The Role of Child Sexual Abuse Images in Coercive and Non-Coercive Relationships with Adolescents: A Thematic Review of the Literature

Abstract

The objective of this article is to present a thematic review of literature that pertains to the role of child sexual abuse images in online coercive and non-coercive relationships with adolescents, synthesize and contextualize current research on this topic, and identify some of the complexities in the self-production of sexual images by adolescents and their potential use by offenders. This review examines why there is a trend for child abuse image production to be increasingly associated with adolescent self-produced sexual images and how this may be related to individual coercion, as well as changing social and Internet contexts. Practitioners need to understand the technological and social affordances offered by the Internet, particularly in relation to the ability to produce sexual images, as part of a more ecological approach to understanding online abuse and exploitation.