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Obin Khoury’s daughter Kristen was 15 years old when she was allowed to open her own Instagram account. “We considered ourselves responsible and did everything we could to ensure safety,” Corey says. Months later, Kristen disappeared from her parents’ home after being groomed by a criminal gang on Instagram’s direct message service and sold as prostitutes on the streets of Houston.
Colley said her daughter never recovered from the ordeal. Kristen returned to her home, but after she was trafficked again, she went missing. Her mother does not know if she is still alive.
Corey blames the gang that trafficked his daughter for destroying her life. She also blames Instagram, which she believes played a key role in the sex trafficking of her daughter. “If Instagram didn’t exist, none of this would have happened to my daughter,” she says. “Instagram made it so easy.” [for these people] do this. ”
This week, Mark Zuckerberg Wealth estimated at $139 billion The founder of Meta, the company that owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, received £109bn. Big Tech and the online child sexual exploitation crisis.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said this after addressing the audience at this week’s U.S. Senate committee hearing on online child sexual exploitation. Photo: Evelyn Hochstein/Reuters
During the hearing, Zuckerberg, along with other social media executives, was questioned about the extent of harm to children on their platforms, and said there was no “causal effect” between social media and poor mental health among young people. He denied there was any evidence that there was a relationship.
He then addressed parents gathered at a Congressional hearing and apologized to parents who had lost children to sexual exploitation and harassment for what they had gone through.
Corey doesn’t have time to hear Zuckerberg’s apology. “If she wanted to, she could stop all the harm that’s happening on her platform,” she says. “Words are not enough. He needs to act.”
She said her daughter was a “normal, happy child” until 2019, when she became the target of a criminal organization operating a prostitution ring in downtown Houston.
Boys working as gang scouts at Kristen’s school identified Kristen as a potential target, and she was flooded with messages from gang members through the direct message feature on her Instagram account.
“They promised her a Louis Vuitton bag in an Instagram message, promised her a yacht trip, things like that,” Corey says. “They say, ‘Come party with me.'”
A few months after she started receiving messages, the gang lured Kristen out of her parents’ home. Two weeks later, police found her in Houston’s red-light district.
“[When she came home] She started talking more about what they had done to her,” Corey says. “The babies’ mouths came out with horrifying stories about what they were forced to do.”
Corrie said Kristen returned to her family traumatized, frightened, angry and a different person.
“I searched for my daughter in some really dark places,” Robin Corey says. “We are conducting DNA testing on the remains that match her description.”
Photo: Tola Olawale/The Guardian
Source: www.theguardian.com
