"I would sit and cry silently for hours every day for about three months. I was so hurt by what he’d done. I was only 15 when I met him, and he was 28. I thought I loved him so much, I would do anything for him at the time. I didn’t realize that he was manipulating me and controlling me. It all started when he wanted me to introduce him to my family—who I knew would never accept him. He started out just being pushy, but when I refused to take the relationship public, he kept getting more aggressive.
Eventually he started threatening me.
Early on he filmed some of our more private moments together on his phone. I could have never imagined then that the man I loved so much would later use them to blackmail me—that he would send these videos out to people. What I didn’t know then was that this was a form of sexual exploitation called sextortion.
We broke up and he emailed videos of us to my best friend. A year later, he sent videos using Facebook messenger to a guy that I had just started dating. I lived in fear of him for years after that. I had no idea what to do." — Anonymous survivor of online sexual abuse Dear John, Stories like this are hard to hear because we know that the sexual exploitation of a child creates emotional and psychological trauma that they will carry with them throughout their life. At the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) we saw the potential threat to children and started the CyberTipline in 1998, anticipating the illegal use of the internet to victimize children through the sharing of child sexual abuse material. Unfortunately, in 2020 we received more than 21.7 million reports of child sexual exploitation to our CyberTipline. This marks the highest annual number of CyberTipline reports we have ever received in one year and is a 28% increase over 2019. This is unacceptable—and cannot continue to happen.
Please consider signing up for a monthly gift to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children today. Your gift will help prevent the victimization of another child. My heart breaks, and I know yours does too, when I think of the child who was victimized in the creation of every piece of online child sexual abuse material. With your generous support, we can work together to prevent the future victimization of children and to remove past abuse material from the internet. There is so much work to be done and the best way to join the fight is by signing up for a monthly donation today. Your gifts can literally help save a child’s life or keep them from lifelong trauma. Click here to make a donation—and make a commitment to protecting kids online and offline. Thank you for supporting NCMEC and I hope that you and your family are safe and happy this spring. Sincerely, Callahan Walsh
Executive Director
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children | 
