Warning: This story contains details of sexual abuse.
Marie was lying on a mattress with her children on the floor of their home in Manila when the agents burst in.
One of the children was resting on a pink Minnie Mouse pillow. A backpack and a white school shirt hung from a hook.
Above the bed, a strip light was strapped to a wire.
Marie sat up, looking deeply confused and worried. An agent told the children to find something to cover their faces before leading them away to a van.
That was three weeks ago. Marie, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, hasn't seen the children since.
"I feel like I'm dying," she told Foreign Correspondent from an interview room attached to a crowded cell in the National Bureau of Investigation detention centre in the Philippines capital.
Wearing an orange prison T-shirt, she sobbed as she spoke about her three children. It was the first time they had all been apart.
"No-one who is a mother is going to want this – kids not [being] with them," she said.
But Marie has been charged with reprehensible crimes.
As agents from the National Bureau of Investigation took the children away, the investigators combed through items in the bedroom of her home, a two-bedroom rental in a maze of narrow pathways.
They placed phones and sex toys into clear evidence bags.
A female investigator told Marie she was being arrested for violating the anti-trafficking persons act and for child pornography.
She stared at the investigator, then looked at the warrant papers in front of her. "Where do I sign?" she asked.
The facilitators
In 2020, as COVID-19 spread and millions became confined to their homes, reports of online sexual abuse and exploitation of children in the Philippines more than doubled.
Many of the predators are Australians.
In response, the Philippines government last year declared "war" on the crime and vowed to ramp up efforts to arrest perpetrators and rescue child victims.
But it's complex and often heartbreaking work for the authorities fighting this hidden crime wave.
"It's a really hard crime type, it's oftentimes very grotesque and violent," said Caleb Carroll, a former US police detective who works with the non-government organisation International Justice Mission in Manila.
The crime itself is disturbingly simple.
An offender in another country meets a Filipino "facilitator" online, often on social media or a dating app.
From there, for a price, the facilitator arranges for a child to be sexually abused or exploited live on camera.
English is widely spoken in the Philippines meaning predators can easily communicate with facilitators, and even the children.
"You're talking about sexually motivated offenders getting to basically direct in real time the kind of abuse they want to see," said Caleb Carroll.
Such real-time exchanges can be fiendishly difficult for police to detect. Much of the evidence vanishes as soon as the video call ends.
On the front line
In a pokey office above the dormitory for new recruits at the Philippines National Police, an international task force is helping fight the Philippines' "war" on online child exploitation.
The Philippine Internet Crimes Against Children Center is made up of experts and police from the Philippines, Australia, the UK, the Netherlands and the US.
Its mission is to help local authorities hunt down the facilitators and to locate abused children, often by gathering leads and information from foreign police agencies.
If Australian police arrest an offender or uncover child abuse material involving Filipino children, the task force picks up the trail in the Philippines.
The task force office seems oppressively small for the sheer volume of crimes it is dealing with.
"I think there's a lot more of this crime type happening than we receive referrals about," said Detective Natalie Roesler, one of three Australian Federal Police members on the task force.
"It certainly is just the tip of the iceberg."
Her navy-blue polo shirt sports the Australian and Philippines flags crossed like swords on the sleeve.
"As much as we work together, the reports don't go down," she said.
Before moving to Manila in 2021, Detective Roesler spent a decade working on child sexual abuse cases in Australia and was once named AFP Detective of the Year for her role in bringing down one of the world's worst paedophiles, known as "Waka".
She's exposed to some of the most disturbing and degrading child sexual abuse imaginable.
"There are tough days," Detective Roesler said. "But really, when you think about what the children have been through compared to what we are going through, that keeps you sort of grounded.
"There's a huge sense of urgency because every day children are being abused."
At 7am on a Friday, a flurry of activity swept through the office as investigators assembled to prepare an urgent search warrant application.
At one end of the room, a photograph of a seven-year-old girl, Jolene*, was projected on the wall, her big brown eyes staring expressionless past the camera.
For months, police had been analysing videos of a girl being sexually abused.
