced sentence.

Several factors about the crime did not make sense. For one, the parents are unable to speak the level of English needed to communicate with perpetrators abroad, even though they are considered to be the instigators of the crimes.

And in therapy sessions, the eldest boy said their lives had changed for the better since they started the “shows”: the family had more money, they could eat at the local fast food chain Jollibee, and their mother could stop working in a factory.

Slowly, what had happened became apparent. “They saw the neighbors making money. They suggested it to their parents,” the prosecutor said. And at 13, it was Nicole who spoke to the pedophiles online, not her mother.

There were even times when the children did it without their parents present, the prosecutor said.