"My name is Sweetie, I am ten-years-old.

I live in the Philippines.

Every day, I have to sit in front of the webcam to talk to men.

The men ask to take off my clothes.

They undress. They play with themselves. They want me play with myself. As soon as I go online, they come to me. Ten hundreds every hour. So many.

But what they don't know. I'm not real."

This was how Filipino Avatar "Sweetie" introduces herself in a short documentary detailing how she traps international paedophiles.

"Sweetie" was created by the Netherlands-based charity group Terre des Hommes to combat the fast growing new form of child exploitation: webcam child sex tourism.

"Sweetie" is a computer model created to move and talk like a real Filipino girl.

Through Sweetie, in about two and a half months, Terre de Hommes researchers were able to gather data of over 1,000 paedophiles that were paying children from developing countries to perform sexual acts in front of the webcam. 65 of these sexual predators were already identified by the authorities.

Webcam child sex tourism is mostly prevalent in The United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, Germany, Turkey, Italy and The Netherlands.

In Australia, there were already 49 sexual predators identified.

The undercover was conducted from an isolated building in Amsterdam. Researchers of Terre des Hommes posed as "Sweetie" in public chat rooms. Within just few seconds of being online, "Sweetie" was already being swarmed by 20,000 adults from countries across the world.

In the wake of evidences and the disturbing information through "Sweetie," Terre de Hommes Netherlands is calling all governments to conduct investigations within their countries and join their petition to stop the webcam child sex tourism.

According to Terre de Hommes, although webcam child sex tourism is obviously a crime, there were only 6 sexual predators convicted for this crime.

"It is not a problem of existing laws. The United Nations has established laws that make this child abuse nearly universally illegal. The biggest problem is that the police don't take action until child victims file reports, but children almost never report these crimes. These children are usually forced to do this by adults or by extreme poverty," as explained by Hans Guyt, director of campaigns at Terre des Hommes Netherlands.

"Sometimes they have to testify against their own family, which is almost an impossible thing to do for a child. We want governments to adopt proactive investigation policies that give law enforcement agencies the mandate to actively patrol public Internet hotspots where this child abuse is taking place every day. The child predators doing this now feel that the law doesn't apply to them. The Internet is free, but not lawless."

The Associated Press was able to have a chance to observe a demonstration on how "Sweetie" entraps these predators. The chat between the researcher and "Sweetie" went like this:

Sweetie: "What you want see?"

User: "U."

Sweetie: "What u pay for?"

User: "Naked."

The predator then agreed to pay $20 fee through a wire transfer. "Sweetie" wittingly asked for his Skype address - authorities will take over from there.

Legal Issues

Researchers at Terre de Hommes were retrieving data through Skype and other social media platform to track down suspects. The group has now provided all information to the police and was willing to give "Sweetie" to the authorities for them to be able to act on the webcam child sex tourism.

However, European policing agency Europol expressed their apprehensions about legal issues that "Sweetie" may encounter.

"We believe that criminal investigations using intrusive surveillance measures should be the exclusive responsibility of law enforcement agencies," spokesman Soren Pedersen told the Reuters news agency.

Mr Guyt upheld that webcam child sex tourism "requires a new way of policing" because "the predator won't come forward. The victim won't come forward."

"Our worst-case scenario is that the same will happen with this phenomenon as with child pornography, which is now a multi-billion industry in the hands of criminal gangs."

Hence, they were compelled to bring their A game through "Sweetie".

"We identified ourselves as 10-year-old Filipino girls. We did not solicit anything unless it was offered to us."

Andy Baker from U.K.'s national Crime Agency explained that in spite of the fact that "Sweetie" "widened awareness of a global child sex abuse threat, tackling child sex abusers is best left to specialist law enforcement agencies".

Rest assured, Mr Baker said that they are working with their international law enforcement partners and was looking at the information passed on by Terre des Hommes.

Terre de Hommes hoped that other countries will do the same.

As for "Sweetie", the group said that "Sweetie will not be used again. She has done her job - showing the predators that they can easily become prey."

Meet "Sweetie":

(Credit: Sweetie YouTube Page)