Dawn of the new pagans: ‘Everybody’s welcome – as long as you keep your clothes on!’
It’s nearly Beltane, and pagans across the country are getting ready to celebrate. One of the eight festivals in the “wheel of the year”, Beltane is observed from 30 April to 1 May in the northern hemisphere and is an occasion for joyful ritual that marks the moment spring bursts into life, with fires, flower garlands – and perhaps a maypole.
“To be in a circle, to have a huge bel-fire and to jump the ashes into the full summer, it’s very life-enhancing,” says Adrian Rooke, a druid from the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (OBOD), which runs druidry courses. Annelli Stafford, a practising “eclectic” pagan and the organiser of Beltane at Thornborough Henge in North Yorkshire, agrees: “It’s a really nice start to the year after a long, cold winter.” A regular since 2011, Stafford describes the energy and stunning skies at the three ancient henges, and the event’s welcoming spirit. “There’s a full range from babies to old people with walkers and electric wheelchairs,” she says. The majority of people are pagan, but Wiccans and Christians are also welcome, as well as their four-legged friends: “We’ve had cats, dogs, a bunny, ferrets … everybody’s welcome, as long as you keep your clothes on!”
It’s a similar scene at Butser Ancient Farm’s eclectic Beltane Celtic Fire festival in Hampshire. More pagan-inspired than actual ritual, there’s drumming, Celtic face painting, flower crowns, a May Queen and a Green Man – not to mention a dramatic 40ft wicker man that gets burned at dusk. “It’s a joyful celebration and a collective coming-together, with a decent amount of mead, which is an essential component,” says Kristin Devey, who runs events at Butser.
If you’re thinking that sounds like fun, you’re out of luck for this year. Overnight camping spots for Beltane at Thornborough were booked up weeks ago, and there’s no space left for day visitors. Butser, which has capacity for 2,500 guests, is also completely sold out. “We used to be able to sell tickets on the door,” Devey says. “Now our final release sold out literally in minutes. It was akin to the ‘big festival tickets’ feeling.” That’s a striking degree of enthusiasm for what would once have been considered seriously fringe celebrations.
Is paganism, a loosely defined constellation of faiths based on beliefs predating the main world religions, going mainstream? King Charles’s coronation invitation features a prominent image of the Green Man – “an ancient figure from British folklore, symbolic of spring and rebirth”, as the royal website puts it – creating what one paper called a “paganism row” (basically a cross tweet from one member of Mumford & Sons). Thriving fantasy literature and cinema genres are rich in pagan symbolism, and British folk revival musicians frequently draw on pagan inspiration.
While less than half the UK population identified as Christian in the 2022 census, 74,000 people declared they were pagan, an increase of 17,000 since 2011. And that might well be a significant underreporting. When the preeminent scholar of British paganism professor Ronald Hutton investigated in the 1990s, he came up with 110,000 – much higher than the contemporary census total. “Most of the pagans with whom I’ve kept in touch do not enter themselves on the census,” he also notes.
Pagan groups report a similar story. “When I joined OBOD 29 years ago,” says Rooke, “there were about 240 people doing the druid course. There are upwards of 30,000 now worldwide and the course is in Dutch, Italian, German …” Heathenry – based on northern European traditions of polytheistic and spirit worship and ancestor veneration – is also “seeing massive growth”, according to Jack Hudson from the “inclusive heathen community” Asatru UK. “When we started in 2013, there were eight of us; now, about 4,000 people have interacted with us over the past 10 years.” Meanwhile, a 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center estimated at least 0.3% of people in the US identified as pagan or Wiccan, which translates to about one million people. That number is expected to triple by 2050.
What is paganism in 2023? For starters, it’s essentially a contemporary creation, drawing on ancient traditions. There were no “card-carrying, self-conscious pagans” from the mid-11th century until the Romantic movement in the 18th century, says Hutton. Although elements endured in Christianity, neopagans only started to establish continuous traditions in the early 20th century. It’s also the broadest of churches, spanning witchcraft, Wicca (the organised witchcraft-based religion founded in the 1950s), shamanism, druidry, heathenry and a vast swathe of non-affiliated “eclectic” pagans. “It has become incredibly mainstream, and that means it’s become incredibly diverse,” says professor of theology Linda Woodhead, who has researched the rise of alternative spiritualities.
