‘Lolita’ sites on social media allow abusers to groom girls
A BOOM in “Lolita” sites on Instagram, Facebook and other platforms is allowing paedophiles to target teenage girls without fear of arrest, an investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has found.
The phenomenon, where so-called #DDLG – “daddy dom little girl” – hashtags are used to enable older men to connect with younger women in online communities, has steadily increased since 2016 in the UK to garner more than three million posts last week on Instagram alone.
Britain’s leading children’s charities say paedophiles are using them to “hide in plain sight”, and are demanding the tech giants either ban the communities by blocking the tags or introduce tough age verification procedures to prevent children engaging with them.
After being told of The Telegraph investigation, Facebook, which owns Instagram, announced an immediate worldwide ban on the tags.
“We have blocked all associated #DDLG hashtags on Instagram, which means they will no longer be searchable, viewable or recommendable,” said a spokesman. “Keeping young people safe on our platforms is a top priority.”
The tags, which have numerous permutations, are ostensibly designed for adult men interested in “submissive” role play relationships with women, which is legal.
However, the US agency responsible for monitoring and reporting child sex abuse online says they are also being used as a cover by predatory paedophiles to pursue children. Some children are being enticed into the “Lolita” communities by offers of cash to provide sexual images, said the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which last year referred 18.4million reports of online child abuse to law enforcement agencies worldwide.
They can then be blackmailed and groomed for sex.
“It is concerning how it is being used, both to groom children to produce sexually abusive content and to connect like-minded individuals to discuss grooming techniques and share images,” said John Shehan, the NCMEC vice-president.
So far it is thought there has only been one prosecution in the UK where a 39-year-old computer engineer who called himself “Papa Bear” groomed a 15 year-old-girl before travelling 160 miles from his home in Wolverhampton to meet her at a play park in Devon. Police who raided Dominic Nielen-Groen’s home found a Fifty Shades of Grey- style contract, setting out rules and punishments. A judge at Exeter Crown Court warned the divorced father-of-two, that he faces a long jail term.
Tumblr and Yubo are two online platforms which have already blocked the hashtags, but until alerted on Friday, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter had done little beyond attempting to restrict it to adults even though there are under-13s unofficially on their sites.
John Carr, secretary of the UK children’s charities’ coalition on internet safety, said: “This type of content and access to groups that propagate it should be confined to adults.”
He said that because the images were not illegal, hotlines that received reports, police and the courts were unable to require them to be removed, which meant it was up to the platforms to police it