Many men who follow child influencers online seek salacious images of them, often from their parents. The boxes below represent descriptions of images that appeared in court documents or were found online.
A 12-year-old girl in a tanktop and underwear poses on all fours, arching her back.
A preteen girl in a tank top pulls down her underwear straps below her hips.
A close-up of a young girl’s genitals, barely covered by a G-string bikini.
A 12-year-old girl on a bed, lying on her side. She is in the process of pulling down her underwear.
A 13-year-old girl pulls up her tank top, exposing the lower portion of her breasts.
A 12-year-old girl spreads her legs while lying on a bed.
A 13-year-old girl wearing a bikini, showing her rear end to the camera.
A young girl lying on her back on a bed with her legs in the air. Stuffed animals appear around her.
A 12-year-old girl on all fours crawling on a bed.
A preteen girl is wearing a long white dress shirt and no underwear; her private areas are visible.
A 13-year-old girl poses in a red silk robe, a white bra and red silk shorts.
A young teenage girl in a see-through bra pulls her bikini bottoms upward, exposing her pubic area.
The Men Who Use Instagram to Groom Child Influencers
Everyone had an idea about how the 12-year-old girl should pose in a G-string bikini as they assembled in an Airbnb rental home in a small Louisiana town.
The photographer was new to the business of shooting child influencers, so he welcomed suggestions, he later explained in an interview.
The girl’s mother, swiping through images of women from men’s magazines on her phone, recommended that she stand with one leg raised provocatively on a bed, he recalled. The girl, he said, proposed imitating a scene from an erotic film she had watched — she would lie on her back with her hands grasping for the bedposts.
In the end, several shots positioned her “head on a pillow and her buttocks raised in the air,” and in one, the camera focused on her “barely covered” genitals. That was the description in court documents, written by federal authorities who charged the photographer and mother with crimes related to child sexual abuse material.
“We just provided what we knew that men wanted to purchase,” the photographer, Grant Durtschi, said by telephone from a jail outside Baton Rouge.
For the past year, The New York Times has been investigating how a drive for online fame has created a marketplace on Instagram of girl influencers who are managed by their parents — Instagram does not allow children under 13 to have their own accounts — and frequently draw an audience of men.