Panic Is Not Protection.
How moral outrage distorts evidence, policy, and child safeguarding.
Child sexual abuse exists. It exists online and offline. It is widespread, underreported, under-prosecuted, and devastating. International bodies, child-protection agencies, and law-enforcement organisations are unanimous on that point. On these facts, there is no ambiguity.
But acknowledging the reality of abuse does not require us to abandon evidence, proportion, or ordinary scepticism — especially when it comes from a stranger at Davos approaching us with stories so abhorrent one might wonder if they’re intended to short-circuit our critical faculties.
And by “us”, I mean Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart, hosts of The Rest Is Politics. But we’ll get to that.
In an era marked by fake news and AI slop, the online discourse around child exploitation is uniquely degraded. That content creators and rage-baiters feel compelled to exaggerate acts so heinous is, for most of us, beyond comprehension. It is also something we are deeply reluctant to question — who wants to be the person testing the veracity of child sexual abuse claims? That reluctance is part of the problem.
Ever since QAnon co-opted “Save the Children” as a recruitment funnel for the American right, the conversation has been saturated with lurid statistics, moral outrage, and apocalyptic framing. We are told the crisis is unprecedented, exponentially escalating, and largely hidden from view. We are warned that “no one wants to talk about it”: that the media are too squeamish, governments too compromised, and everyone except you is asleep at the wheel.
Inevitably, the organisations pumping child-abuse memes into the digital ether will make a demand. Sometimes they are pro-life crusaders. Sometimes right-wing extremists. Sometimes they simply want your money. Often, they are a distraction from some other plot.
While their delivery mechanisms may be modern, the framework itself is ancient. The Romans accused early Christians of holding secret meetings involving incest and the ritual sacrifice of infants. Christians later accused Jews of the same; records of blood libel in Norwich date back to 1144.
More recently, in 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch became so convinced by the #Pizzagate conspiracy that he fired shots into a Washington pizzeria, attempting to rescue children he believed were being held in the basement as part of a blood drinking satanic plot involving Hillary Clinton.
The Satanic Panic of the 1980s followed the same pattern. Large parts of small-town America became convinced that devil-worshipping networks were abusing and murdering children in vast underground networks. There was no evidence. No mass graves were ever found. But more than fifty people were imprisoned, some for decades.
To modern sensibilities, this sounds far-fetched. But the conditions that enabled it are instructive. For the first time, child abuse was being reported at scale — in churches, boarding schools, orphanages, and most unsettlingly, in the home. For parents raised on stranger danger, the idea that the threat might come from inside the house was almost unbearable. It was psychologically easier to fear satanists than to suspect a husband, a priest, or a trusted neighbour.
Uncomfortable as it is, child sexual abuse overwhelmingly happens in ordinary places and is perpetrated by someone the child already knows.
Decades of research in the UK, the United States, and Europe show a consistent pattern: children are far more likely to be abused by a family member, family friend, teacher, coach, or religious authority than by a stranger. Abuse most often occurs in homes, schools, and religious institutions.
Online exploitation frequently builds on the same dynamics of trust, coercion, and power — it does not replace them.
This forces us to confront failures in safeguarding, housing, education, poverty, and institutional accountability — problems that do not lend themselves to dramatic narratives or technological silver bullets.
Which brings us to an interview broadcast this week on The Rest Is Politics.
The interview — with Gary Haugen and Molly Hodson of the International Justice Mission (IJM) — was presented as a sober, evidence-led intervention into an urgent policy debate. What it delivered instead was a case study in how child-protection rhetoric can derail politicians and journalists who should know better.
Haugen told listeners that “hundreds of thousands” of children are currently being sexually abused via livestream for paying customers around the world. He then narrowed this to a specific claim: that 500,000 Filipino children were abused in front of webcams in a single year, citing a prevalence study conducted with the University of Nottingham’s Rights Lab.
This figure exists — but not as presented.
The study in question offers a non-peer-reviewed, modelled estimate, derived from surveys and extrapolation — not a verified count of identified victims. The problem is not the existence of the estimate, but that it was offered as fact. The information was stripped of its status as advocacy research and conflated with peer-reviewed academic work from the same institution that reaches far more modest conclusions.
In the interview, the number was repeatedly described as something that had been “proven”, with no caveats, confidence ranges, or methodological explanation. Listeners were left with the impression they had heard verifiable information, not an estimate produced under conditions of profound uncertainty.
That distinction matters. When estimates are laundered into facts, they stop informing policy and start inflaming it.
The interview went on to assert that the United States is “the largest global market” for this abuse, with the UK ranked third. No source was given. No explanation of what constituted a “market”, what was being measured — reports, payments, users, referrals — or how such rankings were derived. These claims were delivered as moral indictment, not evidence: designed to shock, not to clarify.
Even more troubling was the assertion that “one in 13 US men” had either livestreamed sexual abuse of a minor or said they would. This is an extraordinary claim — implying participation or intent at a scale that would represent one of the largest crime waves in modern history. Yet no study was named, no journal cited, no methodology described. The statistic was simply dropped into the conversation, greeted with horror, and allowed to stand.
This is not how responsible organisations communicate evidence. It is how moral panics spread.
Language That Should Give Us Pause.
Beyond the numbers, the language used throughout the interview should trouble anyone serious about safeguarding.
