UK kids blackmailed to do sex acts online
- September 21, 2013, 6:56 pm
- World News
- 363 Views
London, September 21 (Online): Hundreds of British children have been blackmailed into indulging in online sex acts and consequently making several of them kill themselves. Britain's Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre has revealed a shocking trend of online blackmail causing children to harm themselves, British media reported on Saturday.
In the past two years CEOP has investigated 12 cases where children were blackmailed into performing sexual acts on a webcam.
According to figures from the police forces in the UK and abroad, 424 children have been a victimized and have being forced to submit to online sexual blackmail in some form. Among them, 184 belonged to the UK.
Most of the British children targeted were boys aged 11 to 15. Britons were disproportionately targeted because they spoke English, and in the apparent belief that liberal values in this country were likely to make them more susceptible to 'online grooming', CEOP said.
The CEOP centre has been involved in 12 operations where blackmailing children into performing sexual acts has been a clear motive of the offender.
Research also shows that of those victims, seven children seriously self-harmed or attempted to take their own life.
The CEOP centre, which will become a command within the National Crime Agency from next month, has also found that in some cases, children are not only made to exchange sexual images/videos of themselves, but also forced by offenders to perform other acts live on webcam including writing degrading statements on their body and cutting themselves.
The children are usually forced into performing these acts after the offender, who often initially pretends to be a child, threatens to share their naked pictures or chats with friends and family unless they do as they are told.
In one of the cases, an offender even collated his images of blackmailed victims in a folder named 'slaves'.
Once the child has sent the images, the offenders begin blackmailing them either for more of such indecent images or, in few cases, even for cash. And unless the child agrees to do what the offender says, theey will then threaten to share the child's pictures with family and friends.
Andy Baker, deputy chief executive at the CEOP centre said, "These offenders are cowards. They hide behind a screen, and in many cases make hollow threats which they know they will never act on because sharing these images will only bring the police closer to them".