One thing that has helped make paganism mainstream is the internet. Finding druids when he first became interested, says Rooke, was near impossible; they were “like the masons – you had to be invited in”.
Now the pagan-curious can find information and resources on every sub-variant imaginable online, groups advertise “moots” (meet-ups) and larger gatherings welcome all-comers.
Social media has played a huge part, too. “Witchtok” is huge: the #witch hashtag has 24.1bn views on TikTok (plus 19.1m Instagram posts). “It’s definitely made magic more accessible, 100%,” says Semra Haksever, eclectic witch and owner of the Mama Moon candle and potion shop in east London. “There was always so much secrecy around how you’d meet people and how other people would practise. Now it’s really easy to connect, to learn how to do things. I can’t remember a time when I was connected with so many other women who are into witchcraft.”
Online resources have also enabled a vertiginous rise in “solitary pagans”, or people whose practice is largely private. “Getting pagans to do anything together is like herding cats,” laughs Dr Liz Williams, author of Miracles of Our Own Making, a history of British paganism and co-owner of an online witchcraft shop. “A lot of people feel they don’t want to be told what to do – they’re just happy getting out into nature and doing their own thing.”
The sacredness of nature is one core pagan belief that holds obvious appeal now. As Hutton puts it, paganism fulfils “a need for a spiritualised natural world in a time of ecological crisis”. That resonates: a new literature of wonder, from Katherine May’sEnchantment to Dacher Keltner’sAwe, has articulated our desire for transcendence, rooted in renewed appreciation for a beleaguered natural world. “You’d have to be living in a cave not to be aware of the impact we as human beings are having on the earth,” says Rooke. “A lot of druidry is about preservation, protection, planting trees. It’s ecological, geocentric, idealistic.”
That’s true of heathenry, too: “We are an intensely nature-based religion,” says Hudson. Paganism also speaks to a desire to reconnect with the rhythms of the seasons and the year: visitors to Butser are keen for more events marking festivals of the pagan calendar, according to Devey.
Then there’s paganism’s attitude to women: there are goddesses as well as gods, and there’s the veneration of a sacred feminine. Female empowerment is a particular draw to witchcraft and Wicca. The appeal to young women is obvious, says Williams. “It’s very female-dominated and womendriven in a way which a lot of other patriarchal religions just aren’t.” Pop culture has had a strong influence on waves of uptake, says Williams. “Buffy started off a big interest in Wicca and witchcraft generally. Charmed,before it, had the same effect.” Now there’s Wednesday, the popular Netflix Addams Family spin-off. “I watched a little bit – it’s all about magical young women and it’s got the message that you can be different, so for young women that’s quite a positive message.”
Neopaganism also supports individual freedom and self-actualisation – very contemporary concerns. Hutton describes paganism as “a religion in which deities don’t make rules for humans or monitor their behaviour – humans are encouraged to develop their full potential”.
People often arrive there after a period of spiritual searching and dissatisfaction with other faiths. Rooke became estranged from the intolerant Pentecostal church he joined as a child, journeying through Buddhism and shamanism via a near-death experience (a catastrophic cardiac infection after a botched wisdom-tooth extraction) before alighting on druidry. Heather, a recent druidry convert, became disillusioned with Methodism after discovering reiki healing and moved through spiritualism before becoming pagan. Having spent time quietly observing on the margins of pagan ceremonies at Stanton Drew stone circle, she found the druids “lovely, kind, welcoming people”.
She and her husband organised a pagan handfasting (a wedding ceremony in which partners’ hands are symbolically bound together) and in preparing for that, learned about “the elements, the stones and the land. All these things just fell into place.” Paganism, says Hudson, is “a lot less rigid in terms of worship and practice. It’s not as dominating over your personal life.” That also translates into tolerance. “I think you see each other as souls,” says Heather. “We’re all on our journey.”
