Consider This from NPR - 'Sextortion' Documentary May Leave Viewers With Exaggerated Sense Of Risk To Children

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

A new documentary called Sextortion: The Hidden Pandemic has gained attention at screenings hosted by universities, police departments and even the Pentagon. But many of the claims made in the film are poorly supported and overhyped.The film warns parents about the dangers of sexually coercive crimes online and suggests that strangers are targeting potentially millions of minors - pressuring them into sharing revealing content and, often, extorting them for money.But NPR has found the documentary could leave viewers with an incomplete and exaggerated sense of the risk by relying upon statistics that lack context. Experts fear it could hinder harm reduction efforts by skewing public perception. NPR's Lisa Hagen, who covers how false and misleading information spreads, shares her reporting into the documentary and its filmmakers.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

There's a documentary making the rounds at screenings around the country that raises serious questions about the safety of millions of children in America. It's a public service announcement-style film called Sextortion, the Hidden Pandemic. And before we continue, a quick note of warning. This episode is about the subject of child abuse, but it does not contain descriptions of abuse or explicit language. Now, what the film Sextortion suggests is that strangers on the internet are targeting potentially millions of minors into sharing sexually revealing pictures and videos, and often extorting them for money. And in 2020, that number jumped up to 21.7 million cyber-tip line reports received.

In the past seven years that I've been working here, the increase that we've seen and the trends that we've seen is definitely sextortion. That's a clip from the film. It was made in cooperation with several law enforcement agencies. Here's Erin Burke, an agent with Homeland Security Investigations, who was featured in the film. She's speaking at last year's Santa Barbara International Film Festival. This is a issue that is happening every single day in every single city across the world. And we're just trying to fight it.

And it's gotten a lot of play from local TV news. Here's a Fox News affiliate in San Diego. A special screening of sextortion, the hidden pandemic, is happening this Thursday. It's hard to even watch that. It's so infuriating. But consider this. NPR has found the documentary could leave viewers with an exaggerated sense of the risk, and experts on child sex abuse and human trafficking fear this first impression could lead to misconceptions about these very serious crimes. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Tuesday, March 14th.

This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. NPR's Lisa Hagen covers how false and misleading information spreads. And she's been looking into this documentary called Sextortion, the Hidden Pandemic. As we heard before the break, the film suggests that strangers on the internet are targeting potentially millions of minors into sharing sexually revealing pictures and videos, and often extorting them for money.

In her reporting, Lisa found questionable claims and filmmakers who had not gotten much scrutiny. I asked her to talk about some of the issues with the documentary, starting with whether the crimes described are as common as the film says. So with any kind of sex crimes, especially involving minors, underreporting is always going to be a problem. And crime researchers will tell you that there's no quality evidence-based statistics on this stuff. One safety alert from the FBI put the number of minor victims in the U.S. at 3,000 last year, and that's a lot of kids. And a dozen cases of those were linked to suicide.

But watching this film, experts I talked to worry people are going to walk away believing child sextortion cases number in the millions. Which is exactly what one of the filmmakers told people when she got that question at a screening. Here's Maria Peek. When you first face this kind of crime, you have a natural aversion to it. But then you realize, oh my gosh, this could be happening. Well, at first we thought thousands. Now we know it's millions of children.

So what is our responsibility as filmmakers? Our responsibility is to investigate it and maybe to show it to people in the best kind of way that it's not exploitive but educational. So my reporting found that millions is just not backed up by evidence. The film also contains some highly disputed claims about addiction and autism from one of the featured experts. And it also doesn't include any discussion of something researchers told me was really important. Just over half of the reported instances of sextortion involve someone the victim knows. Stranger danger is what's emphasized in this film. If anyone wants more detailed reporting on this, there's a deep dive on our website,

NPR.org. So those are the claims that the film makes. Tell us more about how the film was produced. Who was behind it? Yeah, so that was my question, especially seeing federal officials promoting it. So I took a quick trip over to Google. I looked up the directors, and what I saw was the last feature film they'd made was a collaboration with a very notorious British conspiracy theorist. He has been banned from entering the EU, and all this really got me wondering about the reach this film was having. So let's listen to some of your reporting about that. We want to get this movie all over the world.

And we want it in schools, we want it in classrooms, we want it with teachers, we want it in churches, we want it with parents and grandparents, and we want it with young people. That's the film's executive producer Opal Singleton at the premiere at the University of Southern California last fall. The film's creators are a married couple, Stephen and Maria Peek. They both have master's degrees in film and TV from Regent University, a conservative Christian university.

