Child Pornography Research Articles

Changes in sexual thoughts and behaviors in a clinical sample of child sexual abuse material users under the COVID-19 pandemic

In this article, we describe a qualitative study in which we examined perceived effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on help-seeking individuals who access child sexual abuse material (CSAM, legally referred to as child pornography). The study recruited 18 participants who were part of the internet based Prevent It Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) clinical trial, which aims to reduce CSAM use and child exploitation, and were willing to answer questions during a semi-structured interview about the perceived impact of the pandemic restrictions on their lives, including their sexual thoughts and behaviors. Key themes that were identified from the participants’ answers included changes in day-to-day life, mental health, sexual thoughts, behaviors or urges, responses and coping strategies used to deal with sexual urges, changes on the forums, positive changes, and how they could best be assisted with coping in this situation. Our qualitative analysis also suggested that the pandemic affected urges to use CSAM, therefore potentially increasing the risk of online sexual offending. These results support that there is a need to investigate this potential negative side effect of quarantines or lockdowns before future pandemics.

Some Comments on the Criminalization and the Investigation of the Crime of Harassment in the Romanian Law

Starting from the provisions of Article 208 of the Romanian Criminal Code, which refers to the crime of harassment, the article proposed to analyze the crime of harassment both at the national and international level by means of Directive 2011/92/EU on combating sexual abuse on children, sexual exploitation of children and child pornography and the Council of Europe Convention on the protection of children against sexual exploitation and sexual abuse. The article also presents and analyzes issues related to criminalization and the investigation of the new forms of harassment carried out through information and communications technology.

What Frontline Professionals Need to Combat Child Maltreatment Online

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.

Occult fractures detected on radiographs in young children with a concern for abusive head trauma.

To determine the incidence of children < 2 years old with suspected abusive head trauma, to evaluate usage of dedicated skeletal radiographs and the incidence of clinically occult fractures on dedicated skeletal radiographs. This is a retrospective single centre study of children < 2 years old with traumatic brain injury, referred to the University Hospital's Social Services Department between December 31, 2012 and December 31, 2020. Clinical and demographic data was retrieved from medical notes and imaging was reviewed by paediatric radiologists. 26 children (17 males), 2 weeks to 21 months of age (median age 3 months) were included. Eleven children (42%) had traumatic history, fourteen children (54%) had one or more bruises, eighteen children (69%) had abnormal neurological findings. 16 children (62%) had dedicated skeletal radiographs, 7 children (27%) had radiographs of part of the skeleton and 3 children (11%) had no skeletal radiographs. 5 out of 16 children (31%) with dedicated skeletal radiographs had a clinically occult fracture. 15 (83%) of clinically occult fractures had high specificity for abuse. The incidence of suspected abusive head trauma in children < 2 years old is low. Clinically occult fractures were detected in one third of children with dedicated skeletal radiographs. The majority of these fractures have high specificity for abuse. Dedicated skeletal imaging is not performed in more than one third of the children and hence fractures may be missed. Efforts should be taken to increase awareness of child abuse imaging protocols.

Image Hashing Robust Against Cropping and Rotation

Image recognition is an important mechanism used in various scenarios. In the context of multimedia forensics, its most significant task is to automatically detect already known child and adolescent pornography in a large set of images. When fighting disinformation, it is used to identify images taken out of context or image montages. For this purpose, numerous methods based on robust hashing and feature extraction are already known, and recently also supported by machine learning. However, in general, these methods are either only partially robust to changes such as rotation and pruning, or they require a large amount of data and computation. We present a method based on a simple block hash that is efficient to compute and memory efficient. To be robust against cropping and rotation, we combine the method with image segmentation and a method to normalize the rotation of the objects. Our evaluation shows that the method produces results comparable to much more complex approaches, but requires fewer resources.

Are all Sex Criminals the Same? Consumers of Child Pornography Reconsidered

A theoretical and practical distinction is drawn between sex offenders and consumers of child pornography on the bases of their unique and different psychological makeups and motives to offend. Distinct psychological profiles have been revealed in clinical practice and in research between “active” sex offenders (e.g., sexual assault, sexual abuse, molestation, active pedophiles, etc.) and “passive” sex offenders (i.e., those prosecuted for consumption of child pornography). Recommendations are made for legislation changes and development of treatment approaches, based on these differences.

