Understanding and Preventing Online Sexual Exploitation of Children

Ethel Quayle, Kurt Ribisl, Kurt M. Ribisl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415689403
• eBook ISBN: 9781136464676
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the last decade there has been dramatically increased interest in the ways that technology has been used in the abuse and exploitation of children, due in part to increasing numbers of convictions for child pornography-related offenses.

Opinion swings between those who feel that there is a danger of distorting the threat posed to children by technology, and those for whom it appears that the threat has been grossly underestimated. Current literature surrounding the debate at times seems to create more questions than answers and what quickly becomes apparent is that the data we have to inform our understanding is partial, potentially context specific, and at times seemingly contradictory.

This book broadens our understanding of the complex nature of online sexual exploitation of children and considers the risk that those engaged in Internet-related offences pose to children in both the online and offline environments. It focuses on cutting-edge research and conceptual thinking that views perpetrators within context, examines those impacted by such offending, describes emerging legal and policy issues, and proposes innovative strategies for prevention within a dynamic global environment.

Understanding and Preventing Online Sexual Exploitation of Children responds to the growing call for help across all practice areas, from judicial to therapeutic, and will provide an invaluable resource for practitioners and policy makers working in the field, as well as students and academics studying sexual exploitation and cyber crime.

Part I

Abusive images and
their emergence as a
significant problem

1 An introduction to the problem

Ethel Quayle, University of Edinburgh
School of Health in Social Science

Roberta Sinclair, National Child
Exploitation Coordination Centre

Overview

This chapter is about photographs: still and moving sexualized images of children, variously called child pornography, abuse images or child exploitation materials. In the chapter we will look critically at some of the assumptions which underlie the criminalization of these materials; the ways in which they are used by offenders; the content of these images; desistance from their use; social contexts for their use; and, the thorny problem of self-generated content. Inevitably, in trying to address these issues, we will touch upon areas covered by other chapters in this book as well as making reference to some of the same literature, much of it written since 2000.

The last ten years have seen a substantial increase in the number of international research publications, policy documents and legislative changes in relation to these photographs. This increased interest in part reflects the growing number of people in the criminal justice system convicted of crimes related to the production, distribution and possession of child pornography (Wolak et al., 2008), a perceived threat that children are at risk of victimization related to technological change (Altobelli, 2010) and possible concern about children and young people's engagement with Internet media, and their capacity to generate content (Ostrager, 2010). However, as early as 2001, Adler was raising concerns as to whether the proliferation of laws in the United States related to child pornography was potentially problematic, making us look at children through paedophilic eyes and, more recently, McKee (2010) has asserted that there is no element of culture today that is not claimed by someone to cause harm to children. There are many reasons underlying such concerns. In May 2008 the Australian Federal police removed a series of artworks by internationally renowned photo media artist Bill Henson from the walls of a Sydney gallery just hours before his exhibition was due to open. They did so in response to an allegation that the invitation to the opening carried an image of child pornography (Hinkson, 2009). In addition there are very different concerns that a preoccupation with media and harm to children diverts attention and resources away from the more substantial problems related to contact sexual offences against children (Wolak et al., 2008). At times it appears that there is a polarization of opinion expressed as concerns about either the presence of (Internet Safety Technical Taskforce, 2008), or lack of (Jenkins, 2009), moral panic about these crimes.

One of the challenges in talking about these photographs, and the people who produce and use them, relates to language. Whilst most national and supranational laws use the term child pornography (Akdeniz, 2008), we still see reference to obscenity (Adler, 2008) and indecent content. Outside the United States, and the legal system, there is a growing preference for calling these photographs child abuse images (Jones and Skogrand, 2005), child exploitation materials (Carr, 2009) and indecent images of children (IIOC: Long et al., under review). This is thought to more adequately capture the content of these images and the ways that they are used, and moves us away from uncritical comparisons with adult pornography (Taylor and Quayle, 2003). There are equally a variety of terms used to describe the producers and users of such materials: paedophiles (Seto, 2010; Holt et al., 2010); online sex offenders (Babchishin et al., 2010; Bourke and Hernandez, 2008); Internet sexual offenders (Elliott, Beech, Mandeville-Norden et al., 2009); and Internet-based sexual offenders (Henry et al., 2010). This becomes even more confusing with reference to people whose offences involve downloading abusive images of children as well as the commission of a contact offence or the sexual abuse of a child who is photographed and the image uploaded onto the Internet. Sheldon and Howitt (2008) described these people as ‘mixed offenders’ as they had committed both contact and Internet child pornography offences, while Wolak et al. (2005) used the term ‘dual offenders’. Does this matter? At its most simplistic, it makes comparison between samples a challenge as it is not immediately apparent whether reference is being made to populations with the same characteristics. However, on another level it reflects some concerns as to whether we are adopting a criminal justice stance or a clinical stance (Kramer, 2010), which is also reflected in the use of language such as minor-attracted people or adults (Goode, 2009) and whether we should always define such children as ‘victims’ (e.g. Riegel, 2010; Malón, 2009).

