Content warning: This story contains descriptions of child sexual abuse, child sexual exploitation, and trafficking that some readers may find distressing.
Teresita was never a girly girl. Growing up in the choked urban sprawl north of Manila, she spent her childhood running wild with neighborhood kids, climbing trees, and shinnying around derelict lots. “I liked games that stretched my bones,” she tells TIME with a grin.
By the standards of blue-collar Philippine life, Teresita had a comfortable upbringing. But things got tricky after her adoptive father returned home from working in Saudi Arabia and could only find a low-paying job as a security guard. Before long, the family was struggling to pay food and rent. “It became more about surviving,” she recalls.
Teresita’s elder stepsister became the family’s chief breadwinner. In her late 30s, she started working online as a romantic companion, sending erotic pictures and videos to predominantly Western men she met via dating and pornography websites.
At first, Teresita would casually join these calls out of impish curiosity, but she soon grew her own clientele brokered by her stepsister. It started with pillow talk as a “fake girlfriend,” she says, though things escalated when the men started to offer more money for nude photos.
Those transmissions all took place using regular chat apps you likely have on your phone right now but remained hidden from law enforcement due to end-to-end encryption (E2EE), a secure communication method that scrambles data on your device and only permits a designated recipient to decrypt it. Technology that was designed to protect privacy had turned into an enabler of horrific abuse.
By 2018, Teresita was being coerced by her stepsister into performing livestreamed sex acts on herself at least four times every day while her “customers” watched, directed her, and pleasured themselves. She was 13 years old.
“I was disgusted with myself,” Teresi
