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Key points
- Our children are at risk for "sextortion" by internet predators.
- Local and national law enforcement agencies pursue and prosecute internet extortion.
- Recovery from the trauma and isolation of sextortion is possible.
Imagine your 15-year-old daughter has provided nude photographs to an internet “friend” who lured her into a malicious (and illegal) trap. Threats of exposure and violence have her yielding to further acts of humiliation.
Imagine that predators use digital media reach to even younger children, even those younger than 10. Their numbers are rapidly growing on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and a plethora of game sites. Young kids now have easy access to online media and game sites. This, compounded by their emotional needs for peer attachments (amplified by the isolating grip of Covid), is how children become innocent prey to internet predators.
Perpetrators seek to feel powerful and in control of others. They are drawn to a digital world where they can manipulate the needs for connection, affirmation, and acceptance of our children, some still in elementary school. These children can feel inescapably trapped, anguished, and deeply alone. Commonly, they withdraw from their families, their greatest source of support, in order to bear their shame and fears. Anger can energize their exit from exploitation and seek the justice due them. There is life in that anger, unlike its alternative: painful passivity and self-blame, when some start cutting themselves, and others are drawn to suicide.
Sextortion
There is a name for these crimes: sextortion. A new documentary, Sextortion: The Hidden Pandemic, streaming this fall on various platforms, delves into the fastest-growing worldwide crime against children. The filmmakers of this 90-minute documentary are right to call it a pandemic, highlighting its virulence and ubiquity.
This remarkable documentary provides us with heretofore unavailable information about the victims, their families, the perpetrators, and their "dark web," as well as a (still insufficient) cavalry of local and federal law enforcement officers. On-screen, we witness highly experienced public servants moved to tears by what they investigate. It is illegal, a felony, to exploit minors on the internet.
Enforcing the law, however, is no simple matter, because of how deft the predators have become in beguiling their victims, how vast, diverse, and growing the web of felons is, and the demanding work needed to build the evidence needed to criminally prosecute them.
With pace and pathos, director and editor Maria Peek introduces us to numerous local and national governmental agencies and organizations that work with victims and their families. They are there to help mitigate trauma and to enforce the law. Theirs is a culture of commitment and resolve, ably demonstrated by articulate spokespersons representing (to name a few): the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Homeland Security Investigations (HIS), the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and the law enforcement agencies of both Bedford and Norfolk, Va.
The subtitle of Sextortion frames the emotional journey of those impacted. Of course, the victims have center stage. We enter the lives of a number of young people who were trapped and damaged, and who courageously came forward to alert others (and serve as witnesses in court).
Justice is not only what they require: their psychological trauma, helplessness, and isolation calls for recovering their former selves. While they surely have been violated, they can regain their lives and rejoin their families—with the collective efforts of law and social service agencies. We humans, especially our youth, are resilient. Recovery, with vitality and a future, is possible.
Recovery takes courage, courage to face and surmount a life darkened by violation and exploitation. It is emotionally hard work to regain a full, purposeful, and loving life. The "traps" that threaten victims (and recovery) include blaming and hating themselves, the avoidance of everyday activities that give shape to our lives, and, most tragically, abandoning hope.
Sextortion is an exceptional documentary about what has been largely unknown: digital victimization and its law enforcement. These are riveting subjects that occupy the predominance of the film, and rightfully so. I would have liked the second section of the documentary, on courage, to have been given more screen time. Might a bit more than ninety minutes have portrayed more personal examples of recovery for we viewers to witness? This is wish, not a criticism. It is a wish to make better known the promise, not only the pain, of those seeking to find life again, despite the odds.
Cyber Tip Line: 1-800-THE-LOST, cybertipline.org
