The phenomenon of online live-streaming of child sexual abuse: Challenges and legal responses

Abstract

In the recent years, the importance of Internet in the education of children all over the world has grown enormously. But as every other phenomenon, the easy access to the Internet creates a great number of concerns that should not be neglected. Over the past two decades, the internet has become a new medium through which child exploitation and sexual abuse happens. Technology is being used not only as a means of committing old forms of sexual abuse and exploitation of children, but also for creating new ones. This variety of crime types ranges from child pornography, sexting and sextortion to online grooming, and live-streaming of child abuse. This dissertation focuses on a very current, fast developing, and not very explored topic, the phenomenon of live-streaming of child abuse. The research includes a perspective of (public) international law, the situation in Europe due to the activities of the Council of Europe and the EU and also a “reality” test with two legal system approaches, Italy and England & Wales, on how to handle online child sexual abuse material and more specifically live-streaming of such abuses. On the basis of this observation, the main objective is to critically analyze the status quo of existing framework in the area of online child sexual abuse and exploitation in order to find out how flexible it is to be applied to this specific crime, if it can be applied, and how can it be improved in order to better respond to this new global reality. Based on all of this I draw conclusions over the insufficiency of existing framework to cover the crime of live-streaming of child abuse and plead for filling the legal lacunae by extending specific criminal provisions -ideally harmonized on an international level- specially made to tackle this crime.