Webcam child sex: why Filipino families are coercing children to perform cybersex
Activists warn that poverty combined with increasing internet access means the number of victims is rising – and they are getting younger
It was the half-naked girls running from room to room upon her arrival that made Filipino teenager Ruby fear that the cybercafe job – which she had been offered online – might, in fact, be a sinister scam. Ruby’s doubts turned to despair when her new employers, a husband and wife, dragged her in front of a computer and webcam, and explained that her work would entail stripping and performing sex acts for paying customers across the globe.
“It was like a bomb exploded,” Ruby, now 21, says, speaking in an empty church in Tagaytay city, 60km south of the Philippine capital of Manila. “I had seen cybersex dens in TV shows and movies, but I didn’t know that they existed in real life.”
Ruby had, she adds, been “totally fooled” by the scam. “I was forced to do things you could not imagine a 16-year-old having to endure.”
Ruby is not a rare case but one of a rising number of ever younger victims of cybersex trafficking – a form of modern-day slavery where children are abused and raped over live streams.
The Philippines is seen by rights groups as the epicentre of the growing trade, which, they say, has been fuelled by cheap access to the internet and technology, the high level of English, well-established money-wiring services and rampant poverty.