Kids being exploited online amid coronavirus pandemic

 As New Jersey started locking down amid the coronavirus pandemic, a convicted rapist and registered sex offender from Oklahoma named Aaron Craiger stepped off a Greyhound bus in Atlantic City. He had a phone with child sexual abuse materials on it and graphic plans to carry out his sexual fantasies with two 11- and 12-year-old girls.

Instead, Craiger was met on March 18 by undercover law enforcement in a four-month sting that led to the arrests of 19 men, one woman and one juvenile male accused of sexually exploiting children online.

While the world has battled the health and economic effects of the coronavirus, another global issue has raged in tandem with little notice – and without the additional money and resources needed to effectively battle it, experts said. Online child abuse and exploitation, already one of the biggest and growing crime challenges nationally, has spiked as the pandemic has forced more people indoors with abusers and children spending more time on the internet. 

The increase in reports tracks in the United States and abroad during the pandemic, experts said. Tips to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the clearinghouse for such information in the United States, nearly doubled from 6.3 million in the first half of 2019 to 12 million through June of this year. Reports of online enticement similarly spiked during that timeframe, from 6,863 to 13,268. 

"Online child exploitation right now is probably one of the biggest problems, from a crime perspective, in our country,"  said Lt. John Pizzuro, commander of the New Jersey Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.

Many millions of images and videos of children and even newborn babies being raped and abused – or of children coerced into performing sex acts on camera – constantly ricochet across the internet. What may begin as seemingly innocent chatting between strangers online can lead to "sextortion," abduction and human trafficking, according to advocates and law enforcement. 

At the same time, the lockdown measures have meant fewer opportunities for abuse to be noticed and reported by day care workers and schoolteachers, New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said in an interview.

“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," he said.

In addition to investigating tips of online abuse, the task forces routinely set up stings to capture would-be predators. With increased tips of abuse during the pandemic in mind, Grewal's office oversaw Operation Screen Capture. The five-month sting led to 21 arrests, including Craiger, who had been communicating with undercover officers and not pre-teen girls as he had thought.

But other cases "show the level of depravity of these predators," Jason Molina, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations, said in a statement at the time.

They included a 40-year-old man from Keansburg, New Jersey, who allegedly manipulated a 14-year-old girl into sending him naked pictures of herself engaging in sexual acts, persuaded her to carve his initials into her legs, then tricked the girl into revealing her mother’s phone number and sent those images to her mother. And a 21-year-old babysitter from Newark was accused of sexually assaulting a "very young child," videotaping herself performing a sex act on the child and posting it on social media, Grewal's office said.

The Protect Our Children Act of 2008 sought to develop a national strategy against online abuse and help the country's 61 Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces. Under the law, Congress authorized spending $60 million each year to distribute among those task forces, which are made up of about 4,500 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.

But no presidential administration has fully funded the program, according to Camille Cooper, vice president of public policy at the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, or RAINN. In fact, the average amount appropriated the past decade is about half what Congress authorized, nearly $29 million, by the Department of Justice's own accounting.

That means each task force unit receives between $500,000 and $600,000 a year, leaving commanders like Pizzuro stretching their dollars for training and equipment for a small staff that works with local, county and federal law enforcement agencies.