INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
One day, just after I had dropped my son off at school, I was sent a horrific video on WhatsApp
It made me question how images and videos of child sex abuse come to be made, and how they can be openly circulated on social media
And I wanted one answer above all - what happened to the boy in the video?It may sound strange, but the woman who sent me the video was a
fellow mum at the school gates
A group of us had set up a WhatsApp group to discuss term dates, uniforms, illnesses
Then one morning, out of the blue, one of these mums sent a video to the group, with two crying-face emojis underneath it.It was just a
black box, no thumbnail, and we all pressed play without thinking
Maybe it would be a meme or a news story
Maybe one of the "stranger danger" videos some of the mums had started to share.The video starts with a shot of a man and a baby, about 18
months old, sitting on a sofa
The baby smiles at the man.I can't describe the rest
If I tell you what I saw in the 10 seconds it took to grasp what was happening, and press stop, you'll have the image in your head too
It's a video of child sex abuse
I screamed, and threw my phone across the room
It was pinging with messages from distraught members of the group.I took my phone to the police station
I told them what had happened
I told them I believed the woman had sent it to us as a warning, and that I hoped they would investigate where the video came from
Was it new, or one they'd already come across? Was this little boy still in danger? Could this evidence help save him, or catch the
abuser?The police had my phone for two weeks
I found out the next day that they arrested the woman who sent it and visited other members of the group
And then I didn't hear anything else about it.But one question stayed with me
What happened to the boy in the video? And so, a few months later, once I could read my own kids a bedtime story without thinking of him and
life had got back to normal, I began to look for answers.I started by trying to speak to the police officer investigating the video on my
But every time I called Wembley CID to speak to him, he'd just gone out.He didn't want anything to do with me
I checked with Alan Collins, a lawyer who specialises in child sex abuse, to see if any of the things I might normally do to track down
Could I, for example, send former police officers a copy of the video to see if they recognised it?"You could be looking at a prison
sentence of 10 years," he told me
Same goes for taking a still and sending that
Just possessing an image like this on my phone could land me in jail.So I called a friend of a friend who used to work for the police
He told me Wembley CID would have sent my phone off to one of the digital forensics labs spread across the city
The labs list all the illegal content, and when it's child sex abuse they grade it: Category A for the most serious, Cat B, Cat C
This WhatsApp video was Cat A
Next, the file goes to victim identification and my case was passed to the Metropolitan Police's Online Child Sexual Exploitation and
An officer there, Det Sgt Lindsay Dick, agreed to talk to me, but he didn't want to say much about the techniques used in case it helped
offenders work out how to evade capture
An estimated 100,000 men in the UK regularly view child sex abusePolice arrest between 400 and 450 people a month, men mostly, for viewing
or downloading these filesWhatsApp takes down 250,000 accounts every month suspected of spreading child sex abuse material, based on the
names of groups and profile picturesHe did tell me about one case, where an officer had got hold of a phone that had images of a boy being
abused on it, along with images of the same boy not being abused
In one, he's standing at a bus stop in school uniform
An officer recognised the bus stop as a Mersey Transport sign, and put a call in to the Merseyside team
They recognised the school uniform
The boy was identified, his parents arrested, and social services took over
Victim-identification police all over the world rely on little clues like this.Lindsay Dick wouldn't discuss the details of what I'd been
sent, even though he had investigated the case
Then, when I asked him about a suggestion from an editor to take a still from the video of the perpetrator's face, to help identify him, I
started to feel some heat."Do you still have a copy of that video?" he asked me, sternly
But it was still sitting somewhere on WhatsApp's server, and because I was still a member of the group, it was still showing on my phone
Even though I'd done nothing wrong, I realised how seriously the police took this kind of thing.This hit home late last year when a senior
Metropolitan Police officer, Supt Novlett Robyn Williams, was given 200 community hours' unpaid work and threatened with losing her job for
failing to report a video of child sex abuse her sister had sent her on WhatsApp
(She is now appealing against the conviction.)The Metropolitan Police refused to help me any further in my search for the boy in the video
