David Farrier, director of docu-thriller Tickled, stumbles into another deeply disturbing instance of vulnerable people being exploited online – this time children, on YouTube.

Editor’s note: While we have endeavoured to protect the identities of the children involved, we recognise that by publishing this story their privacy may be compromised. It is our opinion that privacy concerns, while valid, are outweighed by the issues raised by this story, including the responsibility of Google and YouTube to protect their most vulnerable users.

For information on helping children stay safe online, visit netsafe.org.nz.

The Ice Bucket Challenge and the 22 Push Up Challenge spread like wildfire. I took part in the former, and simply observed the latter, cynical by then about the entire endeavour. By the time the Mannequin Challenge rolled around, it wasn’t even attached to a cause – it was just something everyone did, just because. So when someone pointed me towards the Shrunken Ally & Maddie Challenge I thought, “Oh God, what now”.

What I got were pages and pages of YouTubers answering a series of questions, direct to camera.

“Should I ask the question, and you answer?” says a girl to her friend. They are in their room, posters adorning the walls. “Yeah, okay, you do the question” her friend replies.

“Okay. Okay. Would you rather grow into an enormous size of 10,000 feet tall, and over three times the size of the world’s tallest building, or have your home invaded me a colony of ant sized people who want to take over your home for themselves?”

The girls burst into laughter, compose themselves, and answer the question.

“If possible please … Oh.” The girl pauses. “Show it to the camera?”

“Oh.”

They bicker for a bit, and then one of them puts her foot in front of the camera.

The video is 16 minutes long. It has 1200 views. A bunch of other users have left a bunch of comments. “Man, weird video!” one says. I find myself agreeing.

There are loads of these videos – all responding to a questionnaire sent out by a pair of teenagers called Ally and Maddie.

In a post on their now-deleted Google+ account they explained how their obsession with shrinking things first began:

“hello my name is Ally, and recently me and my friend Maddie were watching the movie honey we shrunk ourselves and after we were done watching it we got on the topic of what we’d do if the people we hated were shrunk to that size!”

They appear to send out around 15 questions at a time, including “What would you do if you found a 1-inch tall guy you don’t like in your room at night, how would you react?” and “Let’s say you’re leaving your room to go to school, and suddenly you feel something in your sock, realizing the little guy you don’t like was inside your sock would you leave him inside all day to torture him?”

The YouTubers taking this challenge are very young, and they are making fetish content for adults. They just don’t know it.

The fetish is microphilia, which involves the fantasy of being shrunken down to a tiny size. It’s related to macrophilia, the love of giants – or as this headline rather dramatically put it:

As far as fetishes go, it’s not giant, but it’s not tiny, either. Right now on clips4sale.com, there are 1,876 stores selling giant and micro-related content, with 88,435 clips available for purchase.

There are three main categories of microphilia and macrophilia content: foot, buttcrush and vore.

The first involves, well, feet. Buttcrush involves being shrunk down and sat on by a regular sized person, or staying your regular size and being sat on by a giant. Vore is about being shrunken down to such a small size that you can be eaten by the other participant.

I should point out that most of the adults into this fetish focus on other adults.

“Kids being part of the fantasy is definitely not a part of it. The forums will ban and report anyone that uses children in their content. Even in user-created stories, it must be with characters over the age of consent,” says Josh (not his real name).

Josh, who has a microphilia fetish, got in touch with me because he was alarmed at what he’s been seeing on YouTube. Earlier in the year he’d watched my documentary Tickled and noticed some parallels.

Tickled focused on Jane O’Brien Media, a company that solicited tickling videos from young men. The victims I interviewed in the film were not underage, but they were misled as to what the videos would be used for. The tickling videos also contained Q&As with the participants, who believed they were taking part in a competition.

Josh said he was pleased that I hadn’t demonised everyone with a tickling fetish just because of one bad egg. He hoped I would treat his fetish in the same way.

He says not only is Ally & Maddie a bad look for the fetish community he’s a part of, it’s “very, very wrong”. He told me he’s frustrated that his messages to YouTube about this phenomenon remain unanswered.

“The girls seem lured into doing it, I believe unwittingly. These types of videos tend to generate more views and subscribers for these young girls’ channels, which then starts a cycle of them fulfilling the desires of these predators so they can keep getting more subscribers and views.”

