Linguistic Indications of More Severe Behavior on Child Sexual Abuse Material Forums

This chapter examines the phenomenon of internet users attempting to report and prevent online child sexual exploitation (CSE) and child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in the absence of adequate intervention by internet service providers, social media platforms, and government. The chapter discusses the history of online CSE, focusing on regulatory stances over time in which online risks to children have been cast as natural and inevitable by the hegemony of a “cyberlibertarian” ideology. We illustrate the success of this ideology, as well as its profound contradictions and ethical failures, by presenting key examples in which internet users have taken decisive action to prevent online CSE and promote the removal of CSAM. Rejecting simplistic characterizations of “vigilante justice,” we argue instead that the fact that often young internet users report feeling forced to act against online CSE and CSAM undercuts libertarian claims that internet regulation is impossible, unworkable, and unwanted. Recent shifts toward a more progressive ethos of online harm minimization are promising; however, this ethos risks offering a new legitimizing ideology for online business models that will continue to put children at risk of abuse and exploitation. In conclusion, we suggest ways forward toward an internet built in the interests of children, rather than profit.

This study focusses on the potential effects of virtual child pornography on the sexual abuse of children, which is a widespread problem. Recent news items about child sexual abusers have brought the issue of pedophilia into the public eye. The media uses these two terms interchangeably. However, there is an essential difference between pedosexuals (those who sexually abuse children) and pedophiles (those who are sexually attracted to children). It is important to notice that not all pedophiles abuse children and not all pedosexuals feel sexually attracted to children. The research question is if virtual child pornography can prevent pedophiles from converting their fantasies into sexual acts. Literature retrieved by a search using PubMed. Sixty-four articles dealing with child sexual abuse, pedophilia, possible treatments for pedophilia and the effects of (virtual) child pornography were analyzed. Furthermore, information on treatment in the Netherlands was requested from the Hotline Child Pornography and an interview was arranged with Jules Mulder, therapist of pedosexuals and pedophiles at forensic psychiatric center De Waag in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Pedophilia is manifested mostly in downloading child pornography. The amount of child pornographic material available has increased dramatically. Earlier research on the characteristics of child pornography downloaders showed that there is great diversity among them; pedophiles are present in all layers of society. Despite that not all pedophiles act on their feelings there is still an elevated risk of abusing young children sexually. Therefore, preventive treatment is very important. Unfortunately, there is limited research performed on treatment for pedophilia. Experts suggest that impulse control is the highest achievable and pedophilia cannot be cured. Child pornography can be used for impulse control. Research performed in various countries showed that when downloading child pornography was allowed, the number of sexually abused children decreased. Child pornography can provide pedophiles in their sexual needs and may prevent that they will abuse young children in the future. However, the provision of child pornography as part of a treatment gives rise to an ethical dilemma, because it indirectly maintains sexual child abuse. Therefore virtual child pornography could be a solution. Further research is needed on the effects of virtual child pornography, taking into account the heterogeneity among pedophiles.

The COVID-19 global pandemic altered the social lives of people around the globe and centred our activities around the internet and new technologies even more than before. As countries around the world responded with lockdowns and social restrictions in order to prevent spreading the virus, concerns about the effects of those measures on child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) volumes on the internet and CSAM related offending online arose. While it is impossible to measure the entire volume of CSAM available online and CSAM related offending, there are some indicators that can be used to assess the scale of online CSAM and whether there was an upward or downward trend in CSAM related activity online and reporting over the pandemic time. Such indicators include the number of reports to hotlines combating CSAM, the number of criminal investigations and cases, and the measurements of the offenders’ online activity monitored by law enforcement and other entities. The aim of this paper is to analyse the data available in these areas and see how they picture the CSAM online problem during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Inherent encryption and anonymity of the Dark Web has facilitated its use for a variety of illegal activities, including the dissemination of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Detection of CSAM has increasingly turned to automated tools; however, these tools’ reliance on databases of known CSAM limit their flexibility and ability to identify previously unknown CSAM. Currently, it is unknown whether the lack of countermeasures used by CSAM disseminators on the Surface Web translates to the Dark Web. Therefore, this thesis examines the structural and naming patterns of websites hosting CSAM on the Dark Web, to identify new, complimentary, detection methods. Data were collected from 1,197 Dark Web websites using a customized web crawler. In total, 179 unique CSAM hash values, found in 3,640 locations, were analyzed. Structurally, websites on the Dark Web prioritized organization (ease of access) over countermeasures (security). 85% of images were located in the first sub-folder level, with default ‘image’ or explicitly named folders being the most common. In contrast, files were frequently innocuously named. However, one countermeasure used was the creation of duplicate, ‘mirrored’, websites. Results are compared to the Surface Web and recommendations for supplementing automated detection tools with structural and naming patterns are outlined.