At one point they even told officers in another part of the country, incorrectly, that I'd been cautioned for sharing the video
I found out later from the woman who sent the video to me that she had been given three years on the sex offenders register
But the investigating officers at Wembley CID took the case no further - they didn't arrest the friend who had sent it to her, and they
didn't even try to find out who had sent it to her friend
Further up that chain of people sharing the video must be some dangerous people, perhaps an abuser
But nothing was done to follow the trail.The Metropolitan Police says: "The scale of child abuse and sexual exploitation offending online
has grown in recent years
This increased demand on police, coupled with the need to keep up with advancement of technology and adapt our methods to detect and
identify offenders, means it is a challenging area for the Met and police forces nationally
However, we remain committed to bringing those who commit child abuse offences online to justice, and safeguarding victims and young people
at risk."We encourage anyone concerned about a child at risk of abuse or a possible victim, to contact police immediately
Anyone who receives an unsolicited message which depicts child abuse should report it to police immediately so action can be taken
Images of this nature should not be shared under any circumstances."I needed someone who wasn't involved with the case to give me some more
clues about where this file I'd been sent might have come from
So I started searching, and I came across news articles about a team in Queensland, Australia with a reputation for infiltrating child abuse
Their head of victim identification, former Greater Manchester Police detective Paul Griffiths, told me the file I'd been sent had probably
started life on one of these sites."What tends to happen is that when a file gets produced like that, it generally stays under cover, under
wraps, circulating amongst a fairly small, tight network
Very often people who would know that they need to keep it safe and not distribute it widely," he said.These networks of paedophiles use the
dark web, a part of the internet that isn't indexed readily by search engines such as Google
They access sites through a connection called TOR, or the onion router
They use a fake IP address, connected to several other servers dotted around the globe, which makes their location untraceable.Members of
these dark web sites are like sick stamp collectors - they post thumbnails of what they have on dedicated online forums, and look to
complete series, usually of a particular child
Some of them are "producers" - they abuse the children, or film them being abused
A couple of years ago Paul Griffiths' team was watching one site called Child's Play
They had intelligence that two of the site's leaders were meeting up in the US
Officers intercepted them, arrested them, and got their passwords
Now they could see everything - each and every video - and they could get to work finding children and perpetrators
They made hundreds of arrests worldwide, and 200 children have been saved so far
"It's Sherlock Holmes stuff, it's following little clues and seeing what you can piece together to try and find a needle in a haystack,"
says Griffiths.The big worry now is live-streaming, where adults can pay to watch children being abused in real time
It's even harder to detect, because no file containing clues circulates, and the platforms are all encrypted
Just as the police and technology get better at finding victims in stills or videos, another threat emerges."There's a famous story and it
often gets told in relation to this area of crime, in relation to the young girl walking on the beach and there's starfish all over the
beach and she's picking the starfish up and putting them back into the sea and a guy says to her, 'Little girl, what are you doing? You're
never gonna be able to save all of these starfish.' And she says, 'No, but I'll save that one.' And that's really what we're doing," says
Griffiths."You know, we're saving the ones we can save
And if some magical solution appears somewhere in the future that's going to save all of them, that's going to stop this happening, then
But in the meantime, we can't just sit back and ignore what we know is happening."Find out moreListen to Lucy Proctor's Radio 4
documentary, The Boy in the Video, on TheIndianSubcontinent SoundsPaul Griffiths is part of a small network of people who travel the globe
for meetings and conferences on what to do about the huge numbers of videos and images circulating online
He told me to contact Maggie Brennan, a lecturer in clinical forensic psychology at the University of Plymouth, who has been studying
child-sex-abuse material for years
Between 2016 and 2018 she combed through the child-abuse images in a database run by Interpol, to build up a profile of victims.She found a