Josh believes it is highly unlikely Ally & Maddie are two young female YouTubers. He believes the account is run by an adult male. His suspicions are based on the type of content the channel is soliciting from the young girls, and the account’s methodical patterns.

“He approaches young girls on YouTube, pretending to be a young girl himself. He targets girls uploading videos on YouTube infrequently, often [ones] with few subscribers and low overall channel views, I believe in order to stay off the radar. He then asks them his set list of questions relating to his fetish; the girls then upload a video to their channel responding to his fetish based questions. After that, he moves onto another girl.”

And while the Ally & Maddie account has been around for three years, it appears the user behind it has been active under other names for much longer. Back in 2009, “BrittneyAshley” was requesting very similar content with similar questions. While inactive, the account still exists.

Back then, the Q&As weren’t framed as a competition, but as a game of tag. The questionnaires came under headings like “Ex-Boyfriend Tag”, “Honey I Shrunk my Ex Tag” and “Itsy bitsy Tag”. The videos still exist on YouTube, and it appears they were all created for the same person.

The thing is that, devoid of context, the videos aren’t contravening any of YouTube’s terms and conditions. They are posted by the user themselves, and their content is G-rated.

Ally and Maddie’s channel never uploads its own videos; it just uses its account to create playlists of the Q&A videos posted on the children’s accounts. The channel subscribes to over 900 accounts, almost entirely belonging to young girls.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he has sent his video request to all of them,” says Josh. “Going by the questions he asks, he seems to be trying to cover all the bases: foot, buttcrush and vore. But with children”.

“The specific mix of facts in this situation, given the specificity of the fetish, is not something NetSafe has seen before,” says Martin Cocker, “but we have seen all of these components of this situation.”

I’d reached out to Cocker, the chief executive of the New Zealand online safety organisation, for comment on the Ally & Maddie videos.

“There are two main concerns. Firstly, the person is presenting himself as a young child, and secondly, he is approaching young children. Essentially this is a person pretending to be a child who is deceiving children online. Although it’s not legally ‘grooming’ it seems to be on that slope.”

However, no one is technically doing anything wrong. “With the facts we have, there appears to be no obvious breach of the law,” says Cocker.

I asked NetSafe if they had a contact at YouTube I could follow up with. NetSafe forwarded the details I’d sent them, and later that day – before I’d spoken to anyone from Google – Ally and Maddie’s channel was suspended, their playlists gone with it.

Later that night a Google representative got in touch, and I responded with some questions. I wanted to know whether my email had led to the account being suspended, and whether they were aware of this sort of content on the service.

“There are more than 400 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute and we do not comment on individual videos,” said Gustaf Brusewitz, Google’s Head of Communications and Public Affairs for the Asia-Pacific region.

“We take safety on YouTube very seriously and our Community Guidelines clearly state that inappropriate material is not allowed on our site. We remove violating videos when flagged by our users and disable the accounts of repeat offenders.”

As to how YouTube felt about this sort of content: 

“YouTube has a zero-tolerance policy for sexual content involving minors. Uploading, commenting, or engaging in any type of activity that sexualizes minors will immediately result in an account termination.”

The issue is that this is a much bigger problem than a single errant account. Ally & Maddie is just one of many adult accounts which appear to be asking children on YouTube to create microphilia content. And it’s not just microphilia. Start searching for competitions and challenges on YouTube, and the number of children unwittingly creating fetish content quickly multiplies.

“Hey, it’s Kaylynn here,” says a girl of about ten, addressing the camera directly. “I am reading some questions about, um, bugs. It’s from Birdy James. The first question is ‘When was the first time you stepped on a bug and what kind of bug was it….” she trails off.

This is one of many videos titled The Bug Challenge, all created for a user called Birdy James. They all focus on children talking about their experience stepping on bugs. This appears to be part of the crush fetish.

A kid watching Kaylynn’s video probably just sees their friend answering some questions that are funny to them. But when you consider it’s most likely an adult asking the questions, things take a much darker turn.

Once you go down the rabbit hole of “challenge” videos, you inevitably end up at the Lego Challenge. There are hundreds of Lego Challenge videos.