Putusan Pemidanaan dalam Perkara Tindak Pidana Membantu Menyediakan Pornografi Anak: Studi Putusan PN Bandung

Pornography is an act that causes anxiety and concern for the community. Viewing pornographic videos is increasingly accessible, both through print and electronic media. The development of media with pornographic elements has increased the existence of pornographic crimes among the public. The definition of a pornographic crime is an immoral act related to sex in the form of a picture, sketch, photograph, writing, video or through other media shown in public which violates the norms of decency in society. This study aims to, firstly, analyze the suitability of the Bandung District Court's decision number 517/Pid.Sus/2018/Pn.Bdg regarding the crime of assisting in providing child pornography based on trial facts. Second, analyzing the imposition of weighting for criminal law subjects that are specific in nature. This research method uses normative juridical research methods with statutory and conceptual approaches. The conclusions obtained are, firstly the Judge in his ruling stated that the defendants were proven guilty of committing the crime of helping to provide child pornography which was not in accordance with the facts of the trial as seen from the testimony of witnesses and the testimony of the defendant and in that decision the victim was a child so the actions of the defendants were more in line with the crime allowing children to commit obscene acts, therefore the punishment is heavier than the Pornography Law. Second, the Pornography Law does not regulate the burden of criminal penalties for special criminal law subjects such as those closest to the victim. When compared with the Child Protection Act, this regulates criminal sanctions for legal subjects of special criminal offenses with an additional 1/3 (one third) of the threat of the article. So the punishment for those closest to the child is more severe than for other people who are not the closest person to the child victim.

Recognition of tor malware and onion services

The transformation of the contemporary societies through digital technologies has had a profound effect on all human activities including those that are in the realm of illegal, unlawful, and criminal deeds. Moreover, the affordances provided by the anonymity creating techniques such as the Tor protocol which are beneficial for preserving civil liberties, appear to be highly profitable for various types of miscreants whose crimes range from human trafficking, arms trading, and child pornography to selling controlled substances and racketeering. The Tor similar technologies are the foundation of a vast, often mysterious, sometimes anecdotal, and occasionally dangerous space termed as the Dark Web. Using the features that make the Internet a uniquely generative knowledge agglomeration, with no borders, and permeating different jurisdictions, the Dark Web is a source of perpetual challenges for both national and international law enforcement agencies. The anonymity granted to the wrong people increases the complexity and the cost of identifying both the crimes and the criminals, which is often exacerbated with lack of proper human resources. Technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence come to the rescue through automation, intensive data harvesting, and analysis built into various types of web crawlers to explore and identify dark markets and the people behind them. It is essential for an effective and efficient crawling to have a pool of dark sites or onion URLs. The research study presents a way to build a crawling mechanism by extracting onion URLs from malicious executables by running them in a sandbox environment and then analysing the log file using machine learning algorithms. By discerning between the malware that uses the Tor network and the one that does not, we were able to classify the Tor using malware with an accuracy rate of 91% with a logistic regression algorithm. The initial results suggest that it is possible to use this machine learning approach to diagnose new malicious servers on the Tor network. Embedding this kind of mechanism into the crawler may also induce predictability, and thus efficiency in recognising dark market activities, and consequently, their closure.

Concerns about Cybersecurity: The Implications of the use of ICT for Citizens and Companies

The widespread use of Information and Communication Technologies - ICT substantially increases the risks related to information security. In fact, due to the increase in the number and type of cyber attacks, Cybersecurity has become a growing concern in today's society. This phenomenon affects not only individual citizens, but also companies and even State entities. Despite the numerous advantages of this "digitalisation" of society, there are several risks, ranging from identity theft, scam emails or phone calls, online fraud, offensive material and child pornography, material promoting racial hatred or religious extremism, access to online services, email account hacking, online banking fraud, cyber extortion or malicious software. In order to determine the impact that cyber attacks have on society it is necessary to understand how people and companies use ICTs, such as social networks, the information they share, their privacy concerns, or the use of electronic services such as online payments or the cloud. This study becomes central not only to try to prevent/minimise risks, showing what has been done in this area, but more importantly, the way forward to try to prevent or minimise possible risks in the future.

Content Moderators’ Strategies for Coping with the Stress of Moderating Content Online

Commercial content moderators are exposed to a range of stressors at work, including analysing content that has been flagged as harmful. However, not much is known about their specific coping strategies. Depth interviews were conducted with 11 content moderators exposed to child sexual abuse material (CSAM) as part of their job, and thematically analysed to investigate both individual coping strategies and those deployed organisationally. Results highlighted the importance of social support and validation of the role, as well as creating boundaries between work and home life. Moderators expressed a preference for mandatory, individual therapy with professionals who had specific experience supporting those exposed to CSAM. How content moderators cope and can be further supported are discussed.