Harm or rights?

One assumption underpinning the interest in abuse images is that of harm. This may be expressed as harm towards the child who was depicted in the image, but equally harm has been argued to take place when someone views the image of the child, even without any contact having taken place. The reasoning is that there is the potential for additional harm, as looking at images may increase the likelihood of the commission of a contact offence against a child at some point in the near, or distant, future. Such arguments have become enshrined in the laws of many countries with, for example, the US Department of Justice prosecuting possession under the rationale that (1) possession leads to contact offences; (2) demand drives supply; and (3) the availability constitutes continued and indirect abuse of the child depicted (Bausbaum, 2010). Mirkin (2009) has challenged assumptions of harm, arguing that the majority of images depict children not engaged in acts that are harmful in themselves (such as individual or group masturbation), with Malón's (2009) and Riegel's (2010) discussion of the ‘participating victim’ adding to the broader debate.

However, the harm argument presents problems for us when we consider images of children that we might argue are exploitative (such as photographs taken without the child's knowledge on the beach or in a changing room), but where no actual contact has taken place. In such a context the child, or the person looking after it, may never know that the images have been taken or their potential for distribution. A further challenge lies in the criminalization of ‘non-photographic pornographic images of children’ (NPPIC) which became a new offence in the United Kingdom under the Coroner and Justice Act 2009. Ost (2010) argues that it is difficult to find a legitimate basis for the prevention of completely fabricated NPPIC through the application of the harm principle, and that moral-based arguments are not convincing since legal moralism, or moral paternalism, should not be acceptable grounds for criminalization. However, the argument that NPPIC, or virtual child pornography, perpetuates a market for pornography involving actual children and thereby causes substantial indirect harm to society is firmly held by many concerned with its use and criminalization (Mains, 2010).

Concern with harm is not a spurious argument. One might argue that conduct should be criminalized only if it is directly harmful, although it is the case that some criminal wrongdoing does take place without causing any direct harm (e.g. trespass). In such cases, as with some abusive images, a case is made for indirect harm as a justification for criminalization. Stewart (2010) alleges that this strategy justifies the criminalization of a wide range of conduct on the basis of the fear, worry and anxiety it generates among those who are not the direct victims. His alternative is to recognize that people have the right to be treated in a certain way because they are persons, as well as rights that are based on their interests and are subordinate to the harm principle. This is enshrined in Article 3 of the United Nations Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography, which entered into force in 2002 and states that each ‘State Party shall ensure that, as a minimum, producing, distributing, disseminating, importing, exporting, offering, selling or possessing for the above purposes child pornography as defined in Article 2 are fully covered under its criminal or penal law, whether these offences are committed domestically or transnationally or on an individual or organized basis’.

It might have been thought that such arguments about ‘harm’, ‘rights’ and the morality of abusive images (King, 2008; Oswell, 2006) might have led to further research on the children within the images, but it is of interest that such research is limited and largely pre-dates the Internet (see Renold and Creighton, 2003). An exception to this is the work of Svedin and Back (2003) with a sample of Swedish children (see Chapter 2 for a more substantial discussion). While it would be unfair to say that there has not been a considerable investment made in many countries to understand the risks posed to children by technology-mediated communication (e.g. Livingstone et al., 2010; Wolak et al., 2008) outside activities by law enforcement the focus for intervention has largely been on educating children about grooming or online sexual solicitation (Davidson et al., 2009 as an example). In the larger context of child protection, education interventions seem to provide the most adequate evidence base (Finkelhor, 2009), but outside of educating children about the dangers of self-generated content or ‘sexting’, very little seems to have been written about child protection strategies in the context of abusive images. Here, industry does seem to have played an increasing role by entering into voluntary or mandated agreements in many countries to block websites or remove content (Eneman, 2010).