Child pornography has become one of the largest social concerns in the world. The welfare of abused and exploited children has become the forefront for combatting and punishing offenders. The United States and other countries are trying to tackle child pornography by legal definitions and adjudication. Arrests are doubling, sites are gradually being removed, victims are receiving restitution, and law enforcement, politicians, and advocates are actively taking a stand to protect children. The entry will provide an overview of the history and the prevalence of issues surrounding child pornography. In addition, the legal definitions of child pornography will be defined, along with the prevalence and usage of child pornography. Lastly, the entry will examine how law enforcement and legislatives practices are trying to combat child pornography.

Children of individuals under investigation for the possession of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in the UK are referred to social work services to assess the risk of potential contact and non-contact sexual harm posed by the offender. As a result of their co-parent’s offences, the non-offending carer (NOC) finds themselves thrown into the centre of child protection investigations and parenting assessments, which is underpinned by the new reality they must face: Their partner is no longer considered safe to be left alone with children. Many of these families in the UK are left devastated as a result of these revelations and find themselves with very little support from their wider families or statutory services as they try to move forward. A minority of CSAM offenders and their respective non-offending partners are referred onto Stop It Now! Scotland and the Lucy Faithfull Foundation for support groups and psychoeducational programmes to prevent recidivism. Stop It Now! Scotland offers a specific service for non-offending partners that seeks to provide support-worker led peer support and education around online offending and how to recognise risk. The latter is especially important for non-offending partners who have children in the home, referred to in the literature and this project as NOCs. At the time of writing, very little literature exists that explores the experiences of non-offending carers and the complex role that they play in simultaneously protecting their children from potential sexual harm and managing their offending partner’s mental health, often in order to prevent further offending. This study was undertaken over the course of five years as part of my participatory action research doctoral thesis, in which I worked in collaboration with four women over two years who have lived experience of social work intervention following the arrest of their partner for possessing CSAM. This project employed creative research methods such as Photovoice, poetry and creative writing to learn more about both the lived experience of these women and what they wished their respective social workers had known in order to support them best. The findings generated from this project were nuanced and often harrowing with participants reporting poor mental health, adverse impact on children, concerns around their (ex) partners’ suicidality, fears of community and media vigilantism and recurring trauma as a result of “the Knock that changed it all.” Following this broader examination of participants’ lived experiences, the data then more closely examines the experiences participants had with social workers. This data is presented in the form of messages that participants wished to communicate to child protection practitioners and were titled by the participants as follows: ‘we are terrified’, ‘we are not the perpetrator’, ‘we are on our knees’ and ‘we want to work together to protect our children’. Following the presentation of themes, this thesis goes on to demonstrate how the participants and I utilised the findings to create a mobile exhibition wherein the photos, captions and writing were displayed at a number of key events for a variety of key stakeholders with the goal of initiating discussions around practice and policy change. This thesis then discusses the wider implications of the findings and how social workers might better respond to families impacted by CSAM.

BackgroundOnline sexual violence, exploitation and abuse of children are some of the worst forms of harm inflicted to children. Under the Convention of the Rights of Child and other international...

In order to contextualize the problems of child pornography and sexual grooming in the contemporary social and legal arena, this chapter examines their modern-day presentation, medical definitions of paedophilia, aetiological theories of sexual offending against children and popular social constructions of the ‘paedophile’. It also explores parallels between child pornography and grooming, the way in which the internet has shaped their contemporary forms, and further reveals something of the broader framework within which I will be exploring critical tensions throughout the rest of book. The occurrence of sexual acts involving children is certainly not a new phenomenon. Child prostitution and sexual abuse have occurred throughout antiquity. Since the Middle Ages it has been a criminal offence to have sexual intercourse with girls under the age of consent in England, although until the late nineteenth century the age of sexual consent was much lower than it is today. It is also true that child pornography has existed in various forms throughout history, from Ancient Greece to Victorian England. It is essential, however, to consider child pornography and grooming specifically within the context of the society in which we currently live, given the existence of a number of significant factors that impact on the nature and perceived prevalence of both phenomena and shape public attitudes towards them. However, at the same time, care needs to be taken when discussing and presenting the contemporary realities of child pornography and grooming.

