WASHINGTON, D.C., USA — When former Maine gubernatorial candidate Eliot Cutler, 75, was arrested Friday on child pornography charges, state police investigators credited the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children with informing them in December that someone in Maine had allegedly downloaded or uploaded an illegal image of a child under the age of 12 years old.
The nonprofit, based in Washington, D.C., employs at least 115 people. Senior Vice President Yiota Souras said her team dedicates their time to fielding tips from the public and social media companies looking through images for clues and consoling victims. When tips become actionable, they pass the information on to law enforcement.
“We really sit in the middle,” Souras said. “We receive those reports. We try to add a little value to that information. But mostly we're trying to determine where in the world is this child being harmed. It might be in the U.S., or it might be in any other country in the world. And our goal there is to make sure that we can push that report and make it available to law enforcement in the appropriate jurisdiction so that they can handle the review and potential investigation of that crime.”
Souras’ office shared data from the previous year and said her team observed regular increases in reports of child exploitation.
According to the report, the NCMEC’s “CyberTipline” received 29.3 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation in 2021. That’s an increase of 35 percent from 2020.
“Day by day, we see the increase grow over the course of the year,” Souras said. “It was not shocking to us that we ended up so much higher. I think a few other things that stand out is the continued growth in video that’s being reported to us. And just the nature of those videos, the extremity of the abuse that is inflicted on children, especially when exploitative videos are reported, how different those are from images.”
Souras said at least one positive trend has contributed to higher reporting numbers: Social media companies flag potentially explicit images on their sites and report them to the center as well.
Of the 29 million reports the center received last year range from trafficking to molestation to coercing children online, more than 99 percent of the reports involved possessing or distributing explicit images of children.
The Maine Attorney General’s website reports that approximately one in five children is sexually solicited online, but fewer than 10 percent of sexual solicitations are reported to authorities.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children CyberTip reporting page can be found here.
The center’s 24-hour hotline is 1-800-THE-LOST or 1-800-843-5678.