“AT FIRST he was very kind, just like an angel,” says a 19-year-old of the man who recruited her into the Philippines’ cybersex industry, “but at the end he was evil.” The end took five years to come. One of a dozen siblings, she left her poor family on the island of Mindanao with a pimp who had promised her an education. Instead, she was made to cavort in front of web cameras. “I didn’t know that I would be a cybersex model,” she says. Six other children were part of the den, two of them just toddlers. Sent to schools where they improved their English, the children received money for beauty products and treatments, so as to present themselves more alluringly to “customers”.

Similar stories abound in the Centre of Hope, a clean, bright shelter for children just outside Manila. It is adorned with lanterns and trees for Christmas; teachers, social workers and psychologists are among those who attend its festive parties. Residents, most of them teenagers, sleep in bunk beds in dormitories that they tidy themselves. The shelter lies hidden behind an unmarked gate. This is so that criminal gangs and, in some cases, family members who have made money by exploiting the 50 girls and one boy who live at the facility cannot find it.

Sherryl Loseno of the Visayan Forum Foundation, the charity that runs the centre, says the problem of online exploitation is worse than ever before. Of the billions of online searches for pornography that occur around the world each month, those involving children account for just a tiny proportion. But that still creates a lucrative business opportunity for the immoral.

Hans Guyt from Terre des Hommes, a Dutch charity which researches online sexual abuse, says that accurate information on the number of victims in the Philippines is impossible to obtain. But he believes that the situation is growing more serious in the country, not least because the content being made there is more depraved than ever. Photographs, videos and live-streaming now more commonly feature animals, toddlers and sometimes even babies.

Experts believe the Philippines is a global hub for the production of such material. Historical, technological and social factors help to explain why. The high level of proficiency in English, a relic of the country’s time as an American colony, means that both children and those abusing them can communicate easily with clients. The swift spread of the internet, to which 55% of Filipinos now have access, up from 9% in 2009, means cybersex dens can operate in increasingly remote areas. Widespread mistrust of the police discourages both cybersex victims and those who suspect wrongdoing from asking for their help. And a higher proportion of people in the Philippines use methamphetamines or amphetamines than in any other country in Asia. Those addicts are sometimes willing to resort to abhorrent means to fund their habit.

The problem is too big to be solved through arrests alone. The police break up big cybersex dens to much fanfare every few months, but smaller operations carry on without being detected. Some youngsters even want to enter the business independently; there are cybercafés that willingly host them. Another means of stopping the exploitation is to pursue those paying for horrific content. Many come from rich countries such as Australia and America. After online encounters arranged by her father, one woman at the Centre of Hope was eventually sold abroad to a Danish man, who tortured her by burning her with cigarettes.

Technology allows the authorities better ways of tracking down consumers in faraway places. Terre des Hommes, for example, has created an online avatar of a child using artificial intelligence. The idea is to allow police to use it to ensnare would-be customers in chat rooms. Mr Guyt says that a recent six-week pilot project conducted by the Philippine police was a big success. The Australian authorities and Interpol, a group through which the world’s police forces co-operate, are interested too. But once wrongdoers have been identified with the help of the avatar, legal complexities stemming from the international nature of the online interactions mean that the police can only issue a warning message.

Several countries, including America, Britain, Canada and Israel, as well the Philippines, are modifying their laws in response to the jurisdictional morass of online horrors. Indeed, lawmakers around the world are taking the problem of child pornography increasingly seriously. In 2006 just 27 countries had enacted strong legislation to combat it. That number had risen to 82 a decade later, according to the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, a charity.

There is much more to do. The age of sexual consent in the Philippines, for instance, is just 12. Raising it to 16 would also allow those creating pornography involving young teenagers to be punished for rape rather than prostitution (which carries less severe penalties). Congress is considering just such a measure.

But it is more humble interventions that the former victims at the Centre of Hope consider most useful. They say raising awareness among young people, by visiting schools and giving talks, makes a big difference. They also set store by attempts to suppress demand. Some of them have travelled to rich countries to help draw attention to the problem. One enjoyed a trip to America to tell her story so much that she now wants to be a flight attendant. Not all victims escape with such optimism.