chilling pattern that suggested the age of the boy in the video I saw is not that unusual."Concerningly, there is a substantive, small, but
important proportion of those images that do depict infants and toddlers
And we found a significant result in terms of the association between very extreme forms of sexual violence and very young children."Like
the boy in the video I was sent, most children on the database are white - most likely a reflection of the fact that the police forces
contributing to it are from majority-white countries.There's constant pressure, Brennan says, to quantify the numbers of images or videos
that are in existence, and the numbers of victims who are being sexually exploited
Databases only hold the images that have been found, through police raids or reports
Who knows how many are circulating out there? Paul Griffiths says it only takes one person to bring a video out of the depths of the dark
web and unleash it on the general population."Sooner or later it comes into the possession of someone who either doesn't know how to keep it
safe and hidden, or doesn't really care
It can take a few hours, and it's all over the internet."I spoke to one offender who served seven months in prison for viewing child abuse
He had been offered the files on Skype during an adult online sexual meet-up
He'd opened the first file, seen it was of a child - and carried on opening all 20
Then he tried to share them with someone else
Eventually, the man who sent him the files sent them to someone who told the police
But it's a telling example of how easily files like the one I was sent spread, from the depths of the dark web, on to platforms like
Skype, and then to people's phones.Despite the lack of action taken on my case, the UK policing response to child sex abuse images is one
of the most robust in the world
The Child Abuse Image Database (CAID) has seen huge investment over the last five years
When detectives receive the phone or laptop of a suspect, they can run images on it through state-of-the-art software that checks whether
images are new, or already known to police
All police forces are linked up, and the database talks to others around the world.In the 1990s the Home Office undertook a study of the
proliferation of indecent imagery of children
There were less than 10,000 images in circulation then
Now there are almost 14 million images on the UK database.The levels of depravity in videos and images are getting worse, Chief Constable
He's been the National Police Chief Council's lead for child protection and abuse investigations for the last five years.I am expecting
a forbidding character when I go to interview him at his Norfolk HQ
What I find is a man at the end of his tether
"It just keeps growing, and growing, and growing," he says
"And there is an element of, 'These figures are just so huge that just can't be right.' Well trust me, it is right
And if I have one really significant regret around my leadership and our response to this it's that we have struggled to land with the
public the true scale of what we are dealing with, the horrors of what we are dealing with
Most people, I would like to think, would be mortified that this type of abuse is taking place."Last year, Simon Bailey called for a boycott
of tech companies, such as Google and Facebook, until they invest in technology to filter and block these images and videos
The public, including myself, took little notice
Last year, the robots Facebook deploys to sift through its Messenger service reported 12 million posts containing images of child abuse to
the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, which runs the US database
So child protection campaigners are horrified at Facebook's decision to start encrypting Messenger over the coming months, because it will
mean the platform effectively goes "dark" and abusers will be able to share material with impunity.It will become more like WhatsApp, where
end-to-end encryption means no-one except the sender and receiver knows anything about what's in a message.WhatsApp's encryption works
because your phone and the phone of the person you're messaging generate the encryption codes and keys
When the message leaves your phone, it does travel through WhatsApp's servers - but they don't have the keys to decrypt it
The only way robots or artificial intelligence could scan the message would be if it was encrypted after it left your phone
But that would give prying regimes, law enforcement or the tech firms themselves a window into our messages
WhatsApp thinks it would lose customers as a result.The solution is to do the scanning on our phones
One way this could be done would be for everyone to download software with a list of all the unique codes of all the known child abuse
But this would still raise privacy concerns
The tech firms could fiddle with the list of codes to include non-child-abuse images - censorship in other words.So it would be better if
phones could run an algorithm to generate the codes themselves, completely independently from any government or tech company
