Filipino kids as young as 7 are being sexually abused by their parents and sold for sex to paedophiles from the West. We follow an undercover team trying to infiltrate this murky world and stop the abuse of children.
In the Philippines, primary school aged children are being sold for sex to travelling paedophiles, in a black market facilitated by secret online chat rooms.
This week on Dateline, reporter Stacey Dooley follows a team made up of local authorities and investigators from the United States, as they try to take down families who are illegally offering sexual acts with their children in return for money.
Many of these families are selling their childrens bodies as a response to impoverishment - almost a quarter of Filipinos are living in poverty, according to government statistics.
Our film crew embeds with a team who has spent two years deep undercover trying to catch a pair of sisters, who advertised sex with their own children to foreign paedophiles.
To infiltrate the families Mike*, a special agent for the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) arm of US Customs, poses as a paedophile online. This case is one of 64 that his team is currently working on involving child sexual exploitation in the Philippines.
