SHAR­LENE RAM­PER­SAD

Af­ter in­fil­trat­ing dozens of on­line groups where child pornog­ra­phy is al­leged­ly be­ing trad­ed, a lo­cal non-gov­ern­men­tal or­gan­i­sa­tion is now sound­ing an alarm about the dan­ger chil­dren and women face in T&T.

The foun­da­tion says they have been mon­i­tor­ing the ac­tiv­i­ties of dozens of on­line groups where pho­tos and videos of chil­dren and teens are post­ed and “trad­ed” on­line dai­ly.

One of the foun­da­tion’s mem­bers, who asked to re­main anony­mous, said there are al­leged­ly po­lice of­fi­cers and doc­tors among the group mem­bers.

De­scrib­ing the be­hav­iour of the group mem­bers as “preda­to­ry,” she said the groups op­er­ate on What­sApp, Telegram and MeWe. She re­vealed some dis­turb­ing de­tails their in­ves­ti­ga­tion had un­earthed.

“They have Google fold­ers and One-dri­ve fold­ers spe­cif­ic to child pornog­ra­phy called Box Lunch, that’s the name of the fold­er,” she said.

She said dozens of vic­tims have come to the foun­da­tion seek­ing as­sis­tance af­ter they were al­leged­ly tar­get­ed, ha­rassed and black­mailed by group mem­bers.

This, and the foun­da­tion’s in­fil­tra­tion of dozens of the groups, has al­lowed them to iden­ti­fy many of the preda­tors in those groups.

“With the help of the vic­tims and by look­ing at the con­tact in­for­ma­tion that the mem­bers have dis­played, we have been cre­at­ing our own list of preda­tors… there are doc­tors, a lot of en­gi­neers and po­lice of­fi­cers, so far, that is what I iden­ti­fied,” she claimed.

Many of the groups are al­so in­volved in shar­ing what is com­mon­ly re­ferred to as “re­venge porn.” This is where nude pho­tos and videos that may have been sent by young women to their part­ners while in re­la­tion­ships, are shared to oth­ers af­ter re­la­tion­ships end.

The woman said nu­mer­ous re­ports have been made to po­lice about this prac­tice but so far, no one has been pros­e­cut­ed.

An­oth­er dis­turb­ing trend from the groups is the “hunt” for nude pho­tos.

The woman showed mul­ti­ple mes­sages from sev­er­al of the groups, where screen shots of the so­cial me­dia pro­files of teens and young women were be­ing shared. The pho­tos showed the teens and young women post­ing pho­tos of their every­day lives but the woman said they must have caught the eyes of the preda­tors, as the mes­sages ac­com­pa­ny­ing those screen shots are of­ten, “Who have she?”

She said this prac­tice, which eas­i­ly iden­ti­fies po­ten­tial vic­tims, was oc­cur­ring with in­creas­ing fre­quen­cy.

“Who­ev­er shared that per­son (pho­to) re­quests the URL for their Face­book, Snapchat, In­sta­gram pro­file. They would then go on to be­friend the per­son, reach out to them, talk to them, whether it’s black­mail, a lot of vic­tims say they have been black­mailed off the bat by fake ac­counts that these users would cre­ate and then reach out to the girls, they would ha­rass them, ask them for more nude pho­tos and even prey on them if they are sex­u­al preda­tors,” she said.

Some of the oth­er mes­sages sent to the groups in­clud­ed, “Any­one have school­girls?” and “Who have child porn?”

Links to join a group called “Stu­dents Chat Room,” which was de­scribed as “Leaked Stu­dents Videos” and “Quar­an­tine Stu­dents Porn Videos On­ly,” were wide­ly cir­cu­lat­ed among the groups. A link for a group named “Child Porn video” was al­so shared among sev­er­al of the groups.

“They are even in­cit­ing hack­ing, they in­cite peo­ple to go and prey on them to get nude pho­tos from them, so it’s like a sex­u­al groom­ing, preda­to­ry en­vi­ron­ment, where young girls and chil­dren are shared con­sis­tent­ly, 24/7 they will be shar­ing these things,” she said.

The woman said mem­bers of the NGO have “con­front­ed” some of the preda­tors vir­tu­al­ly, by ask­ing whether they were not aware that the dis­tri­b­u­tion of child pornog­ra­phy is il­le­gal in T&T.

“I think the users find com­fort in the fact that there is a lack of law em­pow­er­ing po­lice to in­ves­ti­gate and they take a lot of sat­is­fac­tion in know­ing that noth­ing could re­al­ly be done to them, they have ad­mit­ted that in the group, they have spo­ken about it, say­ing “Them in River­side Plaza can’t do noth­ing about this.”

The woman shared emails with Guardian Me­dia that were sent to se­nior mem­bers of the TTPS in May 2022, where de­tails of the ac­tiv­i­ty, in­clud­ing links to on­line plat­forms where pho­tos and videos of mi­nors were be­ing stored and shared, call­ing for ac­tion but said she was un­aware whether any of­fi­cial probe had been start­ed.

The NGO is now call­ing on the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice to take these types of re­ports se­ri­ous­ly.

The woman said un­for­tu­nate­ly, there is still a sig­nif­i­cant amount of vic­tim-blam­ing done by those in au­thor­i­ty.

“This is lit­er­al­ly a sex trade, we want the po­lice to in­vest them­selves in ad­vo­cat­ing from their side for more tech­nol­o­gy to bet­ter de­tect and fight this il­le­gal trade.”

Guardian Me­dia reached out to the TTPS’ Child Pro­tec­tion for com­ment yes­ter­day but up un­til press time none was forth­com­ing.

Ques­tions were al­so sent to TTPS’ Cor­po­rate Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Man­ag­er Joanne Archie, who said she would re­spond on Fri­day.