Exclusive: Child Trafficking Rescuer Highlights Horrors of Online Sexual ExploitationBY CATHERINE SALGADO
JULY 19, 2023
“The United States is the biggest consumer… of child pornography in the world.” Joseph Sweeney said. Sweeney founded The Asservo Project to fight child trafficking, and he explained how social media drives an epidemic of sexual exploitation of young people in exclusive comments to PJ Media.
The Asservo Project works to help save trafficked children and young adults and to raise awareness about the increasing exploitation of children. The Project’s website says that the average age of a trafficked child is 14 years old, though some are as young as nine or ten. Sweeney himself came into the work during his time working for the U.S. government.
Asservo is involved in rescue efforts and also educates children and adults on the risks that lead to child exploitation. One major factor fueling the child sex trafficking crisis in America is social media, according to Sweeney.
“The United States is the biggest consumer — and producer, at times — of child pornography in the world,” Sweeney told me. “Unsettling, to say the least; and how did we get there?”
The “degrading of our society as a whole” and the rise of social media exacerbated the problem and facilitated child exploitation, Sweeney explained. “The entire industry [is] driven by money,” he said, “it’s very lucrative… We hunt predators every day out there online,” and predators are constantly searching. “They coerce or groom kids into sharing these things, pretending to be somebody else.” So “now the demand side of it has increased,” Sweeney stated.
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“Social media has consumed our entire society,” Sweeney observed soberly. “And these kids, they’re just too trusting. Their lives are on this tech all the time — they’re gaming, they’re chatting, they’re dating. They’re dating without even meeting people in person.”
Unfortunately, that provides the perfect opportunity for predators to create false profiles and prey on young people.
“The predators hide behind… facades,” Sweeney explained, emphasizing how important it is to educate children about this risk as Asservo does. “These relationships happen over months sometimes, sometimes weeks.”
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Source:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/catherinesalgado/2023/07/19/exclusive-child-trafficking-rescuer-highlights-horrors-of-online-sexual-exploitation-n1711645
