One evening last December, a team of law enforcement officers carrying a search warrant knocked on an apartment door in Claremont, New Hampshire. After speaking with the tenants, the police seized several items, including laptops, cellphones and a man’s underwear.

The following day, one of the residents, Wayne Miller, 34, was charged in federal court with producing child sexual abuse material. Authorities said his actions involved an 18-month-old child while he was living in Hartland in 2020.

Miller has also been charged in Vermont Superior Court with two counts of repeated aggravated sexual assault against the toddler, allegedly related to his production of the material.

Miller, founder and former director of a mentoring organization for Black youth in Vermont and New Hampshire, has denied the allegations. He is being held without bail while his criminal cases are being heard.  

According to court records, police began investigating Miller in November 2020 after the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s CyberTipline — the United States’ centralized reporting system for child exploitation online — forwarded a “cybertip” to Vermont’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. The tip originated from Google, which saw that a user in Vermont was trying to send an email containing child sexual abuse material.

Cybertips are generated when members of the public or electronic service providers, such as social media platforms and messaging applications, report suspected incidents of child exploitation through the internet. These include enticing children to engage in sex acts online, trafficking children for sex and distributing child sexual abuse material.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children forwards these cybertips to law enforcement organizations around the country in places where the suspected perpetrators and victims are located. The tips usually go to an Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, of which there are 61 in the U.S. 

Since the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, the number of cybertips coming to Vermont has grown: from 330 in 2019 to 376 in 2020, and to 452 last year — a 37% increase over two years, according to data VTDigger obtained from the Vermont Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.

The task force commander, Detective Matt Raymond, said Vermont cybertips largely involve the production, distribution or possession of child sexual abuse photos or videos. Next to that are predators enticing children to meet them online and in person.  

Another trend the task force has seen in recent years is an increase in the youngest of victims — compounding the fact that most of its cybertips already involve children younger than 8.

“Infants and toddlers have become more prevalent,” said Vermont Attorney General TJ Donovan, whose office oversees the task force known as VT-ICAC. “It’s incredibly troubling on so many levels. But it really underscores the important work that ICAC is doing.”

Since 2015, when the task force became affiliated with the Attorney General’s Office, its investigations have resulted in 239 arrests, 42 of them last year. The cases are then prosecuted in Vermont state court, federal court or both.

The online landscape

Donovan believes the uptick in Vermont cybertips is linked to several factors: Internet-capable devices have become more accessible, more child sexual abuse images are being created, and there are now more electronic service providers sending cybertips. Electronic service providers are required under federal law to report child exploitation they discover on their platforms.

In May and June 2019, for instance, the Vermont task force saw a spike in cybertips because several new platforms began sending reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. And platforms’ first reports included historical data.

The cybertips, in some ways, reflect the dominant online platforms of the times.

Raymond said TikTok, an application for sharing short videos that became popular in recent years, appeared in a Vermont cybertip for the first time in 2021. 

Most of Vermont’s TikTok reports apparently involve minors sharing inappropriate images of themselves with other minors, cases that the task force doesn’t investigate for prosecution since they involve only juveniles.

Most people, Raymond said, might be surprised to know that Twitter has also been used to share child sexual abuse images. Users can designate their accounts as private, which he said allows only their selected “followers” to see the material they share.

The cybertip picture nationwide is similarly alarming.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children says the U.S. total climbed from almost 17 million cybertips in 2019 to 21.7 million in 2020, then 29.4 million last year. That is an increase of nearly 75% during the pandemic.

The center’s leaders believe the public health emergency has been a significant factor in the growth of child exploitation online, because it increased the opportunities for predators to reach children. Due to social distancing measures during the pandemic, both adults and children have spent significantly more time on their electronic devices for work, school, entertainment, socialization and other everyday activities.

“We saw chatter on the dark web amongst these predators and these exploiters, sharing best practices,” said Callahan Walsh, a child advocate at the National Center and son of the organization’s co-founders, John and Reve Walsh. “They know that this is an opportune time.”

He said the pandemic has often given parents and guardians a false sense of security, because their children remained at home. They were within arm’s reach.

“But they’re on their phone,” Walsh said in an interview. “That’s really what’s so dangerous, because these phones really are an open portal to the rest of the world.”

Alarming, skyrocketing trends

The National Center has seen a steady increase in cases where predators entice children to produce explicit content or lure them into running away from home. It received 44,000 such cybertips last year, compared to nearly 38,000 in 2020 and 19,000 in 2019, according to new data the center released on Thursday.

Walsh said the center has also noticed more incidents of “sextortion,” in which a child who has been lured into providing sexually explicit images is extorted into handing over more images or monetary goods. Sometimes, he said, predators coerce children into taking photos or videos of their younger siblings or relatives.

At the top of the cybertip ranking — at least 99 in 100 cases — is the production, distribution and possession of child sexual abuse material. 

This equated to 29.3 million cybertips nationwide last year, up from around 21.7 million in 2020 and almost 17 million in 2019 — a jump of almost 75 percent in the past two years.  

Walsh said predators usually meet children on popular social media or gaming sites. Once they’ve earned the child’s trust, he said, predators will suggest moving to another communications platform that is not as well regulated and monitored — one that could be outside the reach of U.S. authorities and the cybertip system.

“Those, oftentimes, are also created in other countries where we may not have jurisdiction,” said Walsh, co-creator of the investigative TV series “The Hunt with John Walsh.” 

To protect children, law enforcement officials and child advocates say parents and guardians need to be vigilant.

It’s important they try to understand the technology, websites and applications their children are using, even though this could be daunting to people who aren’t tech-savvy. The National Center suggests downloading the apps children use and seeing how they work.

Parents and guardians should also set ground rules for device use and stick to them, especially if there has been improper behavior in the past. There should be a system for monitoring children’s activity online, such as who they talk to and who can see the content they create.

The National Center said most children in the U.S. get their first cellphone at age 10. But before that, they’ve already had access to the internet through the devices of their parents or older siblings.

Though some may worry that monitoring their children’s digital activity is a violation of privacy, Raymond disagrees. He said this is part of a parent’s job of protecting their children.

Most importantly, adults should be involved in their children’s daily lives by maintaining open lines of communication. That includes having ongoing conversations about safety, which evolve as children get older.

“Just like learning to drive a car, you don’t just give them the car and let them loose,” Raymond said, “so it should be with access to the internet.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Online child exploitation tips jumped 37% during 2 years of the pandemic.