Exclusive: Child Trafficking Rescuer Highlights Horrors of Online Sexual Exploitation

“The United States is the biggest consumer… of child pornography in the world,” Joseph Sweeney said. Sweeney founded The Asservo Project to fight child trafficking, and he explained how social media drives an epidemic of sexual exploitation of young people in exclusive comments to PJ Media.

“The United States is the biggest consumer — and producer, at times — of child pornography in the world,” Sweeney told me. “Unsettling, to say the least; and how did we get there?”

The “degrading of our society as a whole” and the rise of social media exacerbated the problem and facilitated child exploitation, Sweeney explained. “The entire industry [is] driven by money,” he said, “it’s very lucrative… We hunt predators every day out there online,” and predators are constantly searching. “They coerce or groom kids into sharing these things, pretending to be somebody else.” So “now the demand side of it has increased,” Sweeney stated.