They now believed it was Jolene in the videos and that her mother's boyfriend had been the one creating and selling them.
After a lengthy investigation they had tracked him down to a house in Manila, which they now had under surveillance.
Investigators would have to swoop soon or risk him slipping through their fingers.
"These cases are very sensitive," said Colonel Portia Manalad, a senior officer with the Women's and Children's Protection Centre with the Philippines National Police.
"You need to have some patience because everything can change overnight."
With the application in hand, half a dozen investigators piled into a mini-van and sped down a bumpy Manila highway to get it approved in court.
But the judge had already gone to lunch.
When the judge returned, the investigators filed one by one into the closed courtroom to detail the horrific abuse they had seen in the videos.
Outside, stray cats roamed in and out of the waiting room where the other officers working on the case waited for their chance to speak before the judge.
Some had been working on the case for weeks and had toiled late into the night preparing the application.
They dozed as they waited, or spoke amongst themselves about the most chilling aspects of the case, like a video in which the young girl begged for the abuse to stop.
As the minutes and hours ticked by, all feared what it could mean for Jolene.
Fighting the war
In the slick office tower that houses the Australian embassy in Manila's financial district, Detective Roesler sat down at her computer.
A copy of a Skype chat between another woman in the Philippines and a 68-year-old man named Ian Schapel, a retired public servant living in a unit in Adelaide, flashed up on the screen.
It's one of hundreds of chat logs detailing how Schapel negotiated with women in the Philippines to watch children being sexually exploited and abused on live video calls.
In one chat, the facilitator posted a photo of a child in a singlet and shorts.
"I have seen [her] before," Schapel replied. The facilitator insisted the child was "new".
"Let me watch her get undressed," he wrote back, "give me a show".
"Throughout the chats he's very direct about age and it was found that he would direct the shows and the acts," Detective Roesler said.
"He was very manipulative and demanding about what he wanted and would negotiate prices for what he wanted."
The power imbalance between the facilitator and Schapel is stark.
At one point she asked him to send her money without giving him a "show". He accused her of using "the same sob story".
"It is absolutely brutal," said Detective Roesler. "She will end up begging because she wants him just to send some money without having to have a show because she needs to buy food for her children and medicines."
Police first learned of Schapel's depraved crimes when he was stopped by Border Force at Melbourne Airport after returning from an overseas trip in 2020.
They found child sexual abuse material on his phone and, when they searched his house, uncovered over 50,000 images and videos on various devices, including some horrific footage of sexual acts involving children.
He paid as little as $40 to watch the children being abused and exploited. His youngest victim was just three. Schapel received a jail term of 15 years.
Following his arrest, police in Australia passed the evidence to the task force in Manila. From there, Philippines police were able to track down 15 victims and arrest five facilitators.
Examination of the financial records of one of the alleged facilitators led investigators to a 71-year-old man in Western Australia.
They found he paid nearly half a million dollars to sexually abuse children overseas from his home in Geraldton via the internet. He was jailed for 14 years.
Cases where the crimes are live streamed are particularly challenging for investigators.
"Other material that's been pre-recorded and is in possession of offenders, it's easier because they might have that saved on a device," said Detective Roesler.
"But the crime is happening in real time. To go and get that evidence, unless it's been recorded by either party, is quite difficult."
While much of what the police do to catch offenders are "trade secrets", a large part of the AFP's work is monitoring the dark web, keeping track of high-risk and repeat travellers, and looking at suspect financial transactions.
"There's always a trace," she said.
A midnight raid
It was 7pm at the Manila court when the judge granted the search warrant.
The officers left the court for a police station near the suspect's house to rendezvous with the rest of the team set to accompany them on the raid.
There were plain-clothes police and a social worker present, ready to whisk Jolene away to safety.
But rarely are these cases that simple. While many victims are grateful to be found, for others it is more complex.
"Rescue operations are often distressful, especially for very young survivors who may not understand right away why they are being separated from their parents or family members," said Jessa Lazarte, a social worker with the International Justice Mission, who is often first on the scene when children are found.