Repeated references to abuse being “disgusting” may be emotionally understandable, but they depart sharply from the trauma-informed, evidence-led language used by most professional child-protection bodies. Graphic descriptions — involving siblings, animals, and escalating depravity — added nothing to understanding the problem or preventing harm. Their function was rhetorical: to overwhelm the listener’s capacity for critical thought.
So too was the repeated insistence that “no one wants to hear about this”, that “the media won’t go there”, and that governments are paralysed by fear of tech companies. This framing positions the speakers as lone truth-tellers battling a conspiracy of silence — a familiar move in the architecture of moral panic.
Perhaps most concerning was the casual claim that anyone seeking to commission live sexual abuse of a child could “just make their inquiries online”, without specialist knowledge or effort. Even if mainstream platforms have been abused in documented cases, presenting access in this way edges dangerously close to instruction. At the very least, it collapses complex criminal networks into a frictionless consumer transaction — again heightening fear rather than understanding.
From Shock to Surveillance.
All of this rhetorical escalation funnels toward a single policy demand: device-level monitoring.
Listeners were told that the “only fail-safe solution” to this crisis is embedding AI tools directly onto phones, cameras, and operating systems — tools that would prevent certain images or livestreams from being created at all. We were assured these systems would be “privacy-preserving,” that they would not break encryption, and that concerns about civil liberties are no longer a valid objection when framed as a choice between privacy and the protection of hundreds of thousands of children.
This is a familiar move. Fear is amplified, urgency is manufactured, complexity is flattened — and an extraordinary expansion of surveillance power is presented not merely as reasonable, but as morally mandatory.
Yet this is precisely the terrain where caution is most needed. The history of child protection — like the history of emergency powers more broadly — is littered with examples where expansive powers, justified in the name of safeguarding, were later abused, misused, or quietly repurposed. The fact that a tool is designed for a narrow purpose does not mean the capability will remain narrowly used.
Why This Matters.
The IJM is not a fringe organisation. It’s well-funded, well-connected, and taken seriously in policy circles. But it is not without controversy, accused of interfering with public health and HIV-prevention efforts, violent attacks in Ghana, and for presenting anyone involved in sex work, coerced or not, in the role of a victim awaiting salvation.
The failure here was not a lack of concern, but a collapse of discipline — in language, in evidence, and in judgment. When estimates become facts, disgust replaces coherence, and fear is used to foreclose debate, we are no longer protecting children — we are managing anxiety.
History is unforgiving on this point. Moral panics do not end abuse; they obscure it. If we are serious about safeguarding, we must resist the temptation to be shocked into submission and insist instead on the slower, harder work of truth.
Sources & Further Reading
For readers who want to examine the evidence directly, all supporting sources — including primary studies and critical reporting — are linked below.
1. Prevalence Estimates & Methodology (Philippines Livestream Abuse)
Nearly half a million children sexually exploited in online livestreams in the Philippines (Nottingham University)
— Press-release style summary of the Scale of Harm study that’s been widely cited in advocacy contexts.
2. Detailed prevalence findings
Findings of Scale of Harm prevalence study released (IJM Philippines)
— Leads with the same core figures and explains how they were derived, including the two-year methodology.
3. Case study overview of the study
Scale of Harm: prevalence measurement and methodology (WeProtect Global Alliance)
— Independent explanation of what the Scale of Harm project is and how prevalence measurement in this context works.
Note: These estimates are not peer-reviewed counts of identified victims, but modelled prevalence estimates.
Context on Livestreamed Child Sexual Abuse
(Academic & Reporting)
4. Emerging scholarly analysis
Live‑streamed child sexual abuse: Analysis of Norwegian case data (ScienceDirect)
— Academic research describing livestream abuse as part of broader child sexual exploitation patterns.
5. Independent reporting on OSEC in the Philippines
In the Philippines, the lost children to online rape (Le Monde)
— Investigative reporting with survivor and law-enforcement perspectives on online sexual exploitation of children.
Historical Moral Panic Context
6. Satanic Panic (1980s–90s) overview
Satanic panic — Wikipedia overview of the moral panic involving alleged ritual abuse in the 1980s that resulted in many unsubstantiated claims and criminal cases
— Historical parallels to panic framing.
7. McMartin preschool trial
McMartin preschool trial — 1980s California case that became emblematic of day‑care moral panic
— Example of accusations gaining traction without corroborated evidence.
8. Day-care sex-abuse hysteria
Day‑care sex abuse hysteria — Moral panic in the U.S. that included ritual abuse fears
— Broader context on how panic spread in the 1980s-90s.
9. Hampstead hoax
Hampstead hoax — 2014 false paedophile ring allegations in the UK
— Modern example of moral panic dynamics recurring with unsubstantiated claims.
Context on accusations against IJM
10. Children wrongfully "rescued"
Ghanaian children wrongly taken in raids backed by US charity IJM (BBC)
— Modern example of IJMs controversial practices
11. Impacts of NGO practices
Sex Trafficking, Law Enforcement and Perpetrator Accountability (Anti-trafficking Review)
— Research exploring IJMs interference with AIDs prevention policies and attitudes towards sex workers
Additional Context on Online Exploitation & Responses
12. IJM summary page on online sexual exploitation
Online sexual exploitation of children — IJM UK overview of the issue and law‑enforcement warnings
— Context on how organisations frame livestream abuse and other online exploitation.
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