Victims in the Philippines, Customers in the United States
According to a 2023 report by the NGO International Justice Mission (IJM), nearly half a million children in the Philippines have been abused for the production of sexual content and profit. The organization estimates that roughly one in every 100 children in the country is trafficked for the production of such content.
On October 11, 2026, CNN has revealed the dimensions of a new criminal industry in the online space in a detailed and interactive report. Customers of this business order child sexual abuse content. These children, most of whom live in the Philippines, are exposed to sexual abuse and rape live, and the consumers of the images are more American men than anywhere else. What makes the report even more horrifying is that many of those selling these children are themselves relatives of the children.
CNN's investigative team spent months poring over court records, police documents and leaked data.
According to the 2023 report of the non-governmental organization "International Justice" (IJM), nearly half a million children in the Philippines have been abused for the production of sexual content and for profit. This organization estimates that approximately one in every 100 children in this country is trafficked to produce such content.
According to officials, the Philippines is the main center of this industry. According to the report of the Anti-Money Laundering Council of this country, from 2015 to 2023, the United States was the largest buyer of this content from the Philippines, and Americans paid more than 7 million dollars for it only between 2020 and 2022. This figure, however large it may seem, does not tell the whole picture. Each image or access to a live stream is often sold for a few dollars, but behind that number are hundreds of thousands of images, and therefore hundreds of thousands of children.
The most shocking finding of the report is that a large part of the perpetrators are women from the victims' own families. The Philippine National Police has announced that out of 50 women arrested last year for abusing and raping children online, 32 were mothers, and the statistics are similar this year.
John Tango, executive director of the Center to End Online Child Sexual Exploitation at IJM, told CNN: "These children are being abused and the abuse is being broadcast live because someone in America is willing to pay for it." He considers the live streaming of this crime to be one of the fastest growing and least known forms of child abuse in the world.
A confession that came from the heart of the family
The CNN report focuses on Kate's story. Kate was 13 years old when she sat in front of the camera for the first time. His father had lost his job during the coronavirus pandemic, and his older sister, who previously worked in the field of online sex work, left him in his place. Keith is now 20 years old and says his biggest fear was that one day these men would come to his home in the Philippines. "I just thought I was working for money, to at least survive today," he said of those days.
14-year-old Iza has another story. He and his younger cousins were abused by their aunts. According to the reconstructed messages from the police file, one of these women offered content to a Swiss citizen and the other haggled over the price. A PayPal account linked to one of them had more than $3,500 in balance. Today, Iza lives in a shelter and says, "We are much safer now. There is no more pain, fear and trauma." However, he still feels the weight of those years. Her aunts had told her that this story should remain a secret and, in Iza's own words, "It was as if you were scared and had no one to tell."
The Isa case led to the conviction of a man in Switzerland and the opening of an investigation into a man in the UK.
A market that can be accessed with one click
Entering this market is not difficult. CNN reporters show that public websites are just a few clicks away from private Telegram groups. In some of these groups, whose number of members reached thousands, lists were published with the details of the victims and the price of each. Sometimes the prices were the same as a cup of coffee. Sellers used alt-characters and code terms to bypass automated filters. Just minutes after speaking with one of the alleged sellers, CNN reporters were confronted with a message indicating that the groups were working to attract organized customers.
Using court documents and data from a leak monitoring site, CNN identified more than a dozen customers of the content. They were from America, Britain and Sweden and had very different jobs, from restaurant waiters to mental health counselors and students. Their ages ranged from 20 to 70 years old, and some had children and grandchildren. All of the men CNN reviewed had been convicted of or pleaded guilty to crimes related to online child abuse.
One of these men was Raymond Lee Shaws, a 70-year-old climate consultant from Virginia who had more than 5,000 images and videos and bought at least 15 live broadcast channels. According to court documents, in his messages to an intermediary in the Philippines, he expressed his anger at not getting what he wanted. 20-year-old Casey James Caudill traveled to the Philippines from Florida and sexually abused a 7- and 12-year-old sibling.
Why is it difficult to prosecute this crime?
The migration of harassers from the dark web and their presence in cryptic groups and live streaming has made policing very difficult. Traditional methods, such as hacking into groups, are almost ineffective in private chats and live broadcasts. A U.S. federal investigator, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told CNN that perpetrators have learned not to record meetings, making it "very difficult to catch someone in the act."
CNN also spoke of political obstacles. Several current and former law enforcement officials told the network that the administration's domestic priorities have slowed the investigation over the past two years. After Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, nearly 90 percent of Homeland Security Investigative (HSI) agents, more than six thousand people, were transferred to immigration, according to data from the Kito Institute. It is not clear how many of those who specialized in child abuse cases were in this transfer, but investigators say that some leads remained inconclusive. One of them said: "When you come back, it's like you have to start the research from scratch."
According to court documents and survivors' statements, encrypted messengers such as WhatsApp, Viber and Telegram have played a role in the communication between offenders and victims. End-to-end encryption preserves users' privacy, but makes it more difficult to detect malicious content. WhatsApp says it checks for unencrypted information, such as profile pictures, and blocks hundreds of thousands of suspicious accounts every month. Viber mentions automated tools and human moderators to detect abuse in channels and groups. Telegram claims to have closed more than 400,000 channels linked to this crime in 2026 alone, but admits that blocked users often create new accounts. Microsoft, which is retiring Skype in 2025, did not respond to CNN's questions about the closure of one of the defendants' accounts.
Carl Lee Sackman, a 60-year-old man from Maryland who once worked as a night operations manager for a logistics company, was one of those who remotely guided Kate and the other children. A 2010 FBI search of his home revealed that he used multiple Skype accounts to access live streams of children. His youngest victim was only six years old.
Sackman was sentenced to 10 years in prison, less than the usual sentence of 15 years for producing such content. Part of this discount was due to the payment of 50,000 dollars compensation to the victims in the agreement. Kate says she received $6,300.
Kate's sister was sentenced to 33 years in prison for human trafficking, three times as much as Sackman's sentence. Kate has forgiven him and has not testified against him in court, but the guilt will not let him go. He blames himself for his sister's imprisonment and says: "I am the main reason for my sister's imprisonment. I am the reason why we are suffering."
After her rescue, Kate began psychotherapy and is now studying social work to help others in similar situations. However, when he talks about the future, the scars become apparent. She says she feels "dirty" and thinks maybe she doesn't deserve to be loved anymore.