That tolerance is not universal. The notion of a deep spiritual attachment to native soil has obvious appeal to white nationalists, and neopaganism has suffered from the far right misappropriating its ideas and symbolism. The Pagan Federation states clearly on its website homepage that far-right ideology is “incompatible with our aims, objectives and values”.
“It’s something our community is extremely aware of,” says Hudson. “We protect our own community by having a strong stance.” Their Introduction to Heathenry document condemns farright ideology as “simply incompatible with heathenry”. Asatru UK also works with Exit Hate, a charity helping people leave far-right groups.
For Woodhead, what really sets paganism apart isn’t nature or selfactualisation but magic. “The big world religions are very anti-magic.” I wonder whether Williams sees a particular hunger for magic at the moment. “I think it’s perennial, but it is particularly emergent in times of crisis and extreme stress. Unfortunately, most of human history has been a time of crisis and extreme stress!” She says there has been a rise in Ukrainian witchcraft recently, directed against Putin and the Russian invasion. “I guess that is because it’s a last resort: they feel helpless, they’re under terrible threat from a powerful foe and they need to do what they can.”
By contrast, the pagan magic evoked in popular culture is often savage, grotesque and bloodthirsty. Robin Hardy’s film The Wicker Man celebrates its 50th anniversary this year and has become the foundational text of folk horror. In it, a buttoned-up Christian policeman travels to a Hebridean island to investigate the alleged disappearance of a young woman and finds himself confronted by a population in thrall to a pagan cult. Hardy and screenwriter Anthony Shaffer carefully researched the rites and rituals included, from maypole and sword dancing to fire jumping. The film’s ineffable creepiness keeps it at the top of “best horror” lists half a century later, and a long wicker shadow still lies across the whole genre, which is filled with horned, garlanded or animaldisguised initiates, unbridled sexuality and, of course, human sacrifice. The sun-drenched, flower-bedecked bloodbath Midsommar is the obvious example, and last year’s Men, by Alex Garland,also went deep on folk horror tropes, including a Green Man and masked children.
There may never have been a wicker man. The legend emerged from a handful of Roman writings on northern European tribes, according to Hutton. “They’re hostile reports and could indeed be negative propaganda.” Meanwhile, the “enduring teatowel, film-poster drawing of the druidic wicker man”, he says, comes from a single illustration in a 17th-century book on the history of Britain. Butser’s wicker man, Devey explains, is simply a way for the experimental archaeologists who work there to show off their woodworking prowess: “It’s a Butser craft thing. It’s got no real relation to Beltane or paganism.”
Nor is the maypole a phallic symbol: “Originally it’s a tree covered in flowers and foliage symbolising everything that’s blossoming and sprouting,” says Hutton. No one sacrifices anything except food and drink these days, and what Rooke calls paganism’s “sensuous spirituality” mainly translates to providing a welcoming spiritual home for
the whole rainbow of sexual and gender identity and orientation. “There are lots of trans people in OBOD,” he says. “Lots of gay men and lesbian women – it’s very inclusive.” Heathenry also has “a large LGBTQ population that is thriving,” says Hudson.
Paganism in 2023 isn’t a secret front for human sacrifice or a sex cult, nor is it an object of ridicule. If anything, it’s becoming institutionalised. Both Woodhead and Williams compare paganism’s current incarnation to the Church of England. “It’s really quite similar to old-fashioned village Anglicanism,” says Woodhead, citing the Goddess temple in Glastonbury. “They’re licensed to do weddings and funerals, they’ve become like the church of Glastonbury. It’s like the Women’s Institute when you go there.” It’s so well-established that there are now second- and even third-generation pagans, promising a continuity never previously imaginable. Stafford loved meeting the “lockdown babies” when celebrations at Thornborough restarted post-Covid. “It’s nice to see small heathen children running around,” says Hudson.
