ST. LOUIS — It began when a mother saw the glow from a cellphone screen emanating from underneath her 11-year-old daughter’s bedroom door.
It was after 11 p.m. on a school night, and the family had strict rules. No screens after 9 p.m. bedtime.
“I went in there to see what she was doing, and she had the covers pulled up to her nose,” said the mother, who asked 5 On Your Side not to use her identity to protect her daughter. “And then I could see the phone light from underneath the covers.
“So I pulled back the covers and she was naked from the waist down with her phone on, and she was recording.”
The moment played out several states away, but the predator on the receiving end of the images her daughter was making was a 50-year-old businessman in Clayton. He tricked the child into thinking he was another little girl, curious about her sexuality.
“He was pretty clever,” the mother said. “He was sending her live videos of another child about her age.
“He had her tie herself up. Just awful, awful things that no one as a parent wants to see their child doing, let alone them being asked to do.”
And he’s one of a growing number of predators the Eastern District of the U.S. Attorney’s Office has convicted in the past two years, according to Nathan Chapman, assistant U.S. attorney.
“Our office has had about a 50% increase in cases from the previous two years,” he said. “And nationally, all offices, districts, the numbers are going up.”
The I-Team discovered the problem for the feds isn’t getting convictions.
It’s keeping up.
Statistics on child sexual abuse material
One study published in October 2022 concluded about one in six minors reported sharing sexually explicit images of themselves online. That's one in seven children between the ages of 9 and 12 and one in five between the ages of 13 and 17.
The FBI St. Louis Division opened 400 new investigations concerning Crimes Against Children between Jan. 1, 2019, and March 28 of this year – the most recent stats available. And about 91% of those investigations involved online child sexual abuse material, according to Assistant Special Agent Chris Crocker.
“The appetite for this stuff is so strong, I don't necessarily see it ever stopping,” Crocker said.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Missouri has hired another full-time prosecutor to handle online child enticement cases – cases that take a lot of time.
Since January 2022, the office has convicted 27 predators – including the one now serving an 11-year sentence for collecting images of the child whose mother spoke to the I-Team.
Between 2018 and 2022, the office has indicted 314 people on charges related to child sexual abuse material. So far this year, 77 suspected predators have been indicted, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.
The family the I-Team spoke to said they were shocked to see how much support the predator who targeted their daughter had in court.
“There were letters written on his behalf that were submitted to the judge at his sentencing from prominent people in the community,” the mother said. “They were teachers, they were doctors, they were past senators, religious affiliates.”
The I-Team is also not identifying the name of the man convicted of collecting sexually explicit images of the woman’s daughter because the family signed a nondisclosure agreement as part of a civil lawsuit. It prevents them from identifying him by name.
The money from that settlement is now paying for the therapy the family and the victim needs.
“She is not good,” the mother said. “She's impulsive, with boys. She snuck out with a couple of boys, she’s snuck out overnight. Her grades are terrible.”
Sextortion and other tactics
FBI agents like Crocker say predators use different tactics.
One method, known as sextortion, includes threatening to send images to a victim’s friends and loved ones if they don’t send more, or, send money. The threat alone has been damning for victims, Crocker said.
“We've seen over a dozen cases of teenage boys committing suicide directly following these incidents,” Crocker said.
Oftentimes, the threats predators make to release the images are empty, because predators don't often have access to a victim's circle of friends and relatives, Crocker said.
“The likelihood of that information being ever being released to anyone is basically nonexistent,” Crocker said. “They're just trying to get a quick payment.
“And if you don't comply, they'll just move on to the next person.”
Other tactics include trying to arrange for in-person meetings and building collections of child sexual abuse images to trade or sell.
By the time the mother the I-Team spoke to discovered her daughter’s messages, she had been sending them for three months via a messaging app called Kik.
“I just saw message after message and video after video that she had been sending,” the mother said. “Her picture could be everywhere, what she did with her body could be everywhere.”
The messaging app was unfamiliar to the child’s parents. The victim kept it hidden in a folder on her cellphone among other more benign apps, so her parents didn’t see it when they frequently checked her text messages, videos and photo folders, the mother said.
The growing number of anonymous messaging apps are not helping prosecutors like Chapman.
“Online exploitation used to be done primarily through actual computers that are typically static in one place in the house,” Chapman said. “Now, with so many more kids having cell phones, all it takes is an internet connection and one social media app, and then, it's out there.”
What parents can do
The mother the I-Team spoke to said the predator who targeted her daughter didn’t start off immediately asking for lewd images.
“It just started like, ‘Send me a picture of you. I want to see what you look like,’” the mother said. “And then it would say, ‘How about a little lower,’ all so he could see more of her body."
Chapman says how parents react if it happens to their child can make things worse.
“You have to be comfortable as the parent, being able to receive that information from your child, not freak out, not panic, but make sure that your child is comfortable coming to you to tell that,” he said.
The victim’s mother said she and her husband were too harsh on their daughter at first, punishing her for violating the screen time curfew and sending pictures to someone she didn’t know.
“We didn't know what this person knew about us, so we took apart her room, we basically treated her like a criminal,” the mother said. “We handled it completely wrong at first and later that day she had taken a thumb tack to her wrist. And so, we had to take her to the local hospital and have her checked out.”
They also waited a few days to contact police.
“I didn’t know what to do, because now we have images of child pornography in our in our possession,” the mother said.
Crocker and Chapman said parents and guardians should always contact police.
“Please don't keep this to yourself or think it's just a localized problem,” Crocker said. “It's not. It's affecting others, as well. And you might prevent the next kid from being victimized by making that phone call.”
Chapman said prosecutors have a goal, and it doesn’t include victims.
“We are recognizing that kids are kids,” Chapman said. “They make poor decisions.
“They make decisions that a child would. The ultimate goal is not to punish any kids for making kid choices, but just to try to make sure that those images don't end up in the hands of people who do ultimately exploit them.”
The mother the I-Team spoke to said she and her husband thought they had done everything they should have to protect their children.
“We had these rules in place,” she said. “We had talked to them time and time again about not talking to people you don't know, don't get on apps. We had watched Lifetime movies about this. We had watched 'To Catch a Predator' with John Stossel. All those things. We never thought that this would happen to us.”
Her daughter struggled to believe her parents when they told her the person on the receiving end of the images she was sending was a grown man and not the 11-year-old girl she thought she had a crush on.
“I think she thought she was having a relationship with this other girl,” the mother said. “And finding out it was an adult who for several months had conversations and an intimate relationship, she was devastated.”
Two years later, her daughter is now 13.
“She's a shell of what she was, this happy girl that we knew that was full of a sense of humor,” the mother said. “We get glimpses of her sometimes, but it's very rarely.”
The mother said she wishes she could go back to that moment when she first saw that blue glow coming from her daughter’s bedroom door.
“I would have went in that room and scooped her up and told her, ‘Everything's going to be okay,’” she said. “I would have just not been so angry with her and not blame her how I did.”
Resources for parents and guardians
The FBI’s website has a page dedicated to raising awareness about sextortion and available resources to help victims.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children offers instructions to take down nudes circulating on certain social media platforms.
Listen to the full interview here:
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