Sweetie

Ten weeks. That’s how long Terre des Hommes, a Dutch organization, left a fake child online. Ten years old, supposedly from the Philippines. They called her Sweetie. Just real enough to fool the right—or wrong—people. Just enough to see who would come looking.

Twenty thousand men did. Seventy-one countries. Two hundred and eighty-five a day. They wanted her to undress. Wanted to watch. Some offered money. One man, thirty-five, from Atlanta, used the handle Older4Young. He offered ten dollars. Just turn on your camera, he wrote. I’m horny.

They tracked down a thousand of them. Americans, Brits, Germans, scattered everywhere. Fathers, musicians, architects. Regular men. Regular men asking a child—as far as they knew—to show them her body.

That’s the thing that won’t leave. It’s not that these people exist somewhere in the dark web. You always knew they did. It’s the scale. The sheer number. The absolute ordinariness of them. You could have gone to school with half of them. Could work next to them now. Could be related to them. Every day, thousands of them are online looking for a real child, and they find them, because children are online and predators outnumber the people who can watch for them. You learn that number—twenty thousand—and you can’t unknow it.