A representative of a new generation is on the throne now, too, taking on the title of Defender of the Faith among others. King Charles has already expressed his desire to uphold that promise – wouldn’t it be refreshing if he incorporated elements of an ancient-modern, tolerant, open, life-affirming, female-friendly faith into his reign? He’s already passionate about the natural world, there’s that Green Man on the coronation invitation and he almost certainly has a good collection of cloaks. Perhaps it’s time for a pagan king.
ahead as, after a long back and forth, on a video call Instagram executives said that they wouldn’t pay Frundt her standard fee of $3,000, instead allegedly offering $300. When we put this to Meta, they did not deny it.
The court documents and the prosecutors * **
What makes social media platforms so powerful as a tool for traffickers – far more powerful than the back pages of a newspaper in which Frundt was advertised as a teenager – is the way that they make it possible to identify and cultivate relationships with both victims and potential sex buyers. Traffickers can advertise and negotiate deals by using different features of the same platform: sellers sometimes post publicly about the girls they have available, and then switch to private direct messages to discuss prices and locations with buyers.
US court documents provide a graphic insight into how these platforms can be used. In one case prosecuted in Arizona in 2019, Mauro Veliz, a 31-year-old who was convicted of conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of a child, exchanged messages on Facebook Messenger with Miesha Tolliver, who also received jail time for sex trafficking. Tolliver told Veliz that she had one girl available for sex, and photographs of two more, before saying that the girls were aged 17, 16 and 14.
The 14-year-old, Tolliver told Veliz, was “new to the sex game”.
The court transcripts then state that multiple sexually explicit images of the girls were sent to Veliz.
Tolliver and Veliz exchanged more messages, arranging for Veliz to meet the girl in a hotel in California two days later.
The final message submitted to the court was from Veliz to Tolliver. “We’re finished she’s in the restroom,” it said.
Luke Goldworm, a former assistant district attorney in Boston, Massachusetts, who has investigated and prosecuted human trafficking cases for years, says that he has encountered numerous exchanges like this one. From 2019 until he left the job in October 2022, he said, his department’s caseload of child-trafficking crimes on social media platforms increased by about 30% each year. “We’re seeing more and more people with significant criminal records move into this area. It’s incredibly lucrative,” he said. A trafficker can make up to $1,000 a night. Many of the victims he saw were just 11 or 12, he said, and most of them were Black, Latinx or LGBTQI+.
According to Goldworm, while his investigations involved every social media platform, Meta platforms were the ones he encountered most often. Six other prosecutors in several different states told us that, in their experience, Facebook and Instagram are being widely used to groom children and traffick children. Five of these prosecutors spoke of their anger over what they felt were Meta’s unnecessary delays in complying with judgesigned warrants and subpoenas needed to gather evidence on sex trafficking cases. “We get a higher rate of rejected warrants from Facebook than any other electronic service provider,” claimed Gary Ernsdorff, senior deputy prosecuting attorney for King County, Washington state. “What I find frustrating is that the exchange can delay rescuing a victim by a month.”
Three of these prosecutors described experiences where they say the company would cite technicalities, picking faults with wording and format, and slowing down investigations. In response, the company said that these claims were “false”, adding that between January and June last year, it “provided data in nearly 88% of requests from the US government”.
The responsibility for reporting ***
Meta acknowledges that human traffickers use its platforms, but insists that it is doing everything in its power to stop them. By law, the company is required to report any child sexual abuse imagery shared over its platforms to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), which receives federal funding to act as a nationwide clearing house for leads about child abuse. Meta is a major funder of NCMEC, and holds a seat on the company’s board.
From January to September 2022, Facebook reported more than 73.3m pieces of content under “child nudity and physical abuse” and “child sexual exploitation” and Instagram reported 6.1m. “Meta leads the industry in using the most sophisticated technology to detect both known and previously unknown child exploitation content,” said a company spokesperson. Of the 34m pieces of child sexual exploitation content removed from Facebook and Instagram in the final three months of 2022, 98% was detected by Meta itself.