This challenge – aimed at young boys who are asked to step or sit on on Lego pieces – is  particularly disturbing. While many of the Lego Challenges focus on crushing, an additional element seems to be the eliciting of pain in the subjects. This is evident from what happens in the videos themselves, and the descriptions left by the children who created them:

The Lego Challenge also appears to be a gateway for other users who want to focus purely on the pain aspect of the videos – and in the Lego Challenge videos they know they have found willing participants who are desperate for views and subscribers:

Pretty soon, other users with other fetishes swoop. It’s a feeding frenzy. I’m somehow not surprised to see tickling appear.

It’s not uncommon for users to directly request the Instagram or Skype details of children in the comments section:

“Kitty Nani 13” is a regular commenter on many of the videos. Her channel has only two videos, one of which is simply a list of challenges, displayed in multiple languages. This phenomenon is in no way limited to only English speakers – and the “challenges” speak for themselves.

By this point, the veil of a challenge – and what the videos are for – is almost non-existent. “Touch my body parts” is inherently awful, as is “Kids it’s pajama time 2016″, which sends out multiple requests.

Most of their video request playlists have over 100 completed video requests.

Not all accounts circling the “challenge” scene operate in the shadows. This user brazenly posts videos of himself giving “shoutouts” to young boy’s accounts in order to gain their favour. His 5000 favourited videos mostly consist of young boys. And his comments on other videos are all something like this:

He explains the “iCarly challenge” direct to camera in one of his videos:

“You have to lick and suck each of your toes for two minutes straight.”

Some of the boys have responded.

How YouTube can deal with this issue is not at all clear. Sure, while I was writing this piece Ally and Maddie’s channel was taken offline. But all that essentially did was delete a playlist. The videos still exist, on hundreds of children’s accounts.

NetSafe says it’s up to parents to monitor any Q&As their children are taking part in on YouTube. “Parents should be across it. Children are often more technically savvy, but they’re not emotionally or mentally mature enough to deal with some online situations,” says Cocker.

For YouTube, it’s also about education: “We work closely with organisations such as charities, others in our industry and government bodies dedicated to protecting young people. YouTube has a variety of educational materials and tools such as safety mode which parents can turn on to stop age-restricted and inappropriate videos from coming up,” Brusewitz told me.

But there’s the problem. In isolation, most of these videos seem utterly harmless – chances are they’ll never be flagged by the YouTube community as violating standards. But when you consider that in all likelihood they’re created for the sexual enjoyment of an adult, posing online as one of their peers, they’re anything but.

For information on helping children stay safe online, visit netsafe.org.nz.

Today is World Toilet Day, a campaign to draw attention to the sanitation crisis in the developing world. But we also have a toilet crisis in the West, says Violet Hunter, and every one of us – woman, man, trans and gender-diverse – is affected.

The woman next to me eyes my pink appendage. “I didn’t know you could BYO,” she says, waggling her standard cardboard unit. Yes, I nod. We laugh, chat a bit. It’s Glastonbury, mid-noughties. We’re holding She-Pees – not woolly toys or pink tents for laydeez, but single-purpose willies for women, so we can stand and pee.

The ladies urinal at Glastonbury is also called The She-Pee, and in the noughties it was a watershed of sorts. An attempt at “potty-parity”, as the Americans infantilisingly call it, the festival’s approach to equal toilet wait times seemed to work. It was quick, efficient. There were no queues. Only some women got wee on their pants.

For a heady moment back then we asked ourselves: could women’s urinals herald the end of queues for the ladies’ loos? But it wasn’t to be. The real world was too much for the She-Pee. We continued to queue, and men continued to pop in and out of their loos, rolling their eyes as we stood endlessly in line. As if it were all our fault.

But is it? I mean, why are there always queues for the ladies’ loos? Are we simply slow pokes, pottering about in the cubicle, dusting our noses and posting pics to Instagram? (Mmm, rarely). Is it our cumbersome clothing, poorly designed to allow access to our nethers? (Partly). Or is there simply something wrong with us? (Yes! Actually, no).

