Online Child Sexual Abuse

Grooming, Policing and Child Protection in a Multi-Media World

Elena Martellozzo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415618212
• eBook ISBN: 9781136343544
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Law

Online Child Sexual Abuse: Grooming, Policing and Child Protection in a Multi-Media World addresses the complex, multi-faceted and, at times, counter-intuitive relationships between online grooming behaviours, risk assessment, police practices, and the actual danger of subsequent abuse in the physical world. Online child sexual abuse has become a high profile and important issue in public life. When children are victims, there is clearly intense public and political interest and concern. Sex offenders are society's most reviled deviants and the object of seemingly undifferentiated public fear and loathing. This may be evidenced in ongoing efforts to advance legislation, develop police tactics and to educate children and their carers to engage with multi-media and the internet safely. Understanding how sex offenders use the internet and how the police and the government are responding to their behaviour is central to the development of preventative measures. Based on extensive ethnographic research conducted with the police and a specialist paedophile unit, here Elena Marellozzo presents an informed analysis of online child sexual abuse: of the patterns and characteristics of online grooming, and of the challenges and techniques that characterize its policing. Connecting theory, research and practice in the field of policing, social policy, victimology and criminology, this book adds significantly to our understanding and knowledge of the problem of online child sexual abuse, the way in which victims are targeted and how this phenomenon is, and might be, policed.

Chapter 1

Establishing the terrain

Introduction

Children are abused every day around the world: physically, emotionally and sexually, and sometimes with very severe consequences. There is a vast amount of academic research suggesting that prolonged neglect or abuse leads to children being placed in care and which can place them at serious risk of being socially excluded as adolescents and young adults. Such young people are more likely to engage in crime (Sir John Stevens 2002) and to continue to be victimised and abused in later life (Pritchard 2004). In particular, non-consensual sexual activities between a child and an adult¹ interfere with normal development processes and lead to maladjustment later in life. Abuse is often confusing, frightening and painful, and these negative effects may continue into adulthood. In fact, child sexual abuse has come to be widely regarded as a key cause of mental health problems in adult life (Mullen and Fleming 1998). Furthermore, abuse occurs during the critical formative time, when the child is learning by experience. Therefore, it should not be surprising that victims of sexual abuse may continue to suffer from debilitating effects, such as emotional distress, anxiety, rage, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse and suicide attempts.

Arguably, the process of grooming represents the main method through which children are sexually abused. Mass media coverage seems to suggest that grooming is a new phenomenon that has developed recently with the advent of the internet (Gillespie 2008). However, this is clearly not the case. As will be argued later in this chapter, there is ample historical evidence of child sexual abuse, even though it has only been recognised as a social problem for just over two decades (Wells et al. 2007).

There is a limited but expanding literature on grooming in the cyber world. It is important to make clear from the start that with this book I do not intend to conduct a comparative analysis of online and offline grooming. On the contrary, this book is a focused case study of the process of online grooming, policing and child protection. We simply do not know enough about child sexual grooming in the real world to support a comparative analysis of grooming online and offline. Of course, where appropriate, comparisons will be made – in terms of theory, epistemology, policy and practice – regarding similarities and differences between grooming and child sexual abuse in the virtual and physical worlds. However, my analysis is firmly situated within the realm of cyberspace. In fact, what we may claim to know, however tentatively, about grooming in the physical world is so limited that it may even be counterproductive to attempt a thorough comparative analysis. Online and offline child sexual abuse take place within distinct but overlapping worlds. They are not hermetically sealed off from each other. The areas of overlap between online and offline grooming are manifold, substantive and significant. Moreover, these