But the vast majority of the content that Meta reports falls under child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) – which includes photos and videos of pornographic content – rather than sex trafficking. Unlike with child sexual abuse imagery, there is no legal requirement to report child sex trafficking, so NCMEC must rely on all social media companies to be proactive in searching for and reporting it. This legal inconsistency – the fact that child sexual abuse imagery must be reported, but reporting child sex trafficking is not legally required – is a major problem, says Staca Shehan, vice-president of the analytical services division at NCMEC. “It’s concerning across the board how little trafficking is being reported,” Shehan says. Social media companies “are prioritising what’s [legally] required”.
“I think everyone could do more,” Shehan says. “The volume of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and volume of trafficking [being reported] is like apples and oranges.” According to Shehan, one further reason for this disparity, beyond the differing legal requirements, is technological. “Child sexual abuse material is that much easier to detect. There are so many technology tools that have been developed that allow for the automated detection of that crime.”
A NCMEC spokesperson told us that if social media companies are not reporting child sex trafficking, it allows this crime to thrive online. Reporting trafficking, they emphasised, is crucial for rescuing victims and punishing offenders.
Between 2009 and 2019, Meta reported just three cases as suspected child sex trafficking in the US to NCMEC, according to records disclosed in a subpoena request seen by the Guardian.
A spokesperson for NCMEC confirmed this figure, but clarified that a number of child trafficking cases during the same time period were reported by Meta under other “incident types”, such as child pornography or enticement. “I think one of the things to be aware of is that is that there’s sort of a singular tag that’s used for reporting,” Antigone Davis, head of global safety at Meta, emphasised to us in a recent interview. “And so just because something isn’t tagged as sex trafficking doesn’t mean that it isn’t being reported.”
A Meta spokesperson claimed that over the past decade, the company had reported “tens of thousands of accounts which violated our policies against child sex trafficking and commercial child sexual abuse material to NCMEC.” When we put these claims to NCMEC, it said that it had not received “tens of thousands” of reports of child trafficking from Meta, but had received that number related to child abuse imagery.
Hany Farid is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who helped invent the PhotoDNA technology that Meta uses to identify harmful content. He believes Meta, which is currently valued at more than $500bn, could do more to combat child trafficking. It could, for instance, be investing more to develop better tools to “flag suspicious words and phrases on unencrypted parts of the platform – including coded language around grooming,” he said. “This is, fundamentally, not a technological problem, but one of corporate priorities.” (There is a separate debate about how to handle encryption. Meta’s plans to encrypt direct messages on Facebook Messenger and Instagram has recently drawn criticism from law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and Interpol.)
In response to Farid’s claims and further questions from the Guardian, Meta did not specify how much money it has invested in technologies to detect child sex trafficking, but said that it had “focused on using AI and machine learning on non-private, unencrypted parts of its platforms to identify harmful content and accounts and make it easier for people to report messages to the company so we can take action, including referrals to law enforcement”. Davis also emphasised that Meta constantly works with partners to improve its anti-trafficking safeguards. For instance, she mentioned that “we’ve been able to identify the kinds of searches that people do when they’re searching for trafficking content, so that when people search for that, we will pop up with information to divert them or to let them know that what they’re doing is illegal activity”.
These efforts have failed to satisfy some of Meta’s own investors. In March, several pension and investment funds that own Meta stock launched legal action against the company in Delaware over its alleged failure to act on “systemic evidence” that its platforms are facilitating sex trafficking and child sexual exploitation. By offering insufficient explanation of how it is tackling these crimes, the complaint says, the board has failed to protect the interests of the company. Meta has rejected the basis for the lawsuit. “Our goal is to prevent people who seek to exploit others from using our platform,” the company said.
The moderators * * *
As well as software, Meta uses teams of human moderators to identify cases of child grooming and sex trafficking. Until recently, Anna Walker* worked the night shift in an office of a Meta subcontractor. She would start each shift filled with dread. “We were just, like, shoved in a dark room to look at the stuff,” she said.
