July 2025 Activity Report
- Admin
- Aug 11
- 8 min read
Hello, this is PAPS.The height of summer is upon us, and the heat continues—how have you all been doing?July was packed with activities, including a press conference and collaborations with external partners.There was so much to share, and here are the highlights.
We Held a Parliamentary Briefing on Financial Sextortion!
On July 17, we held an Emergency Diet Member Briefing and Press Conference on Financial Sextortion inside the House of Representatives office building.Forty-nine members of the media attended, and we provided detailed information on the latest number of consultations, specific cases, the challenges facing Japanese society, and the countermeasures needed going forward.Following the event, many media outlets conducted interviews and published articles.We engaged in broad discussions covering the realities of the harm, the underlying issues, and potential responses.
After the parliamentary briefing, we held a luncheon and networking session in the parliamentarian cafeteria, which also served as a warm farewell gathering for our student staff.
It became a valuable space for connection, and we remain committed to continued public outreach and efforts toward systemic improvement.
Through our big-data analysis of sextortion cases, we discovered a trend: reports from victims tend to increase during children’s long school vacations.
This finding has become an important consideration in determining the timing of our awareness-raising campaigns.
Announcement | Approval of Tokyo Metropolitan Government Subsidy and Future Plans
As a selected subsidy recipient under the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s Support Program for Young Female Victims, we are now able to continue our support activities.
This fiscal year, we aim to further develop our initiatives, enhancing both the quality and scope of the assistance we provide.
Specifically, in addition to offering counseling and support to young women who have experienced sexual violence, we will work to create safe spaces and strengthen coordination with specialized institutions.
We will continue to stand alongside survivors so they can connect with us without fear and gain access to the support they need.
Voices from the Field | From Counseling, Outreach, and the Shelter
The number of new consultations in July reached 411, the highest so far this fiscal year.
Many of the consultations in July were related to financial sextortion cases.
In particular, there was a surge in cases where individuals connected with overseas users through social media apps, engaged in casual conversation, and were then suddenly asked to send sexual images. After complying, they were subjected to demands for money or further images.
In consultations regarding harm from coerced appearances in adult videos (AV), there were many cases involving individuals who had just turned 18—an age where the capacity to give fully informed consent is still limited—being made to appear in such productions.
Examples included:
“While in a relationship at the time, my partner asked to film me. I couldn’t refuse because of my feelings for them, but later the footage was commercially distributed.”
“Years later, I realized that the filming was actually coerced AV performance, and I still suffer from flashbacks.”
We also received reports of various forms of sexual exploitation that are difficult to clearly separate from sextortion, such as obstruction of leaving the sex industry and exploitation through romantic relationships. Many consultations related to involvement in the sex industry involved intertwined issues of contracts, payment, consent, and violence—making them far more complex than typical cases of sexual violence or fraud.
Outreach
This month, PAPS continued its outreach activities, focusing mainly on entertainment districts in Tokyo.Because July nights were especially hot and humid, we included cooling towels in our distribution as part of our hygiene-conscious approach. To our surprise, many people accepted them, and some even said things like, “This really helps!”
The distributed items often served as conversation starters, and in some cases, people opened up and shared far more personal stories than we had initially expected.
On one day, heavy rain left the streets nearly empty, limiting the scope of our activities.
Most people passed by in a hurry, making it difficult to start conversations—but perhaps for that very reason, a simple *“thank you”* from someone stood out and stayed with us.
On sunny days, by contrast, the streets were lively, and we saw many young women walking among the crowds of tourists.
One day, someone approached us saying, “You’re from PAPS, right?” and went on to share concerns such as, “I’m in trouble right now because of this…,” “I’ve been approached about appearing in an AV and I’m worried,” and “I don’t know how to refuse.”
We were able to connect these individuals directly to our consultation and support services.
"Don’t Pretend to Understand"
During outreach, we sometimes heard comments like, “Just knowing that there’s someone who’s trying to understand me is enough to save me.”
It’s difficult to fully grasp another person’s feelings—especially when it comes to pain or struggles we’ve never experienced ourselves. In fact, saying *“I understand”* in such cases can sometimes push the other person away.
However, the presence of someone who says, “I may not understand everything, but I still want to know,” can be incredibly reassuring and empowering.
Creation of an STI Prevention Leaflet
The practice of prostitution by foreign men has become increasingly normalized.
In particular, the sight of young women being “consumed” by sex buyers has gone beyond the scope of individual harm and reached the level of a structural human rights violation.
PAPS is currently creating its own STI prevention leaflet, incorporating perspectives on sexual exploitation and sexual violence.
We are also reflecting the input of our outreach team to make it a more practical and effective tool.
Hitsuji House (Forms of “Invisible” Hardships)
The young women we meet at Hitsuji House may, at first glance, seem cheerful—chatting brightly or spending time with smiles on their faces.
Yet beneath that surface, there is often a deep sense of loneliness and despair, with feelings such as *“I have no place to go,”* *“I am not loved,”* or *“No one needs me.”*
Some return home only to face distress, find it impossible to have a meaningful conversation with their parents, or lack any place where they feel safe.