This is the tricky bit though
No one's invented that algorithm yet.One expert I spoke to put it like this: "I wouldn't call it impossible, I'd call it unknown how to do
it today." It would take huge amounts of research and development - but it could probably be done
The failure by Big Tech to invest in this angers Simon Bailey
"They hold the key to so much of this
Their duty of care I think to children, they have completely absolved themselves of that
"The reaction is always, 'Well we're doing our best.' No you're not
You're making billions of pounds in profit
Invest."There are high hopes for the UK government's Online Harms White Paper published in April 2019 - a radical proposal for legislation
that would see tech firms held responsible for the harm they do
It proposes a new regulator and campaigners hope the resulting bill will include mandatory reporting of any child sex abuse
The results of a public consultation are due soon.At the moment, the tech firms choose what to tell us
No-one knows, for example, how much Facebook or WhatsApp spend on child protection
Facebook says it has the best artificial intelligence on the market trying to block and filter messages
But the company won't reveal how it works, or how much it costs.John Carr, who advises governments on child safety online, says this lack of
transparency has to end."I work with people in these companies all the time, they agree with me on most stuff, they care passionately about
protecting children but they don't make the decisions
It's their bosses, typically in California, that decide what happens
People high up in those companies need to feel the heat, they need to feel that their feet are being brought to the fire."Of course, I ask
They say no.One bright summer day, I finally get a breakthrough in my search for the boy in the video
Simon Bailey's assistant puts me in touch with a senior police officer who opens some doors, and I get a call.I'm told the boy is alive
He's one of the lucky minority who have been identified and rescued
The video I was sent is an old one, from America
There are already three versions of it on the UK's CAID database - mine makes it four
Police can't tell me where he is, or what his name is
But they do tell me his abuser is serving a long jail term
It's the news I was hoping for.And I'm happy to leave it at that
There's one word that has stuck in mind over the months that I've tried to find out more about this case - "revictimisation"
Each time anybody watches or shares a video of a child being abused, that child is revictimised
And as I get closer to finding the boy, I realise I could end up making a phone call to tell him, out of the blue, that I've seen the video
He'd be reminded of the horror
I should just leave him in peace.But I've learned about a campaign group in the US made up of victims - people filmed by abusers - who want
James Marsh, a lawyer who has been representing and campaigning for victims of child sex abuse for 14 years, recently spearheaded a change
to the law in America that gives victims a right to a minimum of $3,000 compensation from everyone convicted of viewing or sharing a video
of their abuse.It's called the Amy, Vicky, and Andy Child Pornography Victim Assistance Act of 2018, after the three young victims who
backed it by writing impact statements for the courts
"It's only been really very recently that victims have become more empowered to reclaim that space, really trying to assert that this is
not a victimless crime, that these are not harmless pictures, and that they have voices that deserve to be heard," he tells me.Voluntary
principlesA set of "voluntary principles" for the tech industry, designed to counter online child sexual exploitation and abuse was
published this week by the governments of the UK, the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, after consultations with six leading tech
companies.An accompanying letter acknowledged the industry's efforts, but said there was "much more to be done to strengthen existing
It added that the initiative was intended to "drive collective action".The principles include preventing dissemination of child sex abuse
material, targeting online grooming, preventing search results from surfacing child sexual abuse, and sharing data about the evolving
threat.Recently a seasoned journalist called him for details about what happened to one of his clients
She was expecting to hear that the abuse involved naked photos
When he told her of the reality of the content of these films - the rape of a small child - she was horrified, and didn't publish the
details."I think as a journalist you're turning off your readership by including these graphic descriptions
And yet, how else can you accurately report what's happening to bring about meaningful change?"He says his clients, as they get older,
have become frustrated by this squeamishness
"This is our lived experience," they say
"Face up to it."I ask him if he thinks the young man, Andy, from the Amy and Vicky and Andy Act, would be up for talking to me