Walker’s job was to review interactions between adults and children on Facebook Messenger and Instagram direct messenger that had been flagged as suspicious by Meta’s AI software. Walker claims she and her team struggled to keep pace with the huge backlog of cases. She says she saw cases of adults grooming children and then making plans to meet them for sex, as well as discussions about payment in exchange for sex.
Walker’s managers would pass on such cases to Meta to decide if action should be taken against the user. In some cases, Walker claims: “Months would pass and then the automatic bot would send me an email saying it was closing this case, because nobody’s taken action on it.” She added: “I would cry to my manager about [the children I saw] and how I want to help. But it felt like nobody would pay attention to these horrible things.”
We talked to six other moderators who worked for companies that Meta subcontracted between 2016 and 2022. All made similar claims to Walker. Their efforts to flag and escalate possible child trafficking on Meta platforms often went nowhere, they said. “On one post I reviewed, there was a picture of this girl that looked about 12, wearing the smallest lingerie you could imagine,” said one former moderator. “It listed prices for different things explicitly, like, a blowjob is this much. It was obvious that it was trafficking,” she told us. She claims that her supervisor later told her no further action had been taken in this case.
When we put these claims to Meta, a spokesperson said that moderators such as Walker do not typically get feedback on whether their flagged content has been escalated. They stressed that if a moderator does not hear back about a flagged case, that does not mean no action has been taken.
Five of the moderators claimed that it was harder to get cases escalated or content taken down if it was posted on closed Facebook groups or Facebook Messenger. Meta “would be less stringent about something taking place behind ‘closed doors’,” claimed one team leader. “With Messenger, we really couldn’t make any moves unless the language and content was really obvious. If it was four guys who trusted each other and it was in a group it could just live on for ever.” Meta said these allegations “appear to be misleading and inaccurate” and said it uses technology to find child sexualisation content in private Facebook groups and on Messenger.
In 2021, former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked internal documents that seem to support the moderators’ claims. These documents, which numbered thousands of pages, detailed how the company managed harmful content. In one memo from the Haugen leak, the company states that “Messenger groups with less than 32 people should be treated with a full expectation of privacy”.
Matias Cruz*, who worked as a content moderator from 2018 to 2020, reviewing Spanish-language posts on Facebook, believes that the criteria that Meta was using to recognise trafficking was too narrow to keep up with traffickers, who would constantly switch codewords to avoid detection. According to Cruz, traffickers would say: “‘I have this cabra [Spanish for goat] for sale,’ and it’d be some really ridiculous price. Sometimes they would just outright say [the price] for a night or two, or ‘an hour’.” It was obvious what was going on, said Cruz, but “the managers would claim it was too vague, so in the end they would just leave it up”.
Cruz and three other moderators we spoke to claimed that in examples like this, where their managers felt there was insufficient evidence to escalate the case, moderators could receive lower accuracy scores, which in turn would affect their performance assessments. “We would take negative hits on their accuracy scores to try to get some help to these people,” Cruz said.
The limits of the law ***
While the law requires Meta to report any child exploitation imagery detected on its platforms, the company is not legally responsible for crimes that occur on its platform, because of a law created almost three decades ago, in the early days of the internet. In 1996, the US Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, which was primarily intended to ensure online pornographic content was regulated. But section 230 of the act states that providers of “interactive computer services” – which includes the owners of social media platforms and website hosts – should not be treated as the publisher of material posted by users. This section was included in the act to ensure the free flow of information while protecting the growing tech industry from being crushed by litigation.
Whereas a newspaper, say, must legally defend what it publishes, section 230 means that a company like Meta, which hosts the content of others, may not be held liable for what appears on its platforms. Section 230 therefore positions internet service providers as fundamentally neutral: offering forums in which illegal, harmful or false content may be posted and circulated, but ultimately not responsible for that content. Since the passing of the act, tech companies such as Meta have argued successfully in courts across the US that section 230 provides them with complete immunity from prosecution for any illegal content published on their platforms, as long as they are unaware of that content’s existence.