The real reason is simple – women’s biological needs are different from men’s. Women have more bodily fluids to dispose of, often more urgently. Sometimes we’re pregnant and the baby is sitting on our bladder, so we have to go more often. Or we need to throw up. Or we need to breastfeed away from judgmental eyes. Or we are having our period. We’re more likely to have children with us, and boys, as well as girls, use our loos. Sometimes, like men, we just want to pee, or poo, while we’re out.

Sitting to pee requires entering a cubicle, turning around and removing some clothes. For starters, this takes longer than walking in and unzipping a fly. There are handbags to hang – for security, for access to tampons, to change our laddered tights. There are simply more women than men and fewer toilet facilities available. Even when there are an equal number toilets available, we don’t get equal access, because there are more of us using them, we have to go more often and we spend longer in there.

For a range of historical, rather than biological, reasons, toilets in the West are typically gender segregated. The Ladies room generally consists of one toilet per cubicle, for anything that needs doing. These take up more space than The Gents, where men’s functions are split: shared urinals for peeing, individual cubicles for poo, etcetera.

So isn’t the answer for women to make like a man and stand? The idea is at least as old as democracy (yes, there is an ancient Greek vase illustrated with a woman standing to pee.). And as we saw at Glastonbury, it can work. But, only as long as it’s culturally sanctioned. Society has to be down with it. And they’re not. We’re not. I’m not. Not really.

Secretly you see, I kept my She-Pee. Partly out of nostalgia for queueless loos, but also because I imagined I might slip it into my purse and use it to crush some toilet oppression out one night. I had visions of leading a queue of toilet warriors into The Gents, which would be full of sparkling available urinals into which we would gloriously relieve ourselves.

But I never led the revolution. I continued to queue, and the She-Pee stayed in its pouch. Because in practice, women need the right clothes, with zips and folds in the right places, if they’re going to stand and pee. And if they’re using existing loos, they need a device, like a She-Pee, and the problem with the She-Pee, aside from the obvious – if you don’t hold it right you will get wee on your pants – the problem is, it’s predicated on the assumption there is something inherently wrong with women’s bodies. So rather than providing more and better toilets that meet the needs of over half of humanity, women are expected to purchase a device with their (at least) twelve-percent-less-earnings, to enable them to stand and pee. As if our ‘lack’ of penis is the issue.

Of course, our lack of penis is the issue. Most legislators, urban planners and architects in New Zealand (and the US, Australia and UK) are men. People with penises decide who gets what toilet and how many. Even though urinals are messier, harder to clean and not necessarily popular with men, the entrenchment of gender roles and male entitlement clings tight to the bowl of old ways.

If women are going to stand and pee, toilets need to be designed for women’s bodies, and we need to train our girls from childhood how to handle their genitals to direct the flow. All par for the course for men, but women? Hell, I didn’t even know you could direct female flow until a few weeks ago.

However, it turns out, there are also many men who prefer not to stand. They like to sit for number ones as well as number twos. They like to sit privately and silently. They do not necessarily want to discuss rugby or racing or beer while weeing. They do not (necessarily) want to compare urine arcs or appendages. Sometimes they would enjoy the opportunity to sit on a public bog and indulge in a little Instagram.

Unfortunately for men, it is not socially acceptable to say you like to sit. It is a bit feminine. And feminine is bad. And sitting is an actual threat to manhood. Or so you would believe if you read British and American men’s responses to the news that European men often sit to pee. Even though it can ensure proper bladder drainage and better bladder health. Uh, uh. No way. Gotta take a stand.

So the men in charge, some of whom probably also like to sit, have subtly tried to address this matter in two ways.

The first is an outrage. If there are only two public toilets, sometimes men are allowed to use The Ladies too. Already there are a lot of people wanting to use The Ladies. In fact, The Ladies is full to bursting. Women, children, anyone not able-bodied, anyone who wants to change a baby’s nappy – they will all be in that queue. Now, able-bodied, child-free men are busting in too.

I was recently in Norway, a country touted for its gender equality, and this situation presented itself often. I once stopped at the aptly named Fartsmåling*. There were two public toilets. A sign for the women’s indicated everyone could use it, including men. However, only able-bodied men were allowed to use The Gents. It contained a single urinal. I know, I busted in there. But. I mean, what? Why? Why not two loos? I will let you guess outside which toilet there was a queue. In that queue there also was a man. I hope he used this time to consider the state of things.

