Sex crime victims fight backConstitutional motion filed as thousands of pornographic images of young girls are still being circulated by local online predators.Unprecendented legal action has been filed against the State on behalf of child pornography victims.
The action has been filed to compel the country’s legal arm to move against the alleged failure of the police to investigate multiple sex crimes committed against children in the increasingly sickening cyberspace.
No less than 25 young women are being represented by the Humanitarian Foundation for Positive Social Change (HFPSC) in a constitutional motion which seeks to highlight a violation of the rights of victims, whereby thousands of pornographic images of them when they were minors are still being circulated by predators online.
The apparent unwillingness of police officers to investigate the evidence brought to them by victims, the lawsuit contends, has enabled an unknown number of anonymous perpetrators to remain undeterred in their predatory behaviour towards countless children who are being exploited.
The Foundation’s represented victims are amongst hundreds, many of whom the Sunday Express understands may be unaware that their own images are being reproduced and distributed daily on platforms such as WhatsApp, Discord, Telegram, MeWe, OneDrive and other cloud drives.
The Sunday Express previously reported that online groups have grown, sharing thousands of images of child pornography, sexual abuse imagery, spy cam-stylised images of unwitting victims, and non-consensual intimate images of an unknown number of young Trinidadian women from as far back as 2016.
Folders of explicit images of underage girls are organised in alphabetical order within multiple cloud platforms that are circulated en masse by the alleged perpetrators.
Child pornography trading, which actively preys on young teens, sexual abuse videos including women performing sex acts under duress, videos and images of Venezuelan women being advertised as escorts were up to last week still being circulated, advocates told the Sunday Express.
According to the Foundation’s legal action, law enforcement entities—particularly the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service’s Child Protection (CPU) and Cybercrime units—have been made aware of the existence of these online rings since 2021.
But up to last week, the Foundation confirmed that several of the platforms hosting explicit images of children were still active, and their users appeared fearless and unashamed.
The Victims The pornographic images of a 15-year-old girl from South Trinidad, who is listed as an anonymous claimant in the motion, were uploaded by a former partner to the pornography website Pornhub without her consent in 2020, and disclosed to an audience of millions.
The video included her full legal name, country and university, she states.
As the images circulated, the now 20-plus-year-old wrote in her legal claim of being harassed, stalked, blackmailed and threatened by countless anonymous perpetrators who had distributed them on local sex-trading groups.
And the abuse, she wrote, continued daily, the images and degrading commentary living in perpetuity, to this day.
The young woman’s claim states that she felt violated, threatened, deeply disturbed and humiliated by the discovery and, feared for her life.
In an attempt to understand the scale in which these images were being distributed, the claimant stated that she entered the groups, where she discovered hundreds of pornographic images and videos of young girls who appeared to be minors, with their full names, addresses, phone numbers and social media accounts being shared among predators.
Predators within these groups, she said, had held discussions on blackmail, harassing and/or grooming young girls to generate explicit content.
But despite her efforts to seek redress through the Cybercrime Unit of the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service, the young woman claims she was told nothing could be done.
The Cybercrime Unit indicated such reports could not be investigated, she said.
“The inaction of the police in conducting a proper investigation or any at all has left me in a state of paranoia where I am always in fear for my safety. I suffer emotionally, socially and financially. I further was in fear for my personal safety, as I was being stalked and harassed online by predators of the said groups consistently,” her claim states.
“To date, I am still unable to speak about my experience openly with others, as it still emotionally affects me.”
Her alleged experience mirrors that of several victims who spoke to the Sunday Express prior to the filing of the motion in May.
Victims told the Sunday Express they had been blackmailed, sexualised, threatened and stalked by perpetrators who had accessed pornographic materials uploaded to these groups without their consent.
They, too, were under the age of 18 when their images were violated.
Victims spoke of a collective fear and frustration as a result of their experiences, adding that at least one local young woman, on whom an entire folder within the child pornography cloud existed, had died by suicide as a result of the actions within the groups.
The Foundation’s claim states that despite numerous reports made by victims, including an August 2022 Foundation report addressed to the CPU which lists 42 public invite links to various predatory rings, as well as two links to cloud platforms designated as child pornography and titled “Box-Lunch 2023”, there is excessive delay in investigations on the part of the TTPS.
The Foundation noted that the online rings had been reported by various teenagers and university students to the police throughout the years, with several victims expressing that their reports were ignored at the stations, with cases where they did not receive citizen’s receipts confirming reports had been lodged.
Some who successfully made reports, the lawsuit states, got no update on any investigation being conducted.
More so, the Foundation and a second anonymous claimant detailed instances where officers, through whom some had attempted to seek redress, appeared unwilling to investigate, instead demeaning and even threatening victims of child pornography.
Accounts from the Foundation and the secondary claimant in the filing lists several occasions on which the crimes committed against victims were ignored, misplaced and, in one instance, laughed at by multiple officers.
The second claimant reports of having been warned by an officer of the TTPS (whose name has been sealed but to whom the Sunday Express will refer as Inspector S) in September 2021 after reporting the phenomena that she could “end up dead on the road”.
The claimant, herself a victim of the predator rings, was compared by the inspector to a human rights activist who was killed for her persistence.
A flash drive which included evidence of the child pornographic images she provided to Inspector S to aid in investigations was lost by the officer in the following months, she claimed.