The use of abusive images

It is very difficult to ascertain the numbers of abusive and exploitative images of children available through the Internet, or indeed the number of children that may be involved in their production, but it does seem self-evident that the nature of the Internet means that such content is cumulative, with more and more images being added to what is already available (Taylor and Quayle, 2003). Few studies have examined these images, which in part may be due to the difficulties in researchers gaining access without committing an offence (Adler, 2008; Blevins and Anton, 2008; Jenkins, 2009) along with the ethical challenges posed by repeat viewing. It might seem that the seriousness of the problem has largely been measured in terms of the number of offenders in the criminal justice system and the proportion of these who have already committed a contact offence or who are deemed at risk of committing one. Where the images in their possession have been explored this is most often in relation to what it might tell us about the offender: the nature of their sexual interests and fantasies, their sexual orientation, and the intensity of their interest or preoccupation. All of this reflects a legitimate concern with the offender and the nature of the offence, but unlike the research on solicitation or grooming, does little to help us understand what has happened from the perspective of the child (see Leonard, 2010).

Paradoxically, more recent interest in the images of these children has arisen as a means of better understanding the offender's motivation and sexual orientation without having to rely on self-report measures such as questionnaires or interviews (Glasgow, 2010 and Chapter 10). Research using indirect measures such as the polygraph (Buschman, Bogaerts et al., 2010; Buschman, Wilcox et al., 2010) would seem to indicate that when questioned, Internet sex offenders overestimate the ages of the children in the images that they have downloaded as well as the severity of the exploitation or abuse, or the number of children with whom they have committed a contact offence. Such inconsistencies in the reporting of offence-related behaviour may be construed positively as a protective measure, indicating awareness of the ‘wrongness’ of the behaviour and decreasing the risk of subsequent offending (Harkins et al., 2010). It may also be framed as impression management, or even lying (e.g. Lippert et al., 2010). In part, this fuels our concern that an interest in abuse images is a good indicator of paedophilic interest (Seto, 2010) and that the content of images may prove to relate to who might also commit contact offences and how such offences might find expression (Long et al., under review).

The ongoing concern with how similar, or different, Internet sex offenders are from contact offenders dominates much of the current research (e.g. Neutze et al., 2010). It is apparent that a proportion of people who commit an online offence involving abuse images share similar characteristics to those who offend in the offline environment. Henry et al. (2010) performed a cluster analysis of the scores of a standard psychometric screening battery (part of the Sex Offender Treatment Evaluation Project (STEP) test battery, Beech et al., 1999) provided by the UK National Probation Service on 422 men convicted of Internet sex offences. The majority were convicted of downloading indecent images of children, with thirtyeight convicted of taking images and one man of enticement. Three clusters were identified which were labelled: normal, inadequate, and deviant. Those in the normal cluster were more emotionally stable and less pro-offending in attitude but scored higher for social desirability than men in the inadequate or deviant clusters. The inadequate cluster was characterized by socio-affective difficulties, deficits in levels of self-esteem and emotional loneliness. The deviant group were characterized by very poor victim empathy. The authors felt that their results were similar to the clusters found in contact offender groups. In addition Seto et al. (2011) found that approximately half of a sample of Canadian online offenders admitted to committing a contact sexual offence and 12.2 per cent had an official history of contact sexual offences.

However, it is evident that there are differences between Internet and contact offenders related to demographic characteristics such as age, level of education and measures of intelligence (Eke et al., 2010) as well as psychological variables such as cognitive distortions, emotional dysregulation, empathy and impression management (Howitt and Sheldon, 2007; Bates and Metcalf, 2007; Middleton et al., 2006). Babchishin et al. (2010) in their meta-analysis of twenty-seven samples found that online offenders tended to be Caucasian males younger than the general population, who, although they did not differ in terms of education, were more likely to be unemployed. Both online and offline offenders were more likely to have experienced physical and sexual abuse than the general population. In comparison with offline offenders, online offenders had greater victim empathy, greater sexual deviancy and lower impression management. These authors concluded that youth and unemployment are risk factors for online sexual offending and that this was consistent with typical crime patterns.

Research on the offence histories of Internet offenders and the likelihood of future offending would suggest that with a longer period post-offence more offenders are detected for new offences, with recidivism for contact sexual offences predicted by criminal history, and in particular violent offence history and the age of the offender at the time of their first conviction (Eke et al., 2010). Importantly, this study also examined failures on conditional release, in particular where offenders put themselves in ‘risky’ situations, such as being alone with children. The finding that one-quarter of the extended sample was charged with failures was consistent with the findings from other sex offender groups. Such failures included breaches of conditions about being alone with children, accessing the Internet and contacting children and downloading child abuse materials, as well as other violations which were non-sexual or indicated non-compliance. This is of interest because while 34 per cent of offenders had a charge for any type of further offence, only 4 per cent were charged with any new contact sexual offence and 7 per cent were charged with new child pornography-rela...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Part 1 Abusive images and their emergence as a significant problem
• Part 2 Legal, social and familial contexts of abuse
• Part 3 Prevention and harm reduction
• Index