The hellish descent of Savile, Hall and Glitter from national treasures to creepy bogeymen held a clear lesson from recent history, she argued, saying, “When one puts on a public face, when one carries out charity work, it does not mean the underbelly of their sexual depravity is not real.”

The man present in the dock that day, 1980s BBC Radio 1 DJ Mark Page, was a different kind of monster, the kind you can never lock your door against at night to keep your children safe.

Page – who was jailed for 12 years – committed much of his abuse from behind the curtains of his Teesside home, while his victims were 10,000km away in the Philippines. Page paid for children as young as 12 to be abused by family members, while he watched online.

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Judge Paul Watson told Page, “You took advantage of the poverty and deprivation in an underdeveloped country in which children are routinely forced, through economic and social deprivation, into acts of prostitution.”

His trial gave an overseas audience a small glimpse into the scourge of online child sex abuse in the Philippines, which has grown exponentially since the onset of Covid-19 after the pandemic temporarily stemmed the flow of Western sex tourists. A 2020 report on online sexual exploitation of children by the Philippine government’s Anti-Money Laundering Council said cases had risen by 264 per cent during the pandemic, with more than 279,000 cases recorded between March and May in 2020, compared with around 76,500 cases in the same period a year earlier.

The council described the trend as a “secret pandemic” of online exploitation and said the paedophiles driving it were mostly older English-speaking men from developed countries including Britain, the United States, Australia and Norway.

The Britain-based Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a charity that monitors and removes online child sexual abuse from the internet, said 2021 had been its worst year on record, with 252,000 URLs containing images or videos of children being sexually abused, compared with 153,000 in 2020. Over the course of the year, the foundation discovered 182,000 instances of self-generated material – 27,000 of them involving seven- to 10-year-old children, more than triple the number for that age range in 2020.

“Younger children have been relying more and more on the internet during the pandemic,” the IWF report concluded. “Spending longer [periods] online may be leaving them more vulnerable to communities of criminals who are looking to find and manipulate children into recording their own sexual abuse on camera.”

John Tanagho, who investigates cases of abuse in the Philippines as director of the International Justice Mission’s Centre to End Online Sexual Exploitation of Children, described the rise in cases of online abuse as “a pandemic”.

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Live streaming, in which children are abused live over the internet, often by their own mothers or other family members for the benefit of a sex offender overseas, was a particular concern, says Tanagho.

Police operations in the Philippines in recent years have uncovered shocking scenarios, with infants as young as three months old being abused-to-order for overseas paedophiles, and mothers arrested for selling footage of the abuse of their own children online.

It is a pandemic that is spreading largely unchecked, however, with few cases making it as far as court either in the Philippines or overseas. But cooperation with overseas police forces and NGOs operating within the country have at least chipped away at the edges.

Decorator Michael Wilkinson, 36, had no criminal convictions when police raided his home in Bexhill, in southeast England, in April 2020, and found indecent pictures and videos of children aged 12 and under from the Philippines on his computer.

Wilkinson had, over several years, paid for a young girl and her half-sisters to be abused and photographed, sending a series of indecent images to the girl and her mother through Facebook Messenger, and asking for them to be replicated by his victims.

Sussex police worked with Britain’s National Crime Agency and officers in the Philippines to trace the family Wilkinson had been communicating with on Facebook. In November 2021, Wilkinson was sentenced to six years in prison after admitting to inciting and facilitating the sexual exploitation of a child under 13, making indecent images of children, and possessing prohibited and extreme images. He was placed on a sex offenders register and given a renewable five-year travel ban from the day of his release.

Detective Constable Richard Gill, who handled the case on behalf of Sussex Police’s paedophile online investigation team, said a complicating element in tracing offenders such as Wilkinson was that they often had no criminal history and gave few visible clues to their offending.

“If you met him, you wouldn’t think anything of him,” says Gill. “You talk to him and he’s a perfectly nice chap. He had various [community] activities and things he was involved in. That’s the story in a lot of cases. People are shocked when they find out. You walk through the doors of people who know them and they say: ‘Oh my God, what?’”

Wilkinson was only caught because he used Facebook Messenger to send images of the indecent acts he wanted children in the Philippines to perform. “I suspect if he hadn’t sent stuff that was picked up on the networks,” says Gill, “he would have flown under the radar for a number of more years.”

Even after discovering the material on Wilkinson’s computer, his offences remained a technically victimless crime until the children in the Philippines could be traced. Cooperation with the Philippines police and the National Crime Agency – and a stroke of luck, when the agency’s officer on the ground returned to Britain temporarily during the pandemic, allowing him to take a detailed file of material back to Manila – finally exposed the full, sordid story.

