This article contains discussion of child sexual abuse and exploitation

Earlier this year, we published an article (‘Robotic Stalking: Sex robots made to order by obsessive stalkers’) that examined how images of celebrities and increasingly private individuals, are being used to reproduce human-sized likenesses, without the individual’s permission. Then we wrote about the worrying rise of child sex-abuse dolls and AI and the influence of paedophilic culture on shaping new technology. Our warnings have unfortunately proven prophetic as this week a mother in Boca Raton, Florida found the likeness of her 8 year old daughter replicated in a child sex-abuse doll for sale on Amazon and other websites.

Our warnings about child sex-abuse dolls have been largely ignored by the academic philosophy community, people who are paid by public funding to carry out ethics evaluations of new technologies.

he doll, on sale for $559 (€472 and £420) was advertised as “a high quality sexy dolly live dolls for men” and even had a reviewer comment stating “Good item during these times.”  Horrified, the girl’s mother who asked to be identified as only Terri, said in tears “I can’t sleep sometimes because that’s all I can think about, men who have sex with those dolls, and I can’t get them back. I just want to burn them….some of these websites have her completely naked and they have a video of people trying to explain how this child sex doll works”.

Terri has now launched a campaign to ban child sex-abuse dolls in the United States and has teamed up with Child Rescue Coalition (C.R.C.) with its CEO Carly Yoost arguing “This is a real child who’s been affected, this isn’t a hypothetical doll that was created’. She adds “Examples of cases demonstrate that there is a risk of these dolls fueling the urges of pedophiles to objectify a child as a sexual being, or to be used by paedophiles to groom a real child into believing this activity is normal.

We wrote to Amazon this week to warn them against the sale of child sex-abuse dolls on their site. We have so far not received a response.

Terri contacted Amazon in the US, who removed the item. But the problem is a global one. Explains Caitlin Roper of Australian campaign group Collective Shout, “Though highly controversial, child sex dolls are already on the market and have been sold through mainstream online retailers like Amazon and Wish for a number of years. Experts predict child sex robots will be next, and some believe they are already in production.” Earlier this year Collective Shout found child-sex abuse dolls on the Chinese-owned platform Alibaba and successfully petitioned to have them removed.

In France, anti-paedophile activist group AIVI alerted the authorities of child sex-abuse dolls for sale on Amazon France. Gaining the support of Adrien Taquet, the junior Child Protection Minister, they were identified and removed within four days.