Executive Summary

Online Sexual Abuse and Exploitation of Children (OSAEC) in the Philippines has become more prominent in recent years with the growth in internet connectivity, access to mobile devices and online payment mechanisms. Here, vulnerability to OSAEC heightened throughout the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, with foreign perpetrators and local facilitators of these crimes gaining an unprecedented level of access to children; colluding in their abuse and exploitation online.

While OSAEC has received increasing attention from authorities, academics and practitioners in recent years, extant research has typically focused on ‘demand side’ offending in the West and other foreign countries, with little attention to ‘how’ and ‘why’ OSAEC crimes are facilitated on the ground in the Philippines. Consequently, there is a dearth of literature and empirical understanding of the role of and profile of ‘supply-side’ facilitators of OSAEC in the region.

In 2022, Justice and Care partnered with Dublin City University, De La Salle University, Manila, and the International Justice Mission (IJM) to address this gap in understanding by carrying out a two- year study on the facilitation of OSAEC in the Philippines, a global epicentre of OSAEC live streaming and other associated crimes.

The project was designed to enhance our understanding of methods of OSAEC offending, to shed light on the situational factors, motivations and pathways to offending, and to inform practical strategies related to law enforcement investigation and technological and financial facilitation of this crime. Here the objective was to make recommendations that might improve the efficacy of OSAEC detection and deterrence, as well as preventative approaches to this type of abuse and exploitation.

This report brings together high-level findings from two distinct phases of the project.

Phase One: During this phase, information from a number of sources was gathered and analysed by the research team. Data sources included one to one interviews with domain experts and professionals with direct experience of working on OSAEC cases facilitated by Filipino offenders at national and international level (‘Key Informants’). These Key Informants were based both in the Philippines and internationally, from a range of backgrounds including law enforcement, financial services experts, online platform providers and child protection agencies. Interviews were also conducted with Local Caseworkers – individuals working in Filipino communities with victims, offenders and affected families where OSAEC crimes are commonplace – to understand how and why these crimes are occurring in their communities and what they believe needs to be done to address the problem and protect children through prevention. A descriptive analysis was also conducted on case files of convicted OSAEC facilitation cases held by IJM, a global organisation that supports the Philippine authorities in bringing OSAEC survivors home to safety, providing aftercare and prosecuting these crimes.

Phase Two: This phase built upon the findings from Phase 1 and involved the analysis of interviews with convicted and incarcerated OSAEC facilitation offenders. Analyses of financial transactions linked to OSAEC and chat log interactions between foreign perpetrators and local facilitators of OSAEC were also conducted. This allowed us to better understand the varied individual, family, community, social and technological issues that motivated offenders to facilitate OSAEC in the Philippines, to understand how these crimes were facilitated and, crucially, to identify ways in which they can be better detected, deterred and prevented.

Our findings corroborated and reinforced the results of previous studies of OSAEC in the Philippines, while offering important novel insights that complement and expand previous work in this area.

Corroboration with previous studies

• The study confirmed that the Philippines is indeed a ‘hotspot’ for OSAEC, with OSAEC activity taking place in both rural and urban areas.

• The majority of OSAEC facilitators were found to be females aged 25-50, usually a family member or a trusted neighbour/friend of the victims, and many of them – including those involved as older minors – were themselves victims of abuse and exploitation in the past. These facilitators tended to prey mainly on girls, who were more frequently abused and exploited than boys; when boys were the victims of OSAEC, child-on-child or sibling-on-sibling abuse was common.

• Our findings suggested that facilitators’ motivation to engage in OSAEC was primarily economic – with most convicted facilitators reporting to be living in extreme poverty and/or needing to support extended families. However, economic need was not the only identified motivation for OSAEC involvement: the lure of making ‘easy money’ was also a powerful motivator, especially when the earnings from this type of activity were perceived to be much higher than those obtainable from regular employment or other sources of income.

• Contextual and/or contagion effects were found to play an important role in facilitators’ decisions to engage in OSAEC activities – in areas where there were precedents of OSAEC activity, facilitators learned about the financial ‘advantages’ of this type of criminal endeavour from other community members, particularly in neighbourhoods where levels of trust in authorities was low and reporting was unlikely.

Novel insights

Importantly, our analysis offers a number of key insights that expand previous work in this area, for example:

1. At the individual level, both foreign perpetrators and local facilitators of OSAEC relied on strategies for offence minimisation that enabled and sustained abusive and exploitative practices. These included offence-supportive beliefs that the financial payments foreign perpetrators made to local facilitators ‘helped’ victims and the pervasive fallacy of ‘no touch, no harm’ held by facilitators; that is, because the abuse and exploitation did not involve physical contact with the foreign perpetrator, the impact of OSAEC activities on the child was diminished.