This brings us to the second matter. The subject of gender-neutral toilets. A single-stall toilet anyone can use. This sounds like a solution. It could be a solution. It’s certainly been the solution suggested for addressing the needs of trans and gender-diverse people. And I think it could be the solution for reducing The Ladies Line.

Already one of the most discriminated-against groups in society, transgender and gender-diverse people have been subject to several controversial ‘bathroom bills’ introduced in states such as North Carolina in the US. These force people to use the bathroom that matches the gender on their birth certificate – rather than the gender they identify with, when using government-owned toilets. It doesn’t take much to realise the kind of distress, pain and humiliation this causes. Even Bush-appointed Judge Thomas Schroeder said, “We’re going to have people dressed like men, who consider themselves men, walking into a women’s restroom. How is that going to work?”

A frequently heard suggestion is that trans and gender-diverse people opt to use single-stall gender-neutral public toilets. However, these are few and far between, if they exist at all. Many people in affected states now plan their entire day around the likelihood of needing to use a toilet, including going without liquids and suffering in pain.

So while it may be true that people are equal in their need to use the loo, it is only some people who get to decide who can use a toilet with convenience and comfort. And we don’t need to look far to see that the more you resemble those with that power, the more likely you are to find yourself quickly and conveniently relieved.

Which brings us back to men.

Because unfortunately, the single-stall gender-neutral toilet solution requires an examination of men’s toilet habits. Evidence, put forward by men themselves, suggests they are unable to guarantee they can pee, poo, do whatever within the confines of the toilet bowl. Surely this is not a natural state caused by too few X chromosomes? Men seem quite capable: they hold most government posts, run most companies, they earn more – all of which is of course down to merit. It must be possible for them to learn to aim with precision, avoid splashback, and… just sit down to pee?

An increase in toilets available to women also stands to benefit men. Not only because men will probably use those loos too, but because it will reduce male crossness. Currently, when a woman comes out of The Ladies, after maybe days of waiting, bent with a phantom still-full bladder, the male in her company will be standing, often as not, arms folded, glaring as she approaches.

Why is he so cross? she thinks. Is he in fact at the end of some extraordinary male toilet queue? She glances around but can only see other cross-faced men standing wherever they choose. Perhaps the ambulance is already outside, waiting to take him and his straining bladder to hospital? But, no. He is cross because he has had to wait. While she’s been larging it up in the basement, foot propping open a heavy door, as a hopeless but ceaseless hand-dryer blows malodorous wafts down The Ladies Line.

So men, see? You too stand to gain from increasing the number of loos available for women. It will improve your mood, your bladder health and add minutes back to your day. With your XY power and dominance of toilet change-makers, you can make this happen. Women may even love you for it.

Because as we were reminded last month, a toilet can be a place of love. But mile-high style loving aside, there was one love-vibe at Glastonbury I truly dug: the triumph for women’s liberation I experienced entering The She-Pee urinal. No waiting. None. Some women punched the air as they entered.

Because men take no-queue-loos as the norm. Yet, when potty-parity was attempted at the Adelphia Coliseum sports stadium in the US and men had to wait in line, it wasn’t the air they punched, it was each other. And men complained so much about queueing at Chicago’s Soldier Field stadium that guess what? They converted some of the women’s toilets into men’s. Because it turns out, it’s OK for some people to wait, as long as those people are not men-people.

As those men found out, waiting for the loo is frustrating, painful and time-wasting. It can make you angry. But from anger springs action. Which makes me wonder: what if women stopped cleaning loos? Stopped wiping up the mess made by boys and men? What if they started busting into The Gents to breastfeed, vomit, change nappies and tampons and tights, to pee and poo? Would the nation come to a smelly standstill? Would the men rise up to take back their oversupply of loos? If the women of Iceland can bring their nation to a halt to prove a point, surely we could too?

And who knows, with all that extra time in the week, women even might solve a few lingering issues: poverty, climate change, the Auckland Housing Crisis.

It’s the twenty-first century. A self-confessed sexual predator has just been elected president of the United States. This is no time for the ladies to wait.

* Fartsmåling was not the name of the stop, as we presumed, but a sign indicating we were in a speed monitoring zone.

** Violet Hunter is a pseudonym.