Sweet protection

By Cong B. Corrales

PEDOPHILES online, beware. The battle against cybersex with children has grown smarter than ever. Its latest avatar: a Filipino “girl” of 10.

Terre des Hommes, a children’s aid organization based in The Netherlands, has just boosted its “Sweetie” project — a chat robot that lures online predators out of anonymity.

“Sweetie” is a virtual 10-year-old Filipino girl created with the use of computer animation technology.

Launched in 2013, the project aims to draw attention to the exploitation of children online and to demonstrate how easy it is to identify would-be child abusers.

Since then, “Sweetie” has outed at least 1,000 pedophiles from “no less than 71 countries” within 10 weeks.

“When we first appeared on the Internet disguised as a 10-year-old Philippine girl, we were overwhelmed by the huge number of men trying to get in touch with us,” Hans Guijt, head of Terre des Hommes’s Special Programmes and Campaign, told reporters and law enforcement agents in Manila on Tuesday.

INFOGRAPHICS by Cong B. Corrales

On Tuesday, Terre des Hommes launched “Sweetie 2.0” online.

In the two months that followed, “Sweetie” has been approached over 20,000 times by online clients. This is despite the fact that the group managed to monitor only 19 of the 40,000 chat rooms that are being visited by online pedophiles.

“We have only scratched the surface,” Guijt said.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) estimates that at any moment on any day, about 750,000 men are lurking on the Internet for possible cybersex with children across the globe.

In the Philippines where poverty incidence is high, some adults have turned to peddling cybersex in the mistaken view that it is a harmless way to earn easy money. Some parents themselves have urged their children to perform sexual acts in front of the web cam.

But extensive research conducted in the country by psychologists commissioned by Terre des Hommes has shown that children exposed to web cam sex suffer “short- and long-term damage.”

“They become traumatized and develop a skewed understanding of relationships with others at a formative age when they should be building up interpersonal skills,” the research reads in part.

“Pedophiles cannot hide in anonymity any more,” Hans Guijt, Head of Terre des Hommes’s Special Programmes and Campaign tells reporters and law enforcement agents in Manila during the launching of Sweetie 2.0 on Tuesday | Photo by Cong B. Corrales

The fact that the children’s own parents have forced or goaded them into web cam sex “undermines their relationships with the very people they should be able to trust.”

Sweetie 1.0 was designed to identify online sexual predators.

Sweetie 2.0 has been boosted not only to identify pedophiles but also to build evidence to be able to prosecute them in courts of law.

“Recognizing and warning potential predators is technically feasible, practically achievable and urgently required to deal with this rapidly growing phenomenon in an effective and efficient manner,” said Guijt. “Pedophiles cannot hide in anonymity any more.”

To achieve this, Terre des Hommes has engaged specialists on cybercrime, profiling, legal frameworks, and technical realization in the project.

The Dutch organization exhorted the Philippine government to seek support from the international community at the Global Conference on Cyber Space scheduled in The Hague this week.

“Our main theme is fighting child exploitation,” Leonarda Kling, Terre des Hommes Regional Director for Southeast Asia says during the launching of Sweetie 2.0 in Manila on Tuesday. Beside her is AJ Van Santbrink, Terre des Hommes Executive Director | Photo by Cong B. Corrales

Here’s how Sweetie 2.0 works:

• The chat robots will scan public chat rooms and will detect and zoom in on individuals who are searching for sexual activities with children.
• Subsequently and surreptitiously, the robots will gather data such as Skype and email addresses and Yahoo accounts.
• Real-time screenshots of conversations as well as shots of the individuals concerned will be formulated to become admissible as evidence.
• Individuals will then be lured to visit another website to watch a sex show trailer. A warning pop-up will reappear every time the individual starts his computer.
• Police and other law enforcement officials and two operational teams that will work with the system throughout 2016 and 2017 will be instructed by the Fox-IT training department.
• The data mined from the Sweetie 2.0 software are handed over to law enforcement agencies.

Several arrests have been made and pedophiles have been convicted in Australia and more recently in Belgium.

Below is a video short of the excerpts of the launching of Sweetie 2.0 on April 14, 2015 in Quezon City.