Wilkinson, it turned out, had made contact with his chief victim when she was just nine years old and communicated with her for 18 months to two years, although often her mother communicated with him, while posing as the child.

“She would say, ‘Can you send me some money for school?’” says Gill, “and Wilkinson would reply ‘What are you going to do for me?’

“She would say, ‘I’ll send you pictures.’ He would send her images and tell her what he wants her to do, and he then starts sending money for images. Wilkinson told us he sent about £1,000 [US$1,250] to £1,500. It was probably a fair bit more than that – at least £3,500 in total. It’s a massive amount of money for the Philippines.”

By sending officers out to trace the victim and her family, safeguarding measures could be arranged for the girl and two younger half-sisters, aged three and five, who also featured in some of the images sent to Wilkinson. “The victims’ mother and older sister were involved in making these images and selling them to Wilkinson,” says Gill.

The outcome was a rare but significant success story. “There are so many cases with no identified victim so it’s good to get someone we can safeguard and get them out of that situation,” Gill says. “It’s rare you can actually find a victim at the end of the process that you can contact and help,” and the internet is flooded with this kind of material.

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The scale of online abuse is growing and the pandemic has worsened it, Gill says, leading to an annual increase of 10 to 15 per cent in referrals to his unit. “Encryption makes some of this [material] harder to find,” he says. “This happened on Facebook and Messenger and they are talking about encrypting that end to end. If they did, we’d probably never have found out about this. Realistically, unless this girl had said something when she was a lot older, she would have been a victim for many years, and it would have been challenging even then for her to get justice out there.”

Soon after Page was sent to prison to begin his 12-year jail term, British government officials joined representatives from NGOs and overseas police forces to mark the third anniversary of the Philippine Internet Crimes Against Children Centre (PICACC) in Manila.

Tony Cook, head of operations for Britain’s National Crime Agency, was among the speakers and told delegates that “throughout the world, children are subjected to horrific sexual abuse, which has a devastating impact on their lives, and technology enables abusers to target children anywhere in the world”.

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Cook says his agency had identified between 550,000 and 850,000 people in Britain who posed a sexual risk to children, and “the threat continues to grow in scale, severity and complexity […] We need every tool we have to find it.”

In Manila, he applauded the international cooperation that led to Page’s conviction and told delegates that prosecutors were seeking an increase to his 12-year jail term to better reflect the severity of his offence.

Between February 2021 and March 2022, PICACC was involved in the rescue of 134 victims and the arrest of 15 suspects in 51 operations. Its successes include the rescue of 14 children aged between two and 17 in May 2021, and the arrest of four adults in a joint operation with Australian Federal Police, following the arrest of a 68-year-old man in Victoria for the possession of child-abuse material.

In his address to the March anniversary conference, Cook referred to the international efforts to curb the rise in online abuse as “God’s work”. For Father Shay Cullen, an Irish missionary who runs Subic Bay-based charity the PREDA Foundation, which has rescued children from sexual abuse for decades, the escalating levels of online abuse point to the “erosion of the Christian ethic, of values, and of respect for children”.

One recent case handled by PREDA involved a 14-year-old girl stripped naked, blindfolded and abused by her mother and father on her birthday for a live video stream sold to paedophiles overseas.

Cullen, whose foundation cares for more than 50 child victims of abuse and secures around 16 convictions of offenders a year, believes the societal rupture began with the sex industry that grew up around US military bases in the Philippines, where “the prevalence of the sex industry was promoted by local politicians and businesspeople, especially retirees from the US military bases in Subic Bay and Clark, and the other US military bases around the country”, he says. “It destroyed the moral values of the communities, and allowed child abuse to become a big way to make money. I campaigned for 10 years to close the military base [in Subic Bay] and succeeded, but we never changed this mentality that women and children can be sexually exploited for big money.”

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In a country where religion is so prevalent, the Catholic Church failed to stand up for children and allowed abuse to flourish, says Cullen. “They are covering up clerical sex abuse and ignoring what goes on in the community around them.

“The reason they can’t speak out is because they are guilty of the same crimes and guilty of covering them up. That is the root of the whole problem. There is no moral force [in the Philippines] that can really speak out.

“It’s driven by money,” says Cullen. “One in every three or four children is a victim of abuse in the Philippines. We are surrounded by it. Internet service providers are allowing it to happen, too.”

Some children rescued from abusive homes recover well with the help of therapy, and by being able to face their abusers in the cases that are brought to court. In most cases, however, victims suffer in silence with no hope of justice, or escape from abusive homes.

“We have 16 young male victims of sexual abuse in our care aged between eight and 14, and, boy, are they aggressive,” says Cullen. “They really let out their anger and hatred. They have been beaten and abused. That is why I believe child sexual abuse is the greatest disturber of world peace – because it creates monsters.”