Hundreds of would-be child sex predators have
been caught in a sting operation engineered by a
children’s rights organization based in Holland. In
this case, the object of desire was not even a real
person, but rather a very lifelike, computer-
generated avatar that resembled a 10-year-old
Filipina girl.
Terres de Hommes (TDH) created the fake child’s
profile, dubbed "Sweetie," as a way to highlight the
international problem of child sex exploitation via
Internet.
BBC reported that in a 10-week period after
Sweetie’s profile was activated on a sex website,
“she” received contact from some 20,000 men
around the world, with about 1,000 of them
offering money in exchange for online sex acts.
The names of the men (including more than 250
from the U.S., 110 from the United Kingdom and
103 from India) were sent to police – the suspects
were identified by researchers by using evidence
from Skype profiles and social media.
“We did not solicit anything unless it was offered
to us,” said Hans Guyt, project director of TDH, in
response to suggestions that his organization was
engaged in entrapment at a news conference in
The Hague. "[These crimes] require a new way of
policing. The predator won't come forward. The
victim won't come forward. We identified
ourselves as 10-year-old Filipino girls.”

The sting project is part of a TDH campaign to put
an end to what it calls "webcam sex tourism." TDH
also released a YouTube video in which it claims
that children in developing nations are being
approached by men from wealthier countries for
online sex sessions, which they locate through chat
rooms and social media websites. Then they use
credit cards that are not traceable in order to
compel the children to take off their clothes or
perform sex acts. "Our worst-case scenario is that
the same [thing] will happen with this phenomenon
as [did] with child pornography, which is now a
multibillion-dollar industry in the hands of
criminal gangs," explained TDH managing director
Albert Jaap van Santbrink.
TDH further stated that despite the obvious
illegality of online child sex tourism, only six men
have ever been convicted of this particular
crime. “It is not a problem of existing laws,” Guyt
said. “We want governments to adopt proactive
investigation policies that give law enforcement
agencies the mandate to actively patrol public
Internet hotspots where this child abuse is taking
place every day.” Guyt added: “The United Nations
has established laws that make this child abuse
nearly universally illegal. The biggest problem is
that the police don’t take action until child victims
file reports, but children almost never report these
crimes. These children are usually forced to do this
by adults or by extreme poverty. Sometimes they
have to testify against their own family, which is
almost an impossible thing to do for a child.”
TDH selected a Filipina avatar since it is believed
that tens of thousands of children in that country
alone have been exploited by online child sex
tourism. At any given moment, TDH estimates,
some 750,000 child sex predators are online
around the globe.
However, some police agencies are queasy about
investigating a “crime” under such ambiguous
circumstances by a group that are not themselves
mandated to perform law enforcement. "We
believe that criminal investigations using intrusive
surveillance measures should be the exclusive
responsibility of law enforcement agencies," Soren
Pedersen, a spokesman for Europol, the European
Union's law enforcement agency, told
Reuters. Similarly, Andy Baker of Britain’s
National Crime Agency said that "tackling child sex
abusers is best left to specialist law enforcement
agencies.” Still, Baker praised TDH for raising
awareness of the “global child sex abuse
threat.” "Working with our international law
enforcement partners, we will now look at the
information being passed on by Terre des
Hommes," Baker added.
But TDH warns the problem will simply worsen as
the number of exploited children increase due to
growing demand. Ironically, the easy accessibility
to the Internet – once thought to be a boon for
impoverished nations – will simply enable
pedophiles in the developing world to further
exploit poor children in their own countries.