Briones: No to sexually abusing minors

BRITISH Ambassador to the Philippines Daniel Pruce hit it on the nose.

Our country, he said, “is one of the world’s leading providers of sexual online content.”

Whaaat?

Before you raise a stink, though, Pruce quickly admitted that the UK is one of the leading consumers (of this content).

I guess, that’s good to know.

Last month, a former media colleague who is now connected with the International Justice Mission sent me an email with a link regarding the arrest of a British national in 2017.

According to the National Crime Agency (NCA), a national law enforcement agency in the UK, Andrew Whiddett, a 70-year-old former lieutenant colonel in the British Army, spent thousands of pounds to watch live-streamed child sexual abuse from the Philippines.

The press release did not mention which part of the country the sexually abused children came from but travel records showed that Whiddett flew to Manila sometime in October 2016.

His local contact, a woman, received a total of £8,584 from the septuagenarian pervert between January 2015 and July 2017.

During this period, some hapless children here were subjected to sexual abuse while he watched over Skype in the privacy of his own home.

The agency was able to record parts of his conversation with the child sex abuse facilitator—the NCA’s words, not mine.

Trust me, this is not for the light-hearted, but this needs to be exposed so the public may know that many of our countrymen and women are peddling minors online for a living.

By the way, if you convert the money Whiddett paid his local contact, it amounts to over half a million pesos, based on the conversion rate of 1 Pound sterling equaling P66.27 last Saturday, May 25.

In a 25-minute conversation with the woman in September 2016, Whiddett asked “if the girl will be with her and he said: ‘need to do more teaching’ and ‘Look forward to touch,’ ‘yes darling, need to open her mind’ and ‘lots of teaching before I arrive.’”

I’m not sure what he meant by “teaching” but I have an idea and it’s making me sick to my stomach.

Whiddett, who had no previous convictions considering he was a private contractor as head of security at the British Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, was arrested at Heathrow Airport in London in October 2017.

Last May 22, Whiddett was sentenced to 38 months behind bars after he admitted live-streaming offenses and making indecent images of children.

“He was directly responsible for the most heinous abuse of children thousands of miles away from him. Live-streaming sex crimes exploits the vulnerable; he was helped in this case by facilitators whose motive is to make money,” said NCA senior investigating officer Gary Fennelly.

Last month, operatives of the Women and Children Protection Center-Visayas Field Unit arrested a 45-year-old woman in Mandaue City after she was caught offering to sexually abuse her six- and seven-year-old daughters and stream live the exploitation for a paying online predator.

The woman had transmitted online sexually explicit materials involving the two girls.

Police also learned that she previously offered her 15-year-old daughter for online child sexual exploitation.

As long as people like her exist, there will always be Whiddetts in the world.

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