Listen to thisThis month, I want to highlight what has been an enormous challenge in our fields for many years, but one that is growing exponentially today, partly because we have failed to respond meaningfully to it earlier, and because new technologies ranging from new social media platforms to generative artificial intelligence, have expanded the opportunities in this illicit economy in ways that are hard to imagine. The COVID-19 pandemic further contributed to an enormous growth spurt in this industry given that young people (and perhaps also adults) significantly expanded their use of social media and online presence. I also want to highlight this month the initiatives we are taking at Toronto Metropolitan University, under the leadership of one of the lead researchers in this field, Dr. Jennifer Martin, to contribute to an enhanced capacity to respond to these issues.
Anyone who is working in child protection, child and youth mental health, youth homelessness, or, for that matter, in schools, anywhere in the world, has come across the issues of child sex trafficking and online child sexual exploitation. Not everyone who has come across these issues, however, is aware that they have come across it, because very often, these experiences of young people are hidden and difficult to identify. In fact, even many young people are not aware that they are being exploited sexually through child sexual images online. And yet, according to data produced by the World Health Organization, other United Nations and international agencies, and by scores of national governments around the world, child sex trafficking and online child sexual exploitation are so ubiquitous that together these crimes against children have become the second largest illicit economy in the world, second only to the illicit drug trade. That means many billions of USDs are at stake, and we know that when this much money is at stake, the systems and processes of an illicit economy are sophisticated and deeply entrenched.
There are several aspects of this issue that make it profoundly difficult to navigate, especially for child and youth serving agencies around the world, but also for law enforcement, hospitality, journalism, cyber security, social media, and many other sectors. Here are some of the complications we encounter.
First, the issue of child sex trafficking is often understood as synonymous with human trafficking. They are not synonymous. Human trafficking is a much broader phenomenon that includes everything from immigration-related fraud to labour-related trafficking, and from modern-day slavery to trafficking for the purpose of harvesting organs. The imagery of human trafficking is often a truck filled with people, or a boat filled to capacity crossing some strait or waterway somewhere in the world. Child sex trafficking is a specific form of child exploitation that unfolds both at the levels of organized crime and at the interpersonal level. Unlike most forms of human trafficking, child sex trafficking, and online child sexual exploitation, require very little infrastructure. You don’t need a truck, fake passports, or a criminal network to engage in child sex trafficking. In fact, some of the largest incidents of child sex trafficking have turned out to be operated entirely by one guy sitting at a computer in his parents’ basement, with victims numbering in the hundreds.
Beyond these kinds of low-barrier entries into the crime of child sex trafficking, another distinguishing feature of this crime is that it very often unfolds in an interpersonal context. This means that many young people, disproportionately young women and girls (on average, 13 years of age), are trafficked by what is sometimes referred to as “Romeo Pimps” (people who perform attentiveness and provide material gifts to gain connections and trust) or by their intimate partners. This does not even require the young person being trafficked to exit their home or their other social spaces. Many young people appear perfectly fine living with their parents, going to school, participating in organized sports, while at the same time experiencing the traumatic horror of being trafficked regularly by their boyfriend or girlfriend or intimate partner. In this context, victims of child sex trafficking are often socialized slowly such that their perceptions of norms evolve and they remain unaware of the enormous exploitation they are subjected to until their lives have been irreversibly altered.
Third, one might perhaps be surprised to learn that the vast majority of child and youth care, social work, and other related professionals have no knowledge of or strategies to respond to survivors of child sex trafficking. Virtually none of the post-secondary education programs, and none of the professional disciplines involved in child and youth service settings, provide any training on this issue. Often, survivors of child sex trafficking are treated as willing participants (as a child making choices) in their repeated sexual abuse, which can and often does cause further harm. In fact, the specific nature of this experience is largely unknown to our child and youth serving professionals. For example, few are aware that the experience of child sex trafficking negates young people’s identities, often replacing even their birth names with ‘professional’ names that take on an identity onto themselves. Few people are aware of the many unanticipated challenges of rebuilding trafficked lives. For example, a common practice of traffickers, as part of their control mechanisms of the young person being trafficked, is to take out credit and loans in the name of the victim, such that those exiting child sex trafficking have horrible credit and often are in enormous debt, not even aware that tens of thousands of dollars have been disbursed in the form of loans and credit cards in their name.
Fourth, child sex trafficking and online child sexual exploitation are inherently transnational, but also include inter-professional issues that cannot be meaningfully addressed with the already existing arsenal of clinical and child and youth care strategies. The issues themselves are deeply embedded across many different sectors, each with its own operating logic. These sectors rarely talk to each other, rarely coordinate their activities, and very often work at cross purposes. For example, some of the sectors that are involved at all times, other than child and youth services, include banking (they trace the illicit funds and profits generated by these issues), cyber security (they identify the patterns in online traffic related to these issues), journalism (they create the narrative about these issues for the public), hospitality (hotels and restaurants are often sites of encounters), law institutions (they aim to develop legal frameworks that allow for the prosecution of traffickers, which is surprisingly difficult and for which the law is ill-prepared), policing (both locally and globally, they aim to investigate these crimes and collect evidence), health care (these issues are closely associated with enormous violence and related health issues), schools (major recruitment sites for victims), social media companies (they try to monitor related activity without, however, compromising or restricting use of their products too much), and of course communities and community elders, who try to protect their children from these issues through intergenerational engagements. Also of great importance in this context are immigration and settlement services, as well as refugee services, because young people caught in those systems are especially vulnerable given their often-meagre social networks and connections.
