There’s one question that Simon Peterson, who leads the Child Exploitation Operations Team (COET), gets asked more than any other.

“How do you do it?”

He said it’s a tricky one to answer.

“I don’t think many people can really tell you how they do it.”

But he does know why he and the rest of his team do the job.

“We’re all motivated because it’s the right thing to do.”

COET deals with the worst of the worst. The team’s job was to find child sexual exploitation material (CSEM) and catch those making, selling and interacting with it.

“It’s videos, it’s imagery, it’s anything that could be defined as a publication which promotes or supports the sexual exploitation of children,” said Peterson.

Peterson was the Chief Customs Officer at COET, and in an episode of The Detail, he discussed the growing issue of child exploitation and how the COET team was working to get on top of the issue.

This year his team had arrested 13 people, which he said meant they’ve done 13 full operations. But every month they deal with up to 100 reports.

“There’s certainly more work there than we can handle.

“The numbers keep going up ... the numbers of reports we get from industry, the number of investigations we do, the number of people we arrest, the amount of material that we seize off people we’ve arrested is increasing.

“Additionally, the type of material we’re seeing, or seizing, is getting more and more violent or abusive, so that may be a metric that it’s getting worse.”

Then there’s the issue of generative AI creating more content.

Peterson said that, just like plane travel created a “new border” in the mid-1900s, the internet has created a “new border” for COET to monitor.

“Most of our work is actually around the cyber border, it’s based online, it’s based on what people in New Zealand are doing or how they’re interacting with people overseas, using the internet.”

‘Listen to your gut’

While in the past, the typical profile of an offender might have been “the dirty old white man who’d just been to Southeast Asia,” that too is changing.

Now, “it’s teenagers right through to grandads”.

It still tends to be male, but the team has seen more females becoming involved.

“All professions too ... that’s one of the scary things about it, it can be a medical professional right through to someone with a long criminal history,” he said.

Peterson said he doesn’t want to sound alarmist but it’s important for New Zealanders to be aware of the issue.

“One thing we have seen a couple of times is at the end of cases parents connecting the dots and saying, ‘I knew there was something wrong’ and for whatever reason justified not doing anything about it.”

Peterson said parents should listen to their gut and not be afraid to explore something that doesn’t feel right.

“If [your] kid is saying something, doing something, it’s your kid, protect them, don’t be afraid to explore that and see if there’s something more there.

“Be engaged in what your kid’s doing.”

RNZ