He agrees to connect us on Facebook Messenger.And with that, I had found a boy in a video
One who had suffered the same terrible fate as the boy in the video I was sent.Whatever I might have wanted to ask that boy, I could ask
Did he have somewhere safe to sleep at night? Had he managed to stay safe?Andy has a warm voice
He's eager to talk, candid and hugely likeable
It's strange, but our conversation is not a miserable one
He tells me he is in his early 20s
He's been out of jail for six months, which is the longest he's managed since he was a child
Fighting mainly, and robbery
When he was younger he was into drugs - meth, heroin and weed
He's doing well at staying off them now
And he has two children, who he adores.But he lives in a kind of prison."I'm kind of a boring person
I don't really go out much, I stay at home, I kind of live just with my kids, and that's about it." Andy lives in constant fear that
someone might recognise him from one of the videos his abuser made of him, as the abuse continued until he was 13
If someone so much as looks at him in the street, he worries.His story starts with his parents' divorce
His mother wanted a male figure in his life, and so when Andy was around seven years old she sent him to a youth programme
The "mentor" allocated by the organisation groomed Andy and his family for a few months and took Andy on trips to Las Vegas.Andy didn't tell
anyone when the sexual abuse started, because he didn't want to upset his mother."I didn't know how my mom would act about it
I didn't want her to be embarrassed because something had happened to me
I didn't know if it was normal
That's kind of how he made it seem." How to get helpIf you've been affected by the issues touched on in this story, you can find sources
of support on the TheIndianSubcontinent Action LineThe Lucy Faithfull Foundation works to prevent and tackle child sexual abuse and
exploitationWhen Andy grew old enough he confronted his abuser, who soon afterwards went on the run to Mexico
Then, one day, the FBI turned up at Andy's high school and knocked on his classroom door
The abuser had got sloppy - he'd sent a video to someone he didn't know, who'd reported him
"And then they tell me that there's hundreds of thousands of videos and pictures of me out on the web."Until that moment, Andy had no idea
his abuse had been shared at all, let alone with thousands of people
But despite this shocking news, and the difficulty of telling his mother the truth, Andy agreed to help the FBI lure his abuser back across
"We coaxed him back with a birthday party of mine
"It was a whole three months, all the way up until my birthday
I talked with him on the phone, like nothing was wrong
He sent me a few packages."The FBI officers set up the sting
They showed Andy the route they thought his abuser would take and the location of the planned arrest."It was really cool
They caught him a couple blocks from my grandmother's house, pulled him over and arrested him."It was one of the best moments of Andy's
life.Like other identified victims in the US, Andy gets a letter every time someone is convicted of viewing or sharing a video of him
He's doing his best to rebuild his life
When he can afford therapy, things are better
His lawyers are working on some big cases, which should bring him more compensation
"Work is really hard for me
And it's not because I'm lazy or anything
It's mainly the mentality of not being able to trust somebody
I can't let this person in
So I'm really anti-social."Andy, like all victims, was incredibly unlucky to fall into the hands of an abuser
Had he not, he thinks he would by now have been the CEO of his father's business.He is finding purpose and solace in his involvement with
Amy, Vicky and Andy's law
The three young campaigners hope to meet up in person soon
In the future, Andy wants to give up his anonymity and go into schools to teach children how to stay safe, and how to tell someone if they
He feels an obligation to do it he says."You know, I want people to know my story." I will never get to talk to the other boy in the video
I hope he can rebuild his life - however slowly and imperfectly - like Andy.I've been able to give you a happy ending
Both Andy and the little boy in the video I was sent have been identified and their abusers are in prison
But this is wildly misleading
Most of the boys and girls in videos won't be rescued
And without radical reform of the way we manage technology and privacy, videos like the one I saw will keep circulating, and new children
will be abused to feed the demand
Illustrations by Hello EmmaYou may also be interested in:Image copyrightRose KalembaLast year Rose Kalemba wrote a blog post explaining how
hard it had been - when she was raped as a 14-year-old girl - to get a video of the attack removed from a popular porn website
Dozens of people then contacted her to say that they were facing the same problem today.'I was raped at 14 and the video ended up on a porn
