Child exploitation on the dark web: Inside the online crisis
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Since the advent of the internet, people have shared explicit pictures of children.<br>But today, devices are everywhere. And files are distributed with the click of a button.<br>Between AI, encryption, and anonymous web forums, the volume of graphic images is overwhelming the systems meant to stop them. Investigators are swamped as technology companies pass the buck.<br>Trapped in the dark web
By Janelle Nanos and Shelley Murphy, Globe Staff<br>Published May 13, 2026
Editor’s note: The following story contains discussions of online child sexual abuse material. If you or someone you know is the victim of digital abuse, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children offers support and resources at 1-800-843-5678.<br>The father in Tennessee thought he knew what was going on behind his 13-year-old daughter’s bedroom door. She was playing video games on her Xbox, and her friends were messaging her on Discord, a popular chat app with a slogan that promises “all fun and games.”<br>Then he discovered who else was talking to her. And that’s when he called the police.<br>Grown men had been exploiting her online, the father told them. They’d been persuading her to send them nude pictures of herself.<br>When the investigators searched the girl’s devices, they saw one man had been talking to her since she was 12, and his messages had become increasingly sexual. He used an anonymous username on Discord — john90 — but was otherwise open about his identity with her: He was 33 years old and a schoolteacher.<br>The Tennessee investigators traced john90’s IP address and phone number to Brookline. After a special agent contacted a detective there in January 2025, they discovered the man’s number matched one given by the victim of a bike theft five years earlier. And that report led them to John Magee Gavin.<br>Gavin, who went by “Magee,” lived on the edge of Coolidge Corner, in a condo he shared with his wife. He went to a Crossfit gym and competed in Spartan races to raise money for veterans and the Animal Rescue League of Boston. And, for work, he taught science to teenagers at Boston’s Josiah Quincy Upper School. He’d previously been a sixth-grade teacher at the Pacific Rim Charter School in Hyde Park, a paraprofessional in Brookline Public Schools, a ski instructor, a camp counselor, and a tutor.
For generations, trying to keep children safe from sexual exploitation meant knowing where they were and who they were with. Today, threats are everywhere online. (Finn Gomez for The Boston Globe)<br>In February, police executed a search warrant on Gavin’s Discord account and found sexual chats he’d been having with approximately 20 minors, ranging in age from 12 to 17. They lived across the US — Georgia, Texas, Florida, and elsewhere — as well as in Canada and the United Kingdom. Hundreds of messages showed him asking the girls about their sexual experience, engaging in online masturbation sessions, and persuading them to send him photos and videos of themselves performing sexual acts.<br>RELATED: Globe Events: Trapped in the Dark Web. An online forum about online safety in the digital age, on June 2. Sign up here.<br>In some instances, Gavin messaged the minors while he was in class. In at least one chat, he shared fantasies about having sex with a freshman girl who would say hello to him in the halls at school.<br>For generations, trying to keep children safe from sexual exploitation meant knowing where they were and who they were with. Parents and guardians lined up chaperones, enforced curfews, and warned about stranger danger. The threats were in the physical world. Today, they’re everywhere online, on children’s laptops, their gaming systems, and the phones they carry in their pockets.
Dangers can lurk in the phones children carry. (Finn Gomez for The Boston Globe)<br>Here in Massachusetts, State Police received more than 23,000 CyberTipline reports about child exploitation in 2025, a 77 percent increase in a single year. And experts believe that still vastly underreports the problem, because encrypted chats on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and other platforms obscure the true volume of what’s taking place online.<br>The tips from people like the father in Tennessee arrive in such volume that state prosecutors have run out of people to deal with them and are hiring retired police officers to try and keep up. Agents are so overwhelmed that they’ve been forced to triage cases to focus on the worst offenders: people in positions of trust, organizers of online forums, and perpetrators who are actively abusing children, including infants and toddlers.<br>Investigators say they’re facing a “tidal wave” of child sexual abuse material online, and it keeps leading them to people like Gavin.<br>Early on the morning of Feb. 7, days after reading Gavin’s Discord logs, Brookline police pulled up to his condo building with a search warrant. Inside, they found clothing he’d been wearing in pictures he’d...