Saving the cyber sex girls: Stacey Dooley Investigates, BBC3 - TV review: A harrowing programme of abuse

It was shocking to learn that many abuse victims are pimped out by their own families

Stacey Dooley

Two years ago, the profile of a 10-year-old Filipino girl called Sweetie appeared online. In less than two months, the little girl was contacted by more 20,000 predators from all over the world who wanted her to perform sexual acts over a webcam in exchange for money.

What they didn't know was that Sweetie wasn't real. A computer model, she was created in a bid to catch the perpetrators of such sickening crimes.

But as journalist Stacey Dooley found out during the latest instalment of her series about the most dangerous places for girls to live, this was easier said than done.

Of the 20,000 paedophiles who contacted Sweetie, her creators were able to trace the names and addresses of 1,000 of them. Of those 1,000 people, 110 were British.

That's a pretty shocking set of statistics. But most shocking of all was the number of prosecutions – between six and eight.

As Stacey soon learned, saving girls from being abused is no easy task. For while it is rare for girls to be rescued, it is even rarer for their abusers to be brought to justice.

Focussing on the Philippines, where the age of sexual consent is 12, Stacey didn't have to go far to find young women being exploited. A boom in cheap internet access has opened up a whole generation to potential abuse and even sites considered relatively safe, such as Facebook, have become a global grooming ground.

With poverty still rife in much of the country, many young women view cyber sex as an “easy” option.

As Stacey delved deeper below the murky surface of this despicable trade, she was visibly shocked to learn that many victims are pimped out by their own families. When she learned of a mother who had sold her own daughter's body over the internet, Stacey visited her in prison to confront her. Sadly, she was offered little in the way of answers.

Saving the Cyber Sex Girls was a harrowing hour-long programme that every teenager in the UK should watch. As a woman, it made me grateful for the rights I so often take for granted – education perhaps being the most important. As one Filipino journalist explained, many of the abuse victims have no education and no hope of finding a job. Unlike their male counterparts they cannot do manual work. Sex work – cyber or otherwise – is fast becoming their only option.

The most harrowing scenes Stacey witnessed, however, came from inside a refuge for rescued abuse victims. Classes run by an abuse survivor encourage the girls to express their anger. To see those tiny little children, backs to the camera, hunched over screaming while they pounded the floor was utterly heartbreaking. And it proved that in order to save these poor girls, we need to do a lot more than simply remove them from the predatory situation.