The doorbell rings over and over again. Men write a few nice, non-binding lines, then they quickly get down to business in the video chat. They show their penis and many masturbate in front of the camera. “Don’t you mind that I’m only twelve?” Ask the girls. “No, why should it?” – “Twelve is a nice age.”
“Trapped in the Net” is deeply disturbing, a glimpse into abysses that one might have suspected but could not have imagined. The documentary is an experiment on the subject of “cybergrooming”, for which the Czech filmmakers Barbora Chalupová and Vít Klusák cast three adult, child-looking actresses and created fake profiles for them in social networks in which they pretend to be twelve-year-old girls. They build the “girls” nursery in a studio hall. Now they sit in front of laptops and wait – but not long. As soon as the wrong profiles are online, the doorbell rings. As if the men had been waiting for it.
In the ten days that the film was shot, 2,458 men contacted the three actresses, almost all of them with sexual intentions. The ringing that announces video calls will soon only sound ominous. The camera holds on to the girls and the screens, follows in painful detail how the men show their (pixelated) genitals, send the supposed children links to porn sites, offer them money so that they can undress in front of the camera; how one of the men puts nude photos of a girl (faked by the filmmakers) on the Internet and uses them to blackmail the supposed child. In the end, the filmmakers handed the material over to the Czech law enforcement authorities, and an investigation was initiated.
The detection of cases of abuse such as in Lügde or Bergisch Gladbach has increased awareness of sexual violence against children. However, the dangers of the Internet are easily overlooked because young people withdraw and parents don’t notice. One would like to recommend “Trapped in the Net”, of which there is also a school version shortened by explicit passages, to all educators, parents and young people. A warning about the snake pit on the net could hardly be more drastic and clear. I would really like to recommend the film. If he wasn’t so questionable himself.
One of the young actresses went into therapy after filming
Even the casting of the adult but very young actresses has something repulsive about it. Most of the women who apply (in children’s clothing, as requested by the directors) have experienced sexual harassment themselves online, one of the cast is one of them. During the filming you can see the confusion on her face again and again when the possibly traumatic experience of her childhood is repeated. It is true that the filmmakers called in psychological support, a sexologist and a lawyer for the shooting, and the young women have the conditions of the chats largely under control. Nonetheless, one of the women says that at one point in the film she fell “into total despair”: “I had the feeling that all men are child molesters and that all children are abused.” One of the young women goes into therapy after filming.
In the studio for “Gefangen im Netz”, the children’s rooms of the allegedly twelve-year-olds were recreated with original props from the actresses.
(Photo: Milan Jaroš 2020 / Hypermarket Film / Filmwelt)
Does the film justify this burden? It seems a little cynical that the directors provoke the crimes they are documenting in a certain way with fake accounts and fake nude pictures. And is your film as enlightening as it claims to be? You hardly find out how the young women are doing during the shooting, you can only read that in the press booklet. Nor are the motives of the men analyzed, the majority of whom are not pedophiles. And there is a lack of information on how parents or educators can help children if they suspect abuse on the Internet. Instead, the directors show more and more chats between the naive girls and the men, whose faces are pixelated into monster grimaces with greedy eyes and mouths with fangs. And in the face of the director, who keeps looking at the camera, one thinks, in addition to the horror of the shamelessness and unscrupulousness of the harassers, to recognize hunting fever. The cinema is a voyeuristic medium, in a nasty way “Caught in the Net” also satisfies this lust for viewing. This trash TV horror only stands in the way of the educational intent of the film.
V Síti, Czech Republic 2020 – Direction: Barbora Chalupová, Vít Klusák. Camera: Adam Kruliš. Editor: Vít Klusák. With: Tereza Těžká, Anežka Pithartová, Sabina Dlouhá. Distribution: Filmwelt, 100/67 (school version) minutes.