By Ella Archibald-Binge, ABC news
Warning: The following article contains references to child sexual abuse.
Kelly Humphries was seven years old when a visit to her uncle’s house turned sinister.
“He came to me and pulled me close, and I remember him saying, ‘I want to teach you what it’s like to love, just like in the movies’,” she recalls.
“That night, before I fell asleep, he came into the bedroom, and that’s where the sexual offending began.”
The abuse went on until Ms Humphries was 15. For years, she struggled to overcome her fear of telling her parents what had happened.
“I worried that they would judge me, that they wouldn’t love me anymore, that they would think I was dirty, disgusting – because that’s how I felt, and that’s how he made me feel,” she says.
At 19, out of concern for her younger sister, she disclosed the abuse.
In 2001, her uncle pleaded guilty to indecent treatment of a child and sexual assault. He was sentenced to four years in prison with a non-parole period of 18 months.
Children blackmailed into producing content for abusers
Ms Humphries, now 40, has worked as a police officer in Queensland for the past 14 years, including eight years as a school-based police officer.
She has seen a disturbing shift in the way predators groom children.
“Now, the trend that we’re seeing is children or young people are making their own child exploitation material,” she says.
Detective Inspector Jon Rouse has seen the phenomena unfold on social media.
“Child-sex offenders are very good at pretending to be a 14 or 15-year-old boy and gaining the trust of a 14 or 15-year-old girl on any of these applications,” Inspector Rouse says.
“They’ve very good at getting that to the next level, which is getting images sent.
“And, once that happens, that’s the end of the game, because they’ve got that image and they can then threaten the child to produce more content – It’s gut-wrenching,” he added.
How police ended up running an online paedophile ring
Detective Inspector Rouse is head of Task Force Argos, a team of experts dedicated to countering what has become one of the world’s fastest-growing major crimes.
Their work is now the focus of an SBS documentary, The Children in The Pictures.
The unit was set up in 1996 to investigate historical allegations of institutionalised child abuse, but its focus quickly shifted as the internet took off and paedophiles set up online chat boards to share abusive material.
Police officers developed an unorthodox method to find the perpetrators.
They would identify and arrest the leaders of the chat boards, before assuming their online identities to gain control of the network – effectively masquerading as offenders and sifting through mountains of harrowing material to find clues that would lead them to victims.
One such operation, reported by 7.30, led to the arrest of Shannon McCoole, a South Australian child protection worker revealed to be a child-sex offender and the administrator of a paedophile chat board with 45,000 members.
In collaboration with overseas police agencies, Task Force Argos has rescued thousands of children from their abusers. But it’s a relentless job.
“The gravitation of child-sex offenders to these platforms has been exponential globally,” Inspector Rouse cited.
“The boards that we continue to monitor now, we’re up in the hundreds of thousands in their membership.”
More than 21 million reports of online child exploitation globally last year
As offenders find new avenues, experts have developed innovative methods to track them down.
It starts with tech companies who detect abusive material and report it to organisations such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the United States.
NCMEC Chief Operating Officer Michelle DeLaune said the organisation received more than 21 million reports last year, mostly from tech companies, regarding child sexual exploitation on their servers.
“We actually sent 94 per cent of those reports to other countries,” she says.
Law enforcement agencies, including Task Force Argos, then analyse the digital fingerprint on the images or videos against a database to filter out the old material and identify new victims.
“Anything that’s left is potentially unique, has never been seen before, which means that person they have seized this from may be a hands-on abuser,” Inspector Rouse said.
But moves by social media companies to protect user privacy could derail that process.
Facebook has unveiled plans to expand end-to-end encryption for its main messaging service – preventing third parties, and police, from obtaining conversations that could become evidence in their investigations.
Inspector Rouse explained this could lead to a 70 per cent reduction in cyber tip-offs.
Ms DeLaune acknowledges it’s a “difficult balance” for tech companies to strike a balance between privacy and child safety.
“But we cannot accept that children and child victims are going to be collateral damage,” she says.
A Facebook spokesperson told the ABC’s 7.30 the company uses behavioural patterns and user reports to combat abuse on encrypted platforms, such as WhatsApp.
“We have 40,000 people working on safety and security at Facebook, and we have invested more than $13 billion in this area since 2016,” they said in a statement.
“We remain committed to continuing our partnerships and substantial investment to fight criminal activity and keep young people safe.”
What can parents do to protect their children?
Kelly Humphries says it is vital that tech companies continue to detect abuse on their servers.
When I was a child, I didn’t have a voice where I felt I could say something myself, and I often wanted or needed someone to ask me,” she says.
“If there was a way that it got flagged … it almost takes that burden off the child having to say it themselves.”
As a public speaker and author, Ms Humphries has dedicated her life to helping child abuse survivors bring their story into the light, “because that’s when it loses its power”.
And, with police vastly outnumbered in the fight against online child exploitation, she says parents have a key role to play.
“The greatest tool you can have against (child abuse) is having that connection with your child, feeling like the child – or the teenager – can come to you and have a safe conversation.”
The Children in the Pictures, released on 24 October, is streaming on SBS now.