Misconceptions About Online Child Exploitation

While the recent panic about child sex trafficking in the media would have you believe that PornHub and OnlyFans are the main places it’s occurring, and that there are adults kidnapping kids off the street, that’s not reflective of the ways children are actually being taken advantage of. I’d like to talk about some ways I’ve experienced it in my life, interwoven with the facts about how these issues usually occur.

When I was 11, a group of friends from my school told me they were planning to attend MCM Expo (now MCM Comic Con), in London. They got me into a show they liked, which was an anime generally aimed at kids, and we planned to dress up as the characters and go. I attended, and I was one of the youngest people there. Of those cosplaying these characters, I would estimate the average age was around 16 – meaning there were a lot of teenagers and a note-worthy number of adults. Most of the children there were unsupervised by their parents, and we took pictures in character and made friends. The first time I went, there were a few inappropriate comments made to me by older teens and adults, mostly about the idea of the characters we were dressed up as being “shipped” together in sexual ways, but nothing particularly noteworthy.

Then, when I got home and had the contact info for some of the other kids and teens there (and a couple of adults), I made some friends long-distance. We planned to go to the next convention. A friend of mine at school told me that she’d found out from some others at the convention that they had roleplay accounts on Facebook as the characters they’d dressed up as. She made me an account as the character I went as, and told me to join them. After a couple of weeks of her bothering me about it at the behest of our new friends (I was still 11, she was 12), I joined up.

It immediately became sexual. Online, behind these character profiles, people were roleplaying very sexually explicit stories in these groups. I would add other people from the friends list of characters I found, and eventually had hundreds of friends – none of whom I knew the identities of in real life. Within a couple of months, I was regularly roleplaying extremely graphic sexual scenarios (as the characters) with dozens of people every week. It was normalized in my group of friends, most people I knew closely were doing it. We knew we had to keep it a secret from our parents – because we’d get in trouble! I saw nothing wrong with it at the time.

I kept going to conventions, and attended maybe 4 in the next year. People at the conventions would talk about this online roleplaying, though not reveal their specific accounts. Some of the people discussing theirs were grown adults. I still saw nothing wrong with it. At one convention, adults there goaded me into buying porn inside the convention centre, in manga book format. The salesperson sold me an 18+ manga of rape fantasy pornography. I read it on the grass out the front of the Excel Centre in London, surrounded by older teenagers and adults who were laughing about it and how scandalized I was. That same convention, a 17-yr-old boy asked me to play the “pocky game” with him – what I now understand was a grooming tactic being implemented, where the game was to each bite the end of a long biscuit and the idea was to eat more of it first. He kissed me and stuck his tongue down my throat at the end. This eventually happened with even older people, too.

Every time I left a convention, I’d go home and roleplay online with these people, not knowing who was who. Some weren’t from the groups I went to conventions with, some were, with some of the people from entirely different parts of the country. On a few occasions, people asked me personal questions and wanted to take breaks from roleplaying to find out what I looked like or my sexual/masturbation habits. I learned that most of the people I was roleplaying with were over the age of 16, and I turned 12 in this time. Many were in their 20s.

At conventions, I slowly noticed other kids coupling off with much older teens or adults. I remember during one event, sitting in a group where a 14-yr-old girl was draped over this 20-yr-old woman’s lap while she complained that her parents had forbidden them from dating and they were having to meet in secret. One of my friends, who was the same age as me (12) started “dating” a 17-yr-old. A lot of these people would talk openly about being sexually involved. By this point, I had been convinced that at 12 I was practically an adult and was fully sexually mature, and I believed it was fine that adults treated me like a peer and discussed their sex lives with me or flirted with me. I still felt like something was wrong, but I couldn’t tell anyone because I thought I’d have gotten in trouble. And even looking back now – I know I would have. My parents would have been angry with me.