Subsequently on August 15, 2022, a meeting between Foundation representatives and the TTPS took place at Riverside Plaza in Port of Spain, during which the second claimant’s statement was recorded. She states that, “All police officials present in the meeting, save and except for Inspector (C) were joking, jeering and gawking at myself and the other representative present.
Harrassment and StalkingOn the same date, the Foundation’s official report which lists the aforementioned links was submitted in hard copy to inspectors of the CPU.
The document also lists the names and contact information of 17 alleged child pornography and intimate image abuse perpetrators (which were redacted in the filing). Of those listed, two were identified as a medical doctor and a police officer.
The perpetrators were collated by the Foundation as having circulated intimate images of young women without their consent, possessing child pornography, participating in sexual/predatory harassment, and stalking.
The Foundation states this document was misplaced by the Unit and was then re-sent.
In a letter written to the Police Complaints Authority by the claimant in October 2022, it is noted that the inspector to whom the document had been submitted had further ignored all questions posed on what was being done with the information.
Additionally, a Samsung Galaxy A70 device and a flash drive containing the Foundation’s evidence gathered within these groups was kept by the TTPS’s Forensic Department and left on airplane mode.
The letter further details unethical behaviours displayed by officers (whose names were sealed) towards victims, including one officer who tried to form inappropriate friendships with victims and later joined the online rings on his personal cellular devices. Another actively participated in the rings, posted photos of himself in police attire while holding guns.
In the legal action filed by attorneys Larry Boyer, Melissa Hanomansingh and Lee Merry on May 23, the claimants stated sufficient evidence was provided to the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service to warrant an investigation.
But the TTPS, it said, had failed to complete the investigation(s) into those reports expeditiously and it would likely result in the failure to apprehend child predators and the continuation of online child sex abuse.
The State’s failure to ensure that investigations into criminal offences under the Children’s Act, 2012, can be concluded, it stated, constitutes a breach of the constitutional rights of victims guaranteed by Sections 4(a) and (b) of the Constitution of Trinidad and Tobago, the lawsuit contends.
These sections enshrine the right of the individual to life, liberty, security of the person and enjoyment of property and the right not to be deprived thereof except by due process of law. It also legislates the right of the individual to equality before the law and the protection of the law.
As such, the victims seek relief in the form of a declaration that the State has a duty to ensure that reports of criminal offences under the Children’s Act, 2012, are investigated expeditiously and that it has failed to do so.
The claim reads that the State’s failure to put mechanisms in place and allocate sufficient resources to ensure that the claimants’ reports can be investigated expeditiously infringes on their rights to security of the person, protection of the law and respect for their private and family life.
This, it says, has likely resulted in the destruction of evidence and further offences against other child victims.
As such, the motion requests an order of mandamus, compelling the State to put in place mechanisms and resources to investigate these reports.
Victims' RightsThis is the second case to come before the courts in recent times in which victims’ rights are being examined.
In the first matter, which is also a claim under the Constitution brought by attorneys Lee Merry and Larry Boyer, the court is considering whether a victim’s rights were infringed by a four-year delay in hearing a preliminary enquiry into a charge of rape.
The case, filed in 2022, concerns a female victim who was 16 years old when she was allegedly brutally attacked by an older man who was in a position of trust.
The charge was called before the magistrate on 23 occasions and the enquiry had yet to begin when the victim filed her constitutional challenge.
The victim writes in her constitutional affidavit of feeling sad, angry and annoyed that her matter is still ongoing.
“Whenever the matter comes up, I cry before and after court. Weeks before the court date, I get depressed and I am unable to sleep,” she states.
That constitutional claim is still pending.
The victim’s identity cannot be revealed because the judge hearing the matter, Justice Avason Quinlan-Williams, granted an anonymity order preventing its publication.
However, documents disclosed by the Judiciary in that matter reveal that it can take decades for a trial to take place in the High Court after the filing of an indictment.
One rape matter completed in 2019 took 41 years from indictment to trial, while others took 23 years, 30 years and 13 years to complete, respectively.
Contacted for comment on these matters, Merry stated, “If successive governments had considered the well-being of victims of crime, the current backlog of criminal cases would not exist. Victims are completely voiceless in this country and that needs to change. We hope that this litigation will lead to a greater role for victims in the criminal justice process and a change in attitude towards them by the police.”
The matter has been assigned to Justice Frank Seepersad for hearing on June 26.
In a statement provided to the Sunday Express on Friday, the HFPSC urged victims of the online child pornography rings to come forward.“ The organisation’s work in so far investigating and advocating for police action is persistent. Victims who are being targeted and/or affected by the online predatory groups have the opportunity to come forward for guidance and assistance,” it said. The HFPSC is a non-governmental organisation that comprises various legal, business, IT and social work professionals who say they have come together “to make a difference in the local community”. The Foundation was formed with the aim of addressing and advocating against gender-based violence. It has a designated social work department, as well as a legal aid clinic that offers social support and subsidised legal services to clients. The group says it has worked directly alongside the National Domestic Violence Unit, the Judiciary’s Domestic Violence Response Unit, the Child Protection and Gender-Based Violence Unit of the TTPS in the past. The organisation can be contacted by telephone at (868) 269-0657 or e-mail at HFPSC.info@gmail.com.Source:
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