And since their sextortion film launched, they say they've gotten more than a hundred requests for local screenings. Here's Stephen at the premiere. This is my fourth feature documentary and at almost the end of each one, I have someone who will come up at an event and say, thank you so much for making this movie because I've been trying to explain this to my friends for years, but now I can just sit them down and say, shut up and watch this for an hour and a half, right? The Peaks say their work is journalism and that they're particular

about the stories they tell. Stephen says those stories are often about heroes overcoming obstacles for a greater cause. The last documentary they directed, edited, and produced in 2019 is called Renegade, the life story of David Icke. It's an admiring look at a man whose popularized theories that alien reptoids control world events through elites like the British Royals and wealthy Jewish families. His numerous books describe anti-Semitic conspiracy theories behind the Holocaust, September 11th attacks, vaccines, and more. Here's Ike describing his work in the

film. If you look at the history of the world, it's renegades by that definition that are the only people that have ever changed anything. Martin Luther King was a renegade. Gandhi was a renegade. As Ike continues, images of Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, and Malcolm X flash across the screen. The film itself doesn't make any anti-Semitic claims, but it also never challenges Ike about any of his well-established beliefs. When I interviewed the filmmakers, Stephen Peake said this. I feel, you know, very good about what that movie became.

And sometimes people will look at him and say, well, some people say this and some people say that. And I was like, well, have you watched the movie? Because there's nothing controversial in the film itself. The Peakes spent a year with Ike, who was the film's executive producer. And Steven Peaks said they had never heard Ike say anything anti-Semitic, so they didn't include anything about those beliefs in their movie. He said they wouldn't have made the film if Ike had said anything anti-Semitic. There's no reason to

believe that the Peaks adhere to Ike's worldview, but in a statement to NPR, the Southern Poverty Law Center cautioned against trusting any journalism that isn't honest about Ike. So how did these filmmakers wind up working with federal and local officials to make a film about sex crimes against children? The project has been a longtime dream of Opal Singleton, the executive producer. She heads a nonprofit in Southern California that educates police and the public about child exploitation. Singleton says she chose the Peaks based on in-depth research and another film they'd made about competitive dance. And she says she didn't know anything about their collaboration

with David Icke. I've not ever seen anything like that. I did, you know, see some of their previous. It was like I Dream of Dance, and it was very healthy and like that. And quite frankly, I'm very pleased with what they've done with this particular subject. I pressed Singleton about the filmmakers' use of frightening statistics without much context. I don't really care about your numbers, okay? What I care about is this is very real, it's happening, and it's happening a lot. And I thought, quite frankly, that Stephen and Maria did a great job of telling this story, but good luck to you. I don't agree with what you're doing. Reporting from NPR's Lisa Hagan, who is still with us, you know, part of your beat is covering conspiracy theories and people who believe in them. And there seem to be certain threads of that running through this story. Draw them out for us. What does this film have to do with conspiracy theories? So let's set aside David Eich and that film entirely. The violation of children and kidnapping them has always played a really

central role in conspiracy theories. You see that in anti-Semitism from centuries ago, satanic panic stuff from the 1980s, and today in narratives like QAnon. There's a good reason for that. These are human taboos. They're horrible, damaging. But people who work on these issues with survivors and law enforcement say overhyped claims about strangers or child sex rings can lead to people missing far more common forms of child sex abuse because they're looking for the wrong threats. I talked to this lawyer, Erin Albright. She's a consultant who trains human trafficking tax forces for the Department of Justice. And she says child sex crimes are very complex problems. They need a super cautious approach. And she worries about coverage like this lingering with an audience that's learning

about a crime for the first time. If they're coming to the documentary with maybe a little bit of background on crimes against children, and maybe they know that kidnapping tends to happen more familial, and maybe they can see through it, but the majority of the public isn't. So I do think that it has a lot of power. Lisa, a lot of prominent law enforcement officials and nonprofits are featured in this film. When you've approached them with your reporting, how have they reacted? Right. The filmmakers list the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security as partners and claim the agency's unsealed case files for them. But while one U.S. attorney did give the filmmakers an interview about a case she prosecuted, the Department of Justice told us they did not officially partner with the filmmakers. They also denied the Peaks characterization that the case files were unsealed for them. The case in this film was never sealed. As for Department of Homeland Security or Immigration's Customs Enforcement, we haven't gotten agency responses. The National

Center for Missing and Exploited Children said they will vet their media partners more carefully going forward. One spokesman told us they didn't see why they'd partner with him again. But overall, they feel like none of the issues we flagged outweigh the good that the film could do. They feel like it's good work. That was NPR's Lisa Hagen. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.