Eventually, the friend who first made me the account was being groomed to such an extent that she was messaging sexually with these adults almost any moment we weren’t at school. Her parents went through her computer. They immediately called the police, who then came to our school and talked to everyone she mentioned as being involved. Her parents weren’t aware of the connection to our attending conventions, or at least not the extent of it. The police made us log into our accounts and scroll through, and the policewoman who spoke to me asked me a bunch of invasive questions that made it clear to me that she thought I was being sexually exploited. I thought I was too mature for that to count for me, and that I would have been in trouble, so I lied through my teeth to her. I’d deleted all my private conversations and any public roleplaying I could find, via my phone that morning when my friend warned me about the police coming to talk to us, and acted like it was all innocent.

This was at a huge scale. There were hundreds of older teens and adults on my friend list alone, and I had nowhere near everyone added. During my roleplaying, two different people who I started talking to out-of-character expressed desired to date me. They were 18 and 19 respectively, and I was still 12. This isn’t what people picture when they think of grooming, and it’s also embarrassing. Groomers rely on that. They know it’s embarrassing to admit you’re sexually roleplaying as fucking anime characters, and that kids don’t want to get in trouble with their parents, and they use that to their advantage.

My experience was certainly complicated, and not how most kids are groomed on these platforms – but this was a massive issue for which Facebook never took any accountability. For most kids who are groomed on Facebook (which has far more cases of sexual exploitation than any site like Backpage or Onlyfans), it happens via pedophiles adding anyone who seems young and then mass messaging them all until they find a kid who starts talking. That kind of grooming happens all the time.

Sites like OnlyFans do have instances of minors (usually teens) using the site and posting child pornography. The difference is, these are cases of the teenagers themselves signing up and managing to get past the verification process. This is deeply concerning, and needs to be tackled – but it isn’t huge scale “sex trafficking” as people are picturing it. It’s vulnerable teens who need money, or who are pressured by older “boyfriends” or “girlfriends” to do it, and those teenagers are no less at risk if a site like OnlyFans bans porn. The same factors that make them vulnerable still exist, and the same abusers still exist, they just use different sites.

Most online exploitation of children is on sites that have explicit rules against sexual conduct and which are generic social media sites. Snapchat, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram. The driving forces, like poverty and children being neglected, are what needs to be tackled to stop this issue.

There are things that need to be done on porn sites, like requiring that only verified profiles can post videos. The fact that a small number of people can subvert these rules does not mean that no site should be allowed to host sexual content, especially since most grooming is happening on sites that already don’t allow that!

The vast majority of the time, when sex trafficking occurs, it’s through a partner pushing a person they’re seeing to sell sex, or it’s a vulnerable young person seeking to get into the sex trade to meet their material needs and then being abused and controlled and stopped from leaving. It’s not kids being snatched from the street and recorded and their kidnapper posting the videos on OnlyFans.

At 17, while homeless, I signed up to SeekingArrangement, which has no profile verification. I lied that I was 18 and I met men from the site and was paid for dates and eventually sex. One of those men raped me on multiple occasions, trapped me in an abusive relationship from which I felt like I had no escape, and later revealed that he’d met with minors of various genders from the site as young as 15 that he was intentionally seeking out. When I was 18, I reported this to the police, and they did nothing. They called him in for one interview, he denied it, and they dropped the case. According to the law, this was sex trafficking, and I was the victim. No-one snatched me or the other teenagers off of the street – we were poor and we signed up in desperation and then were taken advantage of. Online or offline, that’s usually what happens.

Don’t buy into this current panic about sex trafficking that talking about people being kidnapped off the street and sold into sex slavery, or that talks about OnlyFans or Backpage as being these hubs full of traffickers selling video footage of minors.

The reality is that kids and teens are poor and desperate, and that they’re pushed into the arms of groomers and traffickers by their material needs and then controlled and abused and trapped there. Some of them bypass these traffickers, but will try to post sexual media online to make money because they’re desperate – occasionally they’ll try to do so on sites like OnlyFans, but most of the time it’s Snapchat or Facebook or Tumblr or Instagram. Yes, there are things these sites can all do better to stop this material from getting through, but the main focus should be on eradicating the things that make kids vulnerable.

Banning porn from OnlyFans doesn’t do anything to protect kids from exploitation. It just harms the livelihoods of sex workers. That’s the point. These payment processors are putting in rules about not supporting transactions related to sexual content because of laws which target sex workers while pretending they’re protecting kids, meanwhile the real dangers to children are left to continue.