In this paper, I discuss the embodied labor of policing child pornography through the ways in which algorithms and human reviewers like Linda see abuse images. I employ the concept of “apprehension” to suggest that the ways that reviewers “see” child pornography is always already oriented toward the capture and arrest of suspected offenders. As I have argued elsewhere (Author 2017; Forthcoming), the use of new digital techniques to find child pornography has fundamentally transformed and expanded policing into a distributed network of labor increasingly done by computer scientists and technology companies. Rather than suggest new software is the cause of these transformations, I draw attention to the constitutive and mutually defining relation between computing and corporeality, or how image detection algorithms need the work of human perception to put their detective skills to work. I argue further still that the case study of child pornography detection offers an entry point into examining the algorithmic management of race. I suggest that childhood innocence is coded as whiteness, and whiteness as innocence, in the algorithmic detection of victims and abusers. By taking ‘detection’ as a dynamic practice between human and machine, I make an intervention into critical algorithm studies that have tended to focus solely on the programming of racial bias into software. The algorithmic detection of child pornography hinges, crucially, upon practice and the tacit observation of human reviewers, whose instinctual feelings about child protection and offender apprehension become embedded within the reviewing and reporting process as cases escalate for law enforcement.

Rapid technological advances in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have changed the landscape of child maltreatment worldwide. Whereas historically a child was most likely to be maltreated within the family or community systems, now children can be abused by thousands of unknown and unidentified persons from anywhere on the planet. Trafficking in child sexual abuse material (CSAM), luring, grooming, and other predatory behaviors existed before the Internet. However, modern technologies have changed abusers’ points of access to children and the number of abusers who can participate in the maltreatment of a victim. New types of child maltreatment are also being invented with new technologies, such as livestreamed child sexual exploitation. In addition, the volume of certain types of child abuse has exploded exponentially such as has been documented with the trafficking in CSAM, as well as the severity of the abuse being recorded on younger and younger victims, including infants and toddlers. These changes have created challenges at all points along the child maltreatment continuum—from prevention to effective treatment leading to the full physical and psychological recovery and social reintegration of victims and survivors as are mandated by international law for many survivors. Recent research into the experiences and perspectives of frontline professionals combatting technology-facilitated child maltreatment makes clear that more training and supports are needed, such as technological resources, research into effective therapeutic treatments for survivors, consistent and accurate terminology and concepts, a modernization of the legal framework in which these crimes are investigated and prosecuted, and robust mental health supports for frontline providers. As the Kempe Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect provides education and training to thousands of frontline providers worldwide each year, Kempe is uniquely situated to provide leadership in preparing frontline providers to combat child abuse effectively in these new environments.

Objectives This study investigates pedophilic interests through the lens of conditioning, proposing that such interests can develop as a conditioned response in specific contexts. Pedophilia remains a sensitive and complex topic, necessitating further exploration to understand its ontogeny from a psychosocial perspective. Methods Three case studies were analyzed to identify conditioning pathways that led to the development of pedophilic interests. The cases included (1) an accidental exposure to child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in a professional investigation setting, (2) an unintended digital encounter with CSAM during a state of arousal, and (3) a patient with Pedophilic Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (POCD) tested feared interest through Maladaptive Exposure Conditioning (MEC). Each case was evaluated based on stimulus exposure, emotional and physiological response, and the subsequent impact on sexual interest. Results In all three cases, initial exposure combined with heightened emotional or physiological states led to a conditioned response, wherein pedophilic interest emerged as a maladaptive association. The findings suggest that these interests may not inherently reflect core attraction but rather a conditioned reaction, potentially reversible with targeted interventions. Conclusions This analysis offers critical insights into the development of pedophilic interests as a conditioned response, challenging traditional etiological perspectives. These findings have important implications for therapeutic approaches, emphasizing the potential for deconditioning techniques to address maladaptive interests and support healthier, non-harmful expressions. Further research could refine these approaches and validate deconditioning methods within clinical practice. Conflicts of Interest There are no conflicts of interest.

