The damning scale of harm

October is the month of Halloween, of made-up nightmares that we tell ourselves as entertainment and release, to remind us that monsters are not really under our bed and that specters do not haunt the halls. But there are undeniable horrors and evils in this world, and the fact that they are rooted in human activity makes them all the more terrible. For these types of harms, it’s important that we remind ourselves not of their fantasy, but of their reality – and what we can and must do to stem the tide.

One of these real evils that I have spoken against frequently in this column is that of human trafficking, specifically the exploitation of children. During the height of the pandemic, children were increasingly targeted by traffickers who used social media and other online platforms to recruit new victims, profiting from the increased demand for child sexual exploitation materials. Technology will always be leveraged by criminal elements, but the speed of technological innovation in the modern era is unprecedented, and for government, humanitarian and law enforcement agencies to be able to adequately prevent and respond to online exploitation, their tools must also evolve rapidly. Crimes that make use of remote means, such as the online sexual exploitation of children (OSEC), can be incredibly difficult to discover, investigate and properly prosecute.

This has only been exacerbated by the proliferation of live streaming technology, particularly since live streams usually do not result in the creation of a single stored image or file, and any evidence of what occurred will be fragmented across different platforms and devices. The tools we use to investigate, capture and even measure instances of online exploitation must evolve… and while change can be slow, with effort and cooperation such change does arrive.

One of these new tools is the application of the Network Scale-Up Method. This is a product of the Scale of Harm, a project by the International Justice Mission (IJM) together with the University of Nottingham Rights Lab to develop a methodology estimating the prevalence of trafficking of children to produce child sexual exploitation materials. The first