The advent of the internet has put predators into children’s pockets, and many use a classic child sexual abuse playbook. With ease of access to children online, anonymity, the speed and intensity at which online relationships progress, secrecy, careful grooming and vicious, prolonged attacks on children’s identity and belonging, the question is not how this crime occurred, but rather how many other children are affected whose stories we will never know?
It’s a parent’s worst nightmare: the phone call warning that the 16-year-old boy who befriended your daughter online, who told her he was en route from the UK to visit her, is an adult man with international warrants out for his arrest. Worse, he was already in the country.
The story reads like the script of a Hollywood movie – a teenage girl rescued minutes before she was sexually abused and trafficked out of the country. It’s a narrative made more shocking because it didn’t happen to a high-risk child from a vulnerable family. The victim was a normal South African teen from a middle-class home with loving and involved parents who had done everything possible to keep her safe.
It isn’t fiction. The advent of the internet has put predators into children’s pockets, and many use an archetypal child sexual abuse playbook. Through ease of access to children online, the anonymity of online contact, the speed and intensity at which online relationships progress combined with secrecy, careful grooming, vicious and prolonged attacks on children’s self-esteem while they are desperate for identity and belonging, and often with the support and financial backing of organised crime, 10 cases of online child sexual abuse and exploitation are reported to occur globally every second.
