These are the Montana counties with the highest crime rates per 10, people. Numbers are for from dataportal. Earlier this month, a Montana man admitted to sexually exploiting and abusing at least eight girls in Bozeman and Billings. In a scheme to produce child sex abuse material, Tyrell Forest Anderson manipulated underage girls into sharing sexually compromising photos of themselves, which he saved and shared.
To do it, Anderson used one of the most popular social media platforms on the planet. Volunteers plant pinwheels on the Courthouse Lawn in honor of child abuse prevention month in this file photo. The Family Tree Center holds an annual ceremony on the Courthouse lawn.
In the past two decades, tech-based sexual abuse has added an additional layer to a dilemma fraught with complexity and anguish. The ubiquity of the internet has spurred advocates and law enforcement to scramble to stay ahead of the pace of technology, assist the survivors of abuse and hold their abusers accountable.
Internet service providers and social media companies like Meta are mandated by federal law to report child sex abuse material. Most of those tips came from ISPs and social media companies, and were related to the sharing of child sex abuse material.
NCMEC noted in its annual report for that year that sextortion and sexually explicit images generated through artificial intelligence were also becoming more common. Task force members searched devices during their investigations in and combed through over terabytes of data. The subsequent investigation on the part of Bozeman police department revealed that Anderson had been using Snapchat for two years to coerce multiple underage girls in the Bozeman area into sex or sending sexually explicit photos in exchange for money, nicotine or drugs, court documents said.