A Systematic Review into Risk and Protective Factors for Online Sex Offending

With the increased availability of the internet and new technologies, use of the internet to commit sex offences has been well documented. Despite increased interest, no systematic review has yet evaluated the risk and protective factors evidenced for online sex offending among those engaged in such behaviour. The current review aims to investigate this via a systematic review of 43 relevant articles. The emerged focus was on child abuse images. Thematic analysis identified seven risk factors: evidence for cognitive distortions; difficulties with relationships; managing isolation, loneliness, and boredom; psychological traits connected to low self-worth, poor psychological health, and impulse challenges; interest in deviant sexual material; child abuse images as reinforcing for emotions; and developing a hyper-fixation and preoccupation with sex. Limitations and implications are discussed, including the absence of researched protective factors.

GOVERNMENT LEGAL POLICY AND SOCIETY'S ROLE IN OVERCOMING THE PRACTICE OF COMMERCIAL SEXUAL EXPLOITATION OF CHILDREN

The practice of commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) in several areas in South Sulawesi Province is a phenomenon that is very troubling to the community. The government has been faced with many problems that have damaged the future of children. This study aims to determine the form of CSEC and analyze government legal policies and the role of society in preventing the practice of CSEC. This is empirical legal research with data sources from government officials and the public. CSEC covers prostituted children, child pornography, trafficking of children for sexual purposes, child sex tourism, and child marriage in certain cases. Responding to the widespread practice of CSEC, the government and society have taken several legal steps to overcome the practice and prevent the consequences that arise through counseling and law enforcement, especially against the perpetrators.

THE ROLE OF THE KOPASSUS 81 UNIT IN DEALING WITH CYBER TERRORISM: A CONFLICT RESOLUTION EFFORT IN INDONESIA

Facing the current developments in the global environment, terrorist groups have been able to utilize cyberspace to carry out acts of terrorism against vital national installations and national information infrastructure. The rise of cyber crimes in the form of identity fraud, child pornography, fraud, and digital-based terrorism are threats that must be faced by all components of the nation. If this problem is not prevented from developing immediately, then a series of other problems will surface and more and more individuals will be affected by terrorism via cyberspace, so that cyberterrorist groups will be free to carry out their actions. In an effort to prevent the threat of cyber terrorism in Indonesia, the role of the 81 anti-terror Special Forces Unit is needed which specifically handles the threat of terrorism in an offensive and optimal manner. This study aims to analyze the role of the Kopassus Unit 81 in preventing the threat of terrorism, by choosing a qualitative research method. From the results of the research it was found that the development of cyber terrorism threats in Indonesia is very advanced and dangerous, for this reason an optimal role is needed from the Kopassus unit in dealing with cyber terrorism threats to support national defense. This study concludes that progress in the field of science, especially Information and Communication Technology can have a negative impact in creating contemporary crimes known as cybercrimes so that this condition has the potential to increase the spectrum of threats to National Defense.Keywords: optimizatioan; kopassus; cyber terrorism; national defense.

SoK: Content Moderation for End-to-End Encryption

Popular messaging applications now enable end-to-end-encryption (E2EE) by default, and E2EE data storage is becoming common. These important advances for security and privacy create new content moderation challenges for online services, because services can no longer directly access plaintext content. While ongoing public policy debates about E2EE and content moderation in the United States and European Union emphasize child sexual abuse material and misinformation in messaging and storage, we identify and synthesize a wealth of scholarship that goes far beyond those topics. We bridge literature that is diverse in both content moderation subject matter, such as malware, spam, hate speech, terrorist content, and enterprise policy compliance, as well as intended deployments, including not only privacy-preserving content moderation for messaging, email, and cloud storage, but also private introspection of encrypted web traffic by middleboxes. In this work, we systematize the study of content moderation in E2EE settings. We set out a process pipeline for content moderation, drawing on a broad interdisciplinary literature that is not specific to E2EE. We examine cryptography and policy design choices at all stages of this pipeline, and we suggest areas of future research to fill gaps in literature and better understand possible paths forward.

