Romania’s Rise in Child Pornography Reveals Disturbing Side Effect of COVID-19
According to a recent report, COVID-19 lockdowns have increased child pornography distribution (Wikiwand).
The Romanian Directorate for Investigating Organised Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) published a report revealing a pandemic-induced spike in the distribution of child pornography on February 26. Romanian authorities reported that the increase correlates with a largely ignored but prominent global trend.
DIICOT’s finding is part of its 2020 annual report, which found that “the number of pornographic materials with minors detected by prosecution bodies and even by the private sector is on the rise.” It reports a particular increase in “self-generated” content, where minors are approached online and coerced into sending explicit content of themselves.
There are many theories concerning the reason for the sudden increase. DIICOT cited that many offenders manipulated or blackmailed victims into sending graphic content, while also observing that many minors were motivated by the “significant financial gains” from services like live streaming.
The IMF reports that the economy of the central, eastern, and southeastern region of Europe is “expected to contract by close to 5½ percent in 2020, erasing almost three years of economic progress.” The region’s economic hardship is a compounding factor in the increase in financially-motivated self-generated child pornography.
Meanwhile, Europol has published a report which also named indirect effects of lockdown as the grounds for heightened child exploitation. According to this report, isolation and increased unsupervised internet access during the pandemic have caused children to be “more exposed to offenders through online gaming, the use of chat groups in apps, phishing attempts via email, unsolicited contact in social media and through less secure online educational applications.”
The same report found that children in lockdown are “more inclined towards making explicit material to exchange with peers, eventually reaching child sex offenders” and “becoming lonely and isolated, which offenders try to benefit from, connecting with them to produce explicit material or to arrange a meeting in real life.”
Remote learning also means that students are less supervised by teachers and outside figures, leading to an underreporting of abuse that may occur at home. “The same isolation being used to keep us safe during COVID is being exploited by people who are either abusing a domestic partner or spouse, or a young person in their care," explained New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal.
These conditions suggest that child sex crimes are spiking not just in Romania, but throughout the entire region. EU documents testify that some member states have experienced as much as a 25 percent increase in the demand for child pornography.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime offered the governments of southeastern European countries assistance in confronting cybercrime as “the significantly increased risk of cyber criminality becomes well documented and the risk of exposure to such crime grows correspondingly” in the region.
Governments are approaching the issue with newfound urgency. The EU committed to establishing “a center devoted to preventing the mistreatment of children and for legislation requiring online platforms to report child pornography” across its 27 member nations in July 2020. Meanwhile, in December 2020 Romania’s capital Bucharest was chosen to host the EU’s new cybersecurity center, a source of hope for struggling local governments.
In the face of economic downturn and a slow vaccine rollout by the EU, questions remain on whether these methods will stem the flow of this self-generated pornographic content in the Balkan region – or whether such a phenomenon will abate in a post-pandemic world.