It is essential to understand that although globally, child sex trafficking and online child sexual exploitation manifests in many ways and targets any and all child population sub-groups, including those seemingly protected by wealth, wellbeing, and social status, in reality it is the sites of child and youth serving sectors that are targeted for recruitment. Foster homes, group homes, schools, homeless youth shelters, and drop-in programs for street-involved youth are favourite sites for recruitment precisely because the young people in these spaces are relationally vulnerable and more easily lured and exploited. Globally, refugee camps, institutional residences for unaccompanied minors, and similar kinds of service settings are also defined targets. Given the lack of knowledge and understanding on the part of workers involved with those young people at those sites, the professional systems surrounding young people are hardly a deterrent for recruiting. To the contrary, very often those professional systems actually make the recruitment process easier, in part because of poor practices, a lack of dignity, or a relationally unsatisfactory experience for the young people at these sites.
A meaningful response to the issues of child sex trafficking and online child sexual exploitation will require multiple components. No single initiative can achieve change in this context. Of course, we look to national and international policy regimes to set the stage for intervention in these industries. Many governments and several international organizations have published strategies and policy statements to this effect, which at least is a start. The ambitious attempts to eliminate or mitigate these issues, however, rarely is reflected in an emerging infrastructure across national and transnational jurisdictions that could actually accomplish this. Issues of corruption and complicity in governments and policymaking institutions further complicate matters across many jurisdictions. One element that is foundational to developing meaningful intervention strategies is knowledge production and applying knowledge meaningfully across sectors. The research on child sex trafficking and online child sexual exploitation has so far been profoundly underwhelming and rarely takes a transdisciplinary and interprofessional focus. Similarly, traditional professional disciplines, including social work, nursing, teachers, and child and youth care practice, are profoundly under-equipped to respond.
To this end, Toronto Metropolitan University is working to launch two major initiatives designed as foundations for better and more meaningful interventions. Each of these initiatives has costs set as low as possible to increase accessibility for people from everywhere in the world. The first is a new Master of Health Sciences program in Child Sex Trafficking and Online Child Sexual Exploitation, which is set to launch in January 2026 and open to both Canadian and International students and professionals. The program will be delivered mostly online but includes two one week in-person engagements for the entire cohort in Toronto. This program will be unique not only because it will be the first of its kind anywhere in the world, but also because it will be delivered in partnership between academics with research engagements in the issue, survivors and those with lived experience, and professionals working at the highest levels of institutions and sectors in law enforcement, clinical practices, forensic interviewing, financial sectors, technology sectors, education, journalism, and child and youth services (some of these professionals are also survivors). The aim of this program is to create transnational networks of highly trained professionals across many sectors who can work together to apply new research methods fit for these issues, and new ideas about clinical practices and policy measures that are desperately needed. Built into the program is a post-program network cultivation process to ensure that such interprofessional networks are sustained over time.
Our second initiative is very exciting and set to launch in January 2025. This is an Executive Program for leaders in child and youth serving sectors. The goal of this program is to equip leaders (executive directors, senior managers) to develop strategies for ensuring their agencies are equipped to identify the issues of child sex trafficking and online child sexual exploitation and to have meaningful and at the very least not harmful responses. This executive program will be delivered in hybrid format so that people can participate from anywhere in the world, is driven by the knowledge of survivors and those with lived experience, and offers content taught by high-level professionals across multiple sectors. The program will run over the course of a 12-week period and have hybrid all-day sessions on four Fridays, as well as five online sessions (in the evenings (EDT) on Wednesdays) with panelists representing diverse sectors and communities and speaking to very concrete elements of these issues involved in child sex trafficking and online child sexual exploitation. We are offering this opportunity as a way of building capacity to navigate in this complex world more quickly. For further information, please see here: https://www.torontomu.ca/leadership-program-child-sexual-exploitation/. The information will be updated shortly and provide a link for registration.
Both initiatives are built through knowledge frameworks reflecting specific communities that are disproportionately impacted by child sex trafficking and online child sexual exploitation. These communities in the global North include Indigenous and Black communities, as well as disability communities. Furthermore, both these initiatives are built through a survivor lens, and include survivors as instructors and knowledge transfer agents. For additional global relevance, both initiatives are also built around what we are learning about the intersection of child sex trafficking and online child sexual exploitation on the one hand, and migration on the other.
The bottom line is that the importance of developing 21st century strategies, knowledge frameworks, and interventions cannot possibly be overstated. These are necessary in a world of technology, ever-changing online spaces, and political economies that seamlessly merge community and legal activity with exploitative and illicit activities in new and extremely worrisome ways. We cannot sit complacently on trusting our traditional professional disciplines to engage effectively in these kinds of issues. These disciplines were not built for the complexity of today’s world. We need something entirely different to move forward.