2. These psychological ‘justifications’ for OSAEC were compounded by cultural norms that acted as barriers to crime reporting, and a long-standing history of inter-communal tensions that undermined cooperation between regions on OSAEC-related issues in some instances. These factors, together with challenges inherent to the reporting process itself created obstacles to the prevention, disruption and deterrence of OSAEC facilitation in the Philippines.

3. A strong contagion effect was found to exist in communities that extended beyond facilitators learning about the financial ‘advantages’ of committing OSAEC crimes from other community members. While facilitators reported that OSAEC activity has its roots in economic deprivation and poverty, communities were found to provide a conduit to involvement in OSAEC activity, e.g. new facilitators being actively inducted to OSAEC activity and mentored by friends, neighbours or family members who were involved in these crimes.

4. Cultural stigma attached to the loss of virginity, regardless of whether this was through OSAEC or other forms of abuse and exploitation, was also identified as a pathway factor for involvement in OSAEC. The importance of family relationships in this context was highlighted, with the stigma attached to OSAEC victimisation bringing embarrassment to survivors and the family. In some cases, the cycle of abuse and exploitation continued as the survivor felt little option but to become engaged in sex work as they moved into adulthood, without the opportunity for rehabilitation or recovery from early victimisation experience.

5. In some instances, the cycles of abuse and exploitation linked to OSAEC were seen to perpetuate, as children exposed to OSAEC in the community grew up to engage in OSAEC activity themselves. In addition to these intergenerational cycles of abuse and exploitation, our convicted facilitator interviews also illustrated the transfer of criminal knowledge around OSAEC perpetration between generations, in what was effectively a “cottage industry” in communities – reported to be fuelled by few, if any, opportunities for employment that allowed a living wage, that would support a family, to be earned.

6. The harmful impact of incarceration on the family was a strong theme reported by convicted OSAEC facilitators. These harms ranged from: facilitators’ children or child relatives experiencing trauma, social and other severe challenges linked to the impact of arrest, prosecution and the absence of the facilitator in the home due to incarceration, to the loss of income to the family left behind where the facilitator had fulfilled the role of sole breadwinner. In some cases, this could be seen to feed into the systemic vulnerability of communities, causing some children to assume responsibility for providing for themselves or the family as breadwinner (in some cases the most seemingly lucrative earning opportunity available was involvement in illegal sex work themselves).

7. Convicted facilitators offered insights into the facilitation of OSAEC by outlining the various modus operandi for the ‘supply’ of minors for OSAEC victimisation by foreign perpetrators. These ranged from: the use of adult online sex industry services and dating websites, to meet foreigners interested in OSAEC, to the hiring of ‘models’ who were also minors who they ‘promoted’ online to foreigners; to providing children in online chat to participate in both pre- recorded and live camera ‘shows’.

8. Efforts to address OSAEC in the Philippines have involved a strong criminal justice response, with a focus on local facilitation in which convicted offenders – mainly women – receive lengthy sentences, most commonly 15 years but in some cases extending to life imprisonment. There is evidence to suggest that the crime of trafficking for which such harsh sentencing applies is broad in definition, encompassing a wide range of activities from, for example, the supply of nude photographs to trafficking children from remote and rural areas to urban locations for abuse and exploitation. These heavy penalties sit in stark contrast with those handed down to demand side offenders in foreign countries who commission the trafficking of OSAEC in the Philippines, where sentences and other penalties do not reflect the seriousness of the trafficking offence taking place in the Philippines and are not serving to disrupt demand for OSAEC in this country.

9. In addition to the normalisation of the crime in vulnerable communities, additional enabling factors for OSAEC facilitation crimes were outlined by convicted OSAEC facilitators. These included befriending staff of financial institutions who would turn a ‘blind eye’ to potentially suspicious payments or payment patterns.

10. The existence of a variety of social media platforms and the ability toeasily move from public online platforms (whether adult sites or social media platforms) to more private spaces to conduct OSAEC activity was identified as a key enabling factor by convicted facilitators. This involved the progression from ‘chatting’ with foreigners on such platforms to a ‘show’. Some of the women interviewed reported that once they agreed to exit a general chat area and move to a private chat room, foreigners asked for a ‘show’ involving OSAEC activity with a child. This presented an opportunity to make ‘easy money’ online in that it offered opportunity for a quick payment, with the expectation that money would be deposited directly into the local facilitator’s account. Convicted facilitators also referred to the culture in these communities of ‘sharing’ – whether that is social media accounts, bank accounts and/or mobile devices, further enabling OSAEC crimes to be conducted with relative ease.

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