The debate around section 230 has become highly polarised. Those who want section 230 amended say that the legal safe harbour it has provided for internet companies means they have no incentive to root out illegal content on their sites. In an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal in January, President Biden spoke out in favour of the section’s reform. “I’ve long said we must fundamentally reform section 230,” he wrote, calling for “bipartisan action by Congress to hold big tech accountable.”
However, tech companies, along with internet freedom groups, argue that changes to section 230 could lead to censorship and an erosion of privacy, particularly for private, encrypted content. These arguments over section 230 are being put to the test in a landmark case that has reached the US supreme court, which focuses on how far YouTube can be considered culpable for the videos it recommends to its users. A ruling is due by the end of June.
The consequences ***
Kyle Robinson is one year into serving a 10-year sentence at a federal prison in Massachusetts for sex trafficking two teenagers, one only 14 years old. We spoke to him in January over the muffled line of the prison’s pay
phone, our conversation interrupted by prison staff monitoring the call. Referring to himself as a pimp, Robinson described how he sought out damaged girls from care homes and on social media as a way to make money.
Instagram, he said, was his platform of choice. “I find the girls that have pride in themselves, but maybe don’t have the confidence, the self-esteem,” he claimed. “I make her feel special. I give her validation, social skills, her ‘hotential’, if you know what I mean.”
Once he had identified his targets, Robinson claimed that he would “coach” them and advertise them on their Instagram accounts and his own. He would talk to potential buyers through direct messages, offering to send video snippets of the girls in return for “a small deposit” – about $20 – so that the buyers could see what they would be getting. If a buyer decided to meet a girl, he would pay her the rest of the money later, via CashApp, he said. Robinson would then take most of that money.
To crack down on such cases of child sexual exploitation, last June Meta announced new policies including age verification software that will require users under 18 to provide proof of age through uploading an ID, recording a video selfie, or asking mutual friends on Facebook to confirm their age. When we asked Tina Frundt about these new measures, she was sceptical. The kids she works with had already found workarounds; a 14year-old, for example, might use a video selfie made by her 18-year-old friend, and pretend that it’s her own.
Even after children have been referred to Courtney’s House, they continue to be vulnerable to traffickers. One night in June 2021, Frundt says she got a call from Maya, telling her she had arrived home safe. Frundt was relieved: she knew that Maya had spent the evening with a 43-year-old man who had been contacting her on Instagram.
Frundt says that Maya, now 15, was in a fragile state: over the previous few months, her mental health had been in sharp decline and she had told Frundt she’d been feeling suicidal. Photos and explicit videos taken by a pimp showing her having sex were being circulated and sold on Instagram. Sex buyers were contacting her relentlessly through her direct messages. “She didn’t know how to make it stop or how to say no,” Frundt recalled.
That night, on the phone, Frundt told Maya that she loved her and that they would talk in the morning. “That’s the last time I ever spoke to her,” said Frundt. The older man had given Maya drugs. When Maya’s mother went to wake her daughter the next morning, she found her dead.
A picture of Maya that still hangs on the wall of Courtney’s House shows a baby-faced teenage girl with brown curls and a huge smile. Two years after her death, Frundt continues to grieve for her caring “girly girl” who loved makeup, board games and dancing to her favourite Megan Thee Stallion songs. “Losing one of our youth, it changes you for ever. You can never forgive yourself,” she said.
Before Maya died, Frundt claims she spoke to Instagram on a video call, asking them to remove the exploitative content her trafficker had circulated. Frundt says that when Maya died, the videos of her being exploited were still on the platform.
In July 2021, a representative from an anti-trafficking organisation sent an email to Instagram’s head of youth policy, informing her of Maya’s death. Frundt was copied in on the email. It asked why Meta’s tools designed to detect grooming had not flagged a 43year-old man contacting a young girl. Four days later, the company sent a brief reply. If Instagram was provided with details about the alleged trafficker’s account, it would investigate.
But Frundt says that it was too late. “She had already passed,” she says. “They could have done something to help her but they didn’t. She was gone.”
Names marked with an asterisk have been changed to preserve anonymity.
• In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline on 800-422-4453. In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, or Bravehearts on 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contact Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International