"The live streaming of child abuse and the online sexual exploitation have been normalised at their home. Because it's the people that they trust, the victims suffer complex trauma."
Often, social welfare authorities determine that non-offending family members are not willing or able to look after the survivors properly.
Many spend the rest of their childhoods in shelters or foster homes, saddled with the complex emotional fallout from being abused by their own parents.
"It's normal that they won't easily trust us," Jessa said. "So it's important that we don't give up on them."
At 10pm, officers gathered for a pre-raid briefing. The suspect had been spotted in the house.
The alley next to the house was so narrow they couldn't get a car down to secure the area in advance, so they would send two cars to the closest entry point and race to the front door.
By the time the cars arrived at the location, it was nearly midnight.
Suddenly, police piled into the street. Neighbours peeked out of their windows.
Investigators stormed the house and found the suspect inside, shirtless.
Detective Roesler stood to the side of the room, quiet and focused, watching as Philippines police retrieved phones and computer hard drives.
It was leads from Australian and Dutch police that led investigators to this point.
The suspect was arrested and charged with multiple crimes. Police allege they found child abuse material on his phone.
"It's disgusting, I can't explain thoroughly," said Lieutenant Colonel Rahul Bolido, of the Philippine National Police, after the raid.
But Jolene was nowhere to be found.
Somewhere in this sprawling city, she is likely with her mother, police believe, who is also suspected of participating in her abuse.
'It's easy money'
Back in the Manila detention centre, Marie pondered her future and her past.
Before police stormed her home, she had been messaging on her phone with what she thought was an overseas man willing to pay for an online sex show of her children.
It was in fact an undercover police officer. As soon as police saw in the video chat the "show" was about to start, they entered the house.
"I'm paying [for] what I did," she said. "That's why I'm here."
But still she tried to justify her actions.
She told me when she lost her job at the start of the pandemic, a friend told her she could make money selling abuse and exploitation videos of her children to foreigners.
She claimed the decision was "painful, not easy".
"I just ate my pride rather than see my kid sleep with an empty stomach," she said.
She said she was the main breadwinner and responsible for supporting not only her kids but also her extended family.
She claimed she only made the children do "shows" towards the end of each month if she didn't have enough money for rent and wasn't doing it for very long.
But in their statements to police, one of the children said they had done so many "shows" in the last three years they had lost count.
According to Cathy Nolasco, head of the National Bureau of Investigation team that arrested Marie, poverty is a driving factor in these times.
"If we go through to the places where we actually conduct these operations, the places are usually, or most often than not, poverty stricken," Ms Nolasco said.
But when the facilitators tell her they had no other choice, she doesn't buy it.
"It's easy money," she said. "We all have options … they should be the one providing for the needs of the children, not the other way around."
Marie is facing life in prison, but even from inside this cage she still hopes for a chance at a different future, one with her kids.
"To [be] normal, forget everything and have a real job as well," she said.
Marie's children are in the care of the Department of Social Welfare. She has no idea where they are and can't contact them.
"If I can just [go] back in time, I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't," she said. "No-one [is] going to regret it first, always at the end. I know people going to hate me. I'm just human. I'm not perfect."
As our time drew to an end, I said to Marie that I found it difficult, as a mother, to understand how she could do this to her children.
"Maybe because we are not the same," she replied. "That's why you do not understand. What we've been through to stay alive. Maybe when you in my situation, we're the same. For sure, you are going to understand me."
At the task force office, investigators are still looking for seven-year-old Jolene.
They have been scouring the suspect's data and financial records to see if they can identify any other foreign offenders who could lead to more arrests.
"The really hard thing is that you leave work every day, you go to bed every night knowing there are still more children out there that you know about," said task force policing expert Caleb Carroll.
"And it's heartbreaking because they may not know that anybody's even out there looking for them, even though we're trying."
Watch Foreign Correspondent tonight at 8pm on ABC TV, iview and YouTube.
*Name has been changed to protect the child's identity.
