Help make online spaces safer for kids
A recent New York Times piece shone a forensic spotlight on Instagram-facilitated child exploitation. The latest in a series highlighting how Instagram aids networks of paedophiles who sexualise, groom, and exploit young girls - child “influencers”, models, gymnasts and cheerleaders - the piece homes in on the role of male photographers and promoters who produce, distribute and sell underage girls’ content to paedophilic men.
From the article:
For the past year, The New York Times has been investigating how a drive for online fame has created a marketplace on Instagram of girl influencers who are managed by their parents — Instagram does not allow children under 13 to have their own accounts — and frequently draw an audience of men.
Some of the parents, like [a] Louisiana mother, develop monetary relationships with the men, selling them images of the girls. Others also offer chat sessions with them and even sell their worn leotards.
Those looking to supercharge their daughters’ online presence sometimes tap into an established network of men, The Times found, many of them convicted of sex crimes or accused of pedophilia, who participate in the grooming of children under the guise of working as social media professionals.
In a court filing, Mr. Durtschi said the mothers knew that “the money is all coming from older men who pay to see content of underage girls who are being as inappropriately sexy as they can get them to be. Most of the world would call these pedophiles.”
Mr. Durtschi, who resided in Texas, said he was drawn into the child-influencer world through a combination of his sexual attraction to children and the ease of approaching them through Instagram. In 2021, he said, he was browsing Instagram and came across an 8-year-old cheerleader who lived nearby. He reached out to the mother and proposed a photo shoot.
The first sessions consisted of innocent shots in a park, he said, but after a few weeks, he suggested they sell racier photos to make money. The mother was interested, he recalled, but insisted it be kept quiet. He reached out to pedophiles on Telegram. “It went to the guys I most trusted,” Mr. Durtschi said.
He also paid the mother for photos only for him. In one, the girl was fully nude except for glow-in-the-dark body paint, and in another, she was nude except for a “3-6 foot gummy snake,” according to court records.
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We are grieved and frustrated to have documented and reported the exploitative actions of men including those named in the NYT piece play out in real time, for years. We first reported child exploitation content produced by Grant Durtschi (under photography business name Timeless in Texas) and shared on Instagram to US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in May 2021.
We are pleased to know Durtschi is behind bars – but we know there are countless others just like him, openly and freely sexualising and exploiting young girls on mainstream social media. Our ongoing reports to Instagram about this type of exploitation are frequently ignored or dismissed.
Convicted of rape, sexual harassment of young women + girls: following charges in ‘22, Brazilian photographer Jorge Moura sentenced last yr to 14ys in prison.https://t.co/m07xfYqHzR https://t.co/1RF8qqnccR
— LSKennedy (@LSKennedy5) August 12, 2024
Big Tech has failed kids. That’s why we supported raising the social media user age to 16 and continue to call for a ban on “parent run” accounts which serve as a loophole to the new rules. We have also called for a ban on monetisation of children’s content and called for regulation of the “kidfluencer” industry due to the prevalence of exploitation of children used to promote brands online.
Get involved!
- This Safer Internet Day, you can support our work with a tax deductable donation here.
- Learn more about keeping kids safe online on our Parents + Carers Resource page here.
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