Requests of a sexual nature directed at minors through the internet, a phenomenon identified as online sexual harassment of minors, have shown in recent years a steadily increasing trend in the criminal statistics recorded in Spain. The main objective of the present study is to describe and compare the criminal history and recidivism of individuals arrested for online sexual harassment of minors, child sexual abuse, and child pornography, based on police records, in order to identify differential patterns of criminal behavior. To this end, information on criminal history and recidivism was extracted from three different samples of individuals arrested for offenses of online sexual harassment of minors, child pornography, and child sexual abuse. This information, initially obtained from police reports, was expanded with data from police arrest databases and subsequently subjected to statistical analysis. The methodology follows a quantitative approach with a non-experimental, exploratory, descriptive, and comparative design. The results show that both the rate of recidivism and the prevalence of previous criminal history are higher in offenses related to online sexual harassment of minors than in the other two samples. The criminal history involving other sexual offenses is also recurrently higher. From these findings, it can be inferred that the profile of the online sexual harasser of minors is much more similar to that of child sexual abuse offenders than to that of child pornography offenders. Consequently, both police response and reintegration strategies should be adapted to such characteristics.

The US federal government has developed an electronic computer tool known as the Network Investigative Technique (‘NIT’). Essentially, an NIT is a device used by law enforcement to invade an individual computer to obtain access to and obtain all types of information, including computer files, pictures, emails, and other data. This success has led to numerous prosecutions of those receiving and sharing child pornography. However, in response, defendants are starting to raise challenges to the manner in which this technology functions. The courts are struggling with where to draw the line between a defendant’s right to a fair trial, which may be infringed upon if the defendant does not have adequate understanding of how the technology works, and the government’s interest in maintaining secrecy regarding the investigative tools that it develops. For example, criminal defence attorneys in Baltimore were largely unaware that officers with the Baltimore Police Department used cell site simulators over 4,000 times in criminal investigations. This article addresses the use of NITs in the prosecution of a series of related child pornography cases. The first part addresses not only how the FBI began investigating the child pornography distribution ring, but also the issuance of a search warrant by a federal magistrate judge in Virginia that was central to the indictment and prosecution of each defendant around the country. In response to their indictment and prosecution, the defendants raised a number of legal challenges to the FBI’s use of the NIT. These various challenges are discussed in the second part. Most defendants did not succeed in avoiding a conviction for some kind of child pornography charge. However, the third part discusses one case that resisted this trend of convictions based on the notion that the defendant needed access to the NIT source code in order properly defend himself. Index words: United States of America; network investigative technique; source code; due process

In response to several high-profile violent offenses against children over the past two decades, Congress has enacted several pieces of legislation aimed at increasing punishment for those convicted of federal sex offenses. Coinciding with these enhanced penalties was a demographic shift in the composition of those prosecuted for these offenses. In the federal criminal justice system, sex offenses fall into two main categories: child pornography and sexual abuse. The racial and ethnic makeup of individuals charged for federal sex offenses has significantly changed over the past 15 years. The current study utilizes federal sentencing data from the United States Sentencing Commission for the years 2006 to 2017 to explore the nature of punishment for these offenses over time. We also employ multivariate analyses to examine differences in punishment for the two types of offenses and employ disaggregated analyses by offense type to examine temporal change in racial/ethnic disparities in sentence length and departures from the federal sentencing guidelines. Findings demonstrate that convicted individuals who are Black and Hispanic are receiving harsher sentences over time net of controls for other key predictors such as age, sex, criminal history, and presumptive sentence length. Implications for how legislatively enhanced penalties and changing demographic makeup of those convicted for these offenses may have introduced extra-legal disparity into federal sentencing are further discussed.

Recibido: 1 de mayo de 2019Aprobado: 13 de junio de 2019Se realizó un artículo de revisión con la finalidad de conocer la actualidad relacionada al delito de pornografía infantil una realidad escolar y comunitaria. Es importante destaca que el internet y redes sociales, son el cultivo perfecto para la genereación de delitos relacionados a la pornografía infantil y abuso sexual, transcendiendo las fronteras del Ecuador, reseñandose como un delito de connotación global en donde los abusadores, toman diversas pocisiones para poder comenter su fechoría sin ser detectados por las autoridades, familias e incluso por la propia victima. Los llamados Grooming, Sexting, cyberbullying, son algunas modalidades relacionadas a la pornografía infantil desde el internet y redes sociales. Aunque en el Ecuador existen leyes y programas para la prevención del delito de pornografía infantil, surge la necesidad de implementar acciones de mayor contudencia para el resguardo de la infancia.