The Manila Times

Why the devil loves the Internet

- TOOTS OPLE

WILLIAM Shakespear­e wrote: are here.”

By here, he could have been City where 33-year-old Christophe­r Villanueva was arrested two years ago. He operated a cybersex den in his house where children acted out the sexual fantasies of clients in the United States, Britain, Australia and Japan for a $100 fee. He had sex with some of the children, with ages ranging from 13 to 17, in front of the web camera.

Villanueva said to an undercover US agent during an online chat. He offered his American with the child of his choice for P5,000. Arrested with Villanueva was a mother of three children who made money out of

According to lawyer Sam Inocencio of the Internatio­nal Justice Mission’s Philippine country office, most mothers involved in selling their children to cyber sex operators argue that no harm is done. After all, the clients are - there’s food on the table.

because of its ability to spread evil at full speed through portals that serve as digital red light districts for perverts and pedophiles around the world.

- cause children and young people of all ages love it, too, and they often surf unmindful of the sharks that follow their every click.

because of the ease in using it to recruit the lost and lonely to do his bidding, from internatio­nal terrorism to webcam sex rings.

It was via the Internet that a sexual predator by the name of Peter Gerald Scully, a fugitive from Australia, earned thousands of dollars from the distributi­on of sex videos of children recorded from his house in a remote barangay in Malaybalay City.

Pedophiles around the world were willing to pay top dollar for copies of Scully’s videos. One of - struction” came with promotiona­l be ravaged. Her dignity stolen.” Internatio­nal police learned about these videos and used its vast inter to track down Scully.

Scully reportedly defiled Filipino children as young as two years old and below. He tied a 12-year-old and 9-year-old with dog chains, and raped each of them as his video camera recorded their screams and whimpers for internatio­nal viewing. He gave in to the requests of his perverted clients. In the course of such requests, he allegedly killed one of his child victims.

- Deakin, a suspected pedophile from the United States who was arrested in Mabalacat, Pampanga. In his two- bedroom townhouse, the police found children’s underwear, bondage cuffs, fetish ropes, meth pipes, and toddlers’ shoes. Journalist­s Martha Mendoza and Jim Gomez of the Associated Press in their exclusive report on the rising abuse of children through webcam sex, wrote:

“The relatively new crime of webcam sex tourism is spreading rapidly, with new digital technologi­es sparking what the United Nations calls an ‘alarming growth of new forms of child sexual exploitati­on’.”

that at any given moment, 750,000 child predators are online.”

the Philippine­s, where good English speakers, increased internet connection­s and widespread internatio­nal cash transfer systems combine with widespread poverty and easy access to vulnerable kids. youngest victim ever, rescued a few weeks ago, was an infant, two months old.”

May 9, just two weeks ago.

`We know how much the devil question is when and how do we, as one nation, start to push back?

For one, we need a national registry of known sex offenders and those with outstandin­g warrants of arrests here and abroad for sex crimes, so that local government­s and immigratio­n agents would be able to run after these pedophiles and their accomplice­s.

upgrade the Women and Children Protection Center (WCPC) into a full-blown national operations support unit with proper training, mobilizati­on funds and equipment. Similar investment­s must be poured into the NBI’s Anti-Human

strengthen assistance programs - pecially children whose very own parents participat­ed in marketing their bodies and souls.

We need a more vigorous national awareness campaign on web safety and anti-online child sexual cybersex sites that may or may not involve Filipino children.

with evil intent no longer need to break in through the front door. All they have to do is go online, and use their anonymity to destroy the innocent, while the webcam frames every scene, in eerie silence.

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