Police alert: Risk of increased prostitution when more people sell nude photos

The high demand for young people who sell sex and are sexually exploited is very worrying according to the police.

A variety of sites online, from established social media to pure prostitution forums, are platforms where adult men search for young girls and boys to have sex with.

- We have a situation where thousands of men around Sweden are ready to pay for even children's bodies, says police Simon Häggström with many years of experience of working against human trafficking and prostitution.

Often a gateway to prostitution

Children are contacted via chats on established social media through so-called grooming, ie adults who make contact with children for sexual purposes.

Young people can be found on so-called sugar dating sites, where adult men seek contact with people much younger than themselves, or sites where you can post and sell nude photos of yourself.

The latter is a type of platform that has increased sharply, according to Simon Häggström.

- Starting to sell pictures and films is often a gateway that ultimately leads to physical meetings, as many of our cases show.

You do not wake up one day and think that you should start selling sex, this is a world that you slowly but surely slip into.

Mental illness a common cause

There are no exact figures on how many children and young people are sexually exploited.

Guilt, shame and fear keep young people from reporting themselves.

The police try to keep track of the pages where the sex trade takes place, work outreach and with tips from the public.

Central to the police's work is not to blame the young people.

- There is always an explanation for why you end up in prostitution.

In the young people we meet, it is often about mental illness that, among other things, is rooted in sexual abuse.

It is the men who exploit these young people who bear all the blame, says Simon Häggström.

The risks for children and young people who sell sex are even greater than for adult prostitutes, he says.

Those who search very actively for young people exhibit what he describes as a "predator behavior", which means that they are preoccupied with sadism and abuse fantasies that affect the children concretely.

- This is an extremely dangerous world where very many people get into trouble and children and young people get to experience much worse things than adults.