In such circumstances—having nowhere else to go—some have wandered the streets and eventually found their way here.
The desire to be loved and to feel needed is a completely natural emotion that everyone has.
However, this can sometimes be exploited by someone who merely pretends to understand.
There are many cases in which a person—posing as a host, a romantic partner, or someone in a similar role—makes the woman believe, “If I devote myself more, I’ll be loved,” only for her to later realize that she had been exploited all along.
Many of these young women have spent years blaming themselves, thinking, “I’m not normal” or “I’m always causing trouble for others.”
Some even feel they are “not entitled” to ask for help, which can make it increasingly difficult for them to speak out at all.
In one meeting, a woman showed irritation, saying, “Just 15 minutes!”—but once she began talking, we were able to have a calm, unhurried conversation.
Small yet meaningful changes appeared, such as when she shared, “I cut my hair today,” or “It’s hot, so I made it shorter,” opening her heart little by little.
While there are cases where women connect to further support through Hitsuji House, there are also those who do not.
This kind of “invisible hardship” may be driven, perhaps unconsciously, by voices that have never been heard and small, unacknowledged pains carried for a long time.
From the Front Lines of Takedown Requests (Fighting Against Extraterritoriality)
In July 2025 alone, we made takedown requests on behalf of 122 individuals, totaling 1,434 requests.
On average, each person required more than 10 separate takedown submissions, revealing the reality that harm often spreads across multiple platforms and to numerous destinations.
The top five countries by number of takedown requests (based on server location) were:
United States – 644 cases
Canada – 514 cases
Netherlands – 62 cases
Japan – 48 cases
Russia – 41 cases
Since the vast majority of the targeted content is stored on overseas servers, it has become clear that legal measures within Japan alone have their limits.
One of the most serious problems is the fact that some major overseas platforms—most notably “X” (formerly Twitter)—often do not comply with takedown requests. Even when a formal submission channel exists, requests may be summarily rejected for procedural reasons, or left unanswered altogether.
Some victims reported that, despite repeatedly submitting requests on their own, nothing was done until they received our support.
However, because these companies are not subject to Japanese law, the current situation is effectively one of extraterritoriality, where domestic legal authority cannot easily be enforced.
Advancements in AI-Based Image Search Technology
At PAPS, as the number of consultations we receive continues to grow, we are working to reduce staff workload and handle takedown requests more efficiently by developing and operating our own system that leverages AI technology.
At the core of this system is a deep learning model specialized in facial recognition called FaceNet512.
FaceNet512 converts the unique features of a human face into 512 numerical values (a 512-dimensional feature vector, which is ultimately compressed to 128 dimensions) that represent the structural details of the face with high precision.
For example, characteristics such as eye shape, facial contours, and the positional relationships of the nose and mouth are recorded as combinations of numbers—like 123, 456, 789…—creating a kind of unique “facial fingerprint” for each image.
Furthermore, this system employs a technique called fine-tuning to improve identification accuracy for specific individuals.This involves additional training of the existing AI model tailored to each consultation case, enabling it to determine with high precision whether two images depict the same person—even if makeup, facial angle, clothing, or background are different.
On the internet and social media, images are often edited, pixelated, mosaicked, or composited onto different backgrounds before being reposted.Such altered images can be extremely difficult to find through ordinary searches or visual inspection. However, by using this AI, we can still detect them and assess, “This could be the same person.”
From among the images identified by the AI, PAPS staff review each one.If they determine that the image was used without the person’s consent, we formally request its removal from the relevant social media platform or posting site.
This AI system operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, continuously scanning social media, adult video posting sites, and other platforms to check whether new images of the client have been uploaded.Recently, its detection accuracy has improved beyond our expectations, prompting astonishment even among staff members.
To handle the enormous computational demands of AI processing, PAPS has until now been operating with limited resources, using consumer-grade GPUs (Graphics Processing Units).However, as the need for AI processing has steadily increased—particularly for image analysis and the detection of harm proliferation—the current equipment has often struggled to keep up.
When we shared this situation on social media, people who resonated with our mission generously donated funds for the purchase of second-hand GPUs.We are deeply grateful for this support, which has enabled us to move toward establishing a faster and more accurate assistance system.
The system automatically collects the vast number of images uploaded each day, and the number of extracted facial images has now exceeded six million.
To quickly search for a specific individual, we use a database with a vector index.
However, this type of database has the characteristic that as the number of registered data entries increases, memory consumption also grows significantly.
As a result, the more data we store, the longer the registration process takes—presenting us with a new operational challenge.
Through your support, we bring healing to those caught up in sexual exploitation.Your contributions are a powerful force in addressing the issue of sexual exploitation.
With a monthly donation of 1,000 yen (about 33 yen per day), you can provide a woman with no place to go with safe and secure overnight accommodation for one day each year. 
With a monthly donation of 3,000 yen, you can keep a consultation support line for victims of digital sexual violence operating for one day each year. 
With a monthly donation of 500 yen, you can provide accompaniment support once a year to a young woman met during nighttime outreach in entertainment districts.
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