Extreme medical misconduct: 49 UK-registered doctors involved in child pornography, dealt with by the General Medical Council 2012-2020.

Between 1 June 2012 and 31 December 2020, there were 49 cases considered by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service where a doctor's misconduct involved child pornography. The determinations concerning these cases provided the data for analysis. In 47/49 (96%) the regulatory outcome was erasure from the GMC's Medical Register, ending the doctor's career. 12 doctors had been imprisoned for 1 to 20 years, and 19 given suspended prison sentences. In 33/49 (67%) cases the indecent images of children included one or more video recordings. Some of these were of children (including very young infants) being raped, sometimes for prolonged periods, the video recordings sometimes indicating that the child could be seen to be in extreme pain. The high proportion of erasures reflected the gravity of these cases, coupled with the fundamental incompatibility of sexual misconduct involving children with a career in medicine.

Factors Associated With Contact Sexual Offending Among a Non-Forensic Sample of Women With Sexual Interest in Children - Results From an Anonymous Online Survey.

This study aimed at assessing the extent to which factors associated with male child sexual offending may also be applicable to women with a self-identified sexual interest in children. Participants (n = 42) took part in an anonymous online survey covering questions about general characteristics, general sexuality, sexual interest in children, and previously-perpetrated contact child sexual abuse. Group comparisons between women who reported committing contact child sexual abuse compared to those who had not were conducted in terms of sample characteristics. Furthermore, the two groups were compared regarding the factors of high sexual activity, use of child abuse material, indication of ICD-11 pedophilic disorder diagnosis, exclusivity of sexual interest in children, emotional congruence with children, and childhood maltreatment. Our results revealed that high sexual activity, indication of ICD-11 pedophilic disorder diagnosis, exclusivity of sexual interest in children, and emotional congruence with children were associated with previous contact child sexual abuse perpetration. We recommend further research on potential risk factors relating to child sexual abuse on the part of women.

The Dark Web: What Is It, How to Access It, and Why We Need to Study It

The dark web is a subsection of the deep web that conventional search engines cannot index. As an encrypted network of websites, the dark web can only be accessed using special browsers such as Tor. Tor, formerly an acronym for “The Onion Router,” is a free and open-source software intended to protect the personal privacy of its users and keep their internet activities unmonitored. While the dark web is known for both legitimate and illegitimate purposes, it remains notorious for facilitating illegal and deviant activities ranging from drug dealing to child pornography, human trafficking, arms dealing, and extremist recruitment. Accordingly, researching and understanding the dark web is a critical and essential step in fighting and preventing cybercrime. However, studying the dark web poses unique challenges. This special issue seeks to provide a platform for researchers and criminologists to share and discuss research designs and methods that help shed light on the actual activity going on in the dark web’s shadowy realms.

Going dark? Analysing the impact of end-to-end encryption on the outcome of Dutch criminal court cases

Law enforcement agencies struggle with criminals using end-to-end encryption (E2EE). A recent policy paper states: “while encryption is vital and privacy and cyber security must be protected, that should not come at the expense of wholly precluding law enforcement”. The main argument is that E2EE hampers attribution and prosecution of criminals who rely on encrypted communication - ranging from drug syndicates to child sexual abuse material (CSAM) platforms. This statement - in policy circles dubbed ‘going dark’ - is not yet supported by empirical evidence. That is why, in our work, we analyse public court data from the Netherlands to show to what extent law enforcement agencies and the public prosecution service are impacted by the use of E2EE in bringing cases to court and their outcome. Our results show that in cases brought to court, the Dutch courts appear to be as successful in convicting offenders who rely on E2EE as those who do not. Our data do not permit us to draw conclusions on the effect of E2EE on criminal investigations.

Legal revision of "child pornography" (§184b German Criminal Code)

Legal revision of "child pornography" (§184b German Criminal Code)

Child Pornography Is Showing Participation a Person Under the Age of 18 in Sexual Intercourse

Child pornography means any video or image showing a person under the age of 18 engaging in sexual intercourse, showing the genital or anal area of a person under the age of 18 for sexual reasons, or any document supporting sexual intercourse with minors. Child pornography is among the most widespread forms of crime on the Internet. Child pornography is spread by pedophiles to create a personal collection, exchange material with other pedophiles, or create new material and child prostitution. Child pornography is illegal in most world jurisdictions. Convictions for possession of child pornography also usually include prison sentences, but these sentences often translate into suspended sentences for perpetrators.