***"Trigger warning: child exploitation'' 

Twenty men across Victoria have been arrested over child exploitation offences, with police seizing photos and videos of children and babies being tortured.

Deputy Commissioner Shane Patton told the Herald Sun that each month hundreds of Victorians shared millions of images of child abuse material.

“We know there are links between this type of online activity and contact offending, so it’s important that we target anyone prepared to source this type of material in any way,” he said.

Source: Victoria Police 

Mr Patton said the material showed children, and even newborn infants, in sexually provocative poses and in pain.

Writing in response to the Royal Commission into institutionalised child sexual abuse, Collective Shout co-founder Melinda Tankard Reist said:

There is deep distress in the community that defenceless children are used in such evil ways. But the broader culture that encourages the abuse of the children goes unaddressed. The same loathing that is directed toward child sexual abuse has not been extended to the mainstream promotion of paedophilic fantasies for profit.

Melinda Tankard Reist pointed out that this abuse of children was also driven by a culture that normalises and eroticises child sexual assault. 

We’ve exposed mainstream retailers for their promotion of child sexual abuse. Bookworld was forced to withdraw hundreds of rape and incest titles, many of which portrayed the rape of girls by their fathers as erotic and desirable.

After months of campaigning against Amazon in 2010, they finally delisted ‘The Paedophile’s Guide to Love & Pleasure”, a book written by an actual paedophile endorsing sexual crimes against children. Amazon continues to attract criticism for its sexualised content involving children and babies, including sexy nurse outfits for toddlers.

Australian sex shops sell replica vaginas for men’s use, modelled on the bodies of little girls and promoted as “fresh” and “innocent” with intact hymens. Chemist Warehouse sold the ‘Virgin Palm Pal’ men’s sex toy until we exposed them in 2015.

Major retailers sell sexualised clothing for girls, including padded bras, and advertising features children posed and styled in increasingly adultified ways, inviting us to see them as older than they really are.

Service stations around the country sell ‘barely legal’ style porn magazines featuring girls with braces and pigtails.

As Melinda Tankard Reist concludes,

We are destroying the cultural norms that once taught male adults that children’s bodies are off-limits to sexual use. We cannot fully address child sexual abuse until we reject a culture that glamorises it.

Campaigners and survivors of sex trafficking are celebrating what has been dubbed “the most important anti-trafficking legislation in a generation”.

According to the National Centre on Sexual Exploitation, despite investigations by the U.S. Congress, websites that facilitate sex trafficking have not been held to account. New amendments to the “outdated” law, the Communications Decency Act (CDA) would allow victims of sexual exploitation to pursue legal actions against these websites and aid prosecutors in bringing charges against them.

A still image from the 2017 documentary I am Jane Doe.

As reported in the Washington Post:

The legislation arose as Congress learned that its current anti-trafficking laws could not be applied to websites like Backpage, which host thousands of ads daily for female and male prostitutes, some of which are children being trafficked by adults. Backpage has successfully cited the Communications Decency Act, which protects websites from liability for material posted by third parties, to evade both criminal prosecution and civil lawsuits.

Congress launched an investigation into Backpage which showed that its operators helped customers modify their ads to delete references to teenage prostitutes, yet still allowed the ads to run. The Washington Post then reported that Backpage used a company in the Philippines to solicit both prostitutes and johns from other websites, and created new ads for the prostitutes.

In response to the amendments, various major sites have implemented significant changes:

Cityvibe shut down completely, the Erotic Review, the “Yelp of the sex trade” where men rate their experiences with trafficking victims, shut down advertisement boards in the United States, NightShift shut down to review policies, VerifyHim shut down its “newsreel,” Craigslist personals section was shut down, Reddit’s prostitution-related “subreddits” were marked private and the site instituted new policies banning the sale of sex acts and drugs, Google reportedly deleted its publicly shared commercial sex-related advertising, WordPress.com reportedly removed its commercial sex-related advertising sites, Paypal reportedly disabled advertised accounts for commercial sex-related payment, Rubmaps, Erotic Monkey, and USA Sex Guide had extended maintenance periods over the weekend, suggesting upcoming changes due to the new law, Microsoft is issuing new Terms of Service effective May 1st covering all of its platforms, including Skype and Xbox, to urge users not to use the services to share pornography or criminal activity. Read more.

This is a massive victory for survivors of commercial sexual exploitation.

See also:

Watch the trailer for 2017 documentary I am Jane Doe

Backpage’s Sex Ads Are Gone. Child Trafficking? Hardly. New York Times

Despite the advancements made in the battle to bring child sexual abuse to the forefront of public discussion, it seems society still has a long way to go when it comes to reporting on child exploitation with dignity and respect.

Take a moment to think over a recent article you’ve read on child sexual abuse—and now ask yourself, how did they describe the crime? Did the article report on a toddler being raped by an adult, or was it inferred that the offender ‘had sex with’ the child? Was the young trafficking victim reported as a ‘child prostitute,’ or a victim? Did the TV program you watched the other night report that an underage boy was taken advantage of, or that he was really ‘in a relationship’ with his abuser?

Trigger warning: This blog contains references to child sexual abuse, please be aware of and prioritise your own well-being.

Shopping with my with my 10 year old daughter one Sunday afternoon, she suggested she needed new school socks. I could not have envisioned the chain of events that would quickly unfold as a result of her request….

More and more we are hearing stories like this. All the schools affected are listed in the article below. Police are encouraging any victims to come forward and report it.

“I came across an advertisement on Child Sex Dolls while looking at Japanese news online. Who would think such a heinous insult to the sanctity of children would exist?”

More needs to be done to ensure the safety of children in dance

*Content Warning- products and product descriptions may be distressing*

Last week Collective Shout activists exposed online fashion club Buyinvite for selling a range of paedophilic sex toys for men, including sex toys modelled on the vaginas of young girls. One of these items is the Hustler Barely Legal Pussy, accompanied by the product description below:

How Bookworld profited from intra-familial child sexual abuse

*Trigger warning - child sexual abuse, incest*

We've just campaigned against Condom Kingdom selling products that eroticise sex with underage girls and therefore, paedophilia. But Condom Kingdom isn’t the only retailer providing masturbatory material for sexual predators.  Bookworld - formerly known as Borders - has been selling multiple titles eroticising incest.