Reports of online child sexual abuse significantly rose during the pandemic, and offenders are using sophisticated technological methods to get away with it.
As Josh Duggar, an anti-LGBTQ activist and star of The Learning Channel’s (TLC) reality TV show 19 Kids and Counting, has been found guilty of possessing child pornography, officials have said that reports of child porn and child sexual content are exploding. On Thursday, an Arkansas jury found Duggar guilty of downloading and keeping sexual images of children as young as seven years old. He now faces up to 20 years in prison but is still awaiting his sentencing. Duggar’s defense lawyers argued that someone else could have downloaded the images onto his computer. They promised to appeal the ruling. „The expansion of the Internet has led to an explosion in the market for child pornography,“ the Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a 2016 report to Congress. In 2018,69,425 cases of child pornography were reported to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Incidents of child pornography have also increased in response to the increased number of children using the internet during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, experts say. But while the issue is a worldwide problem, the U.S. remains one of the world’s largest producers and consumers of child sexual abuse content, according to Thorn, a firm dedicated to using technology to fight such content. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) reviews over 25 million images of alleged child sex abuse each year—over 480,769 images per week. A majority of the images feature children under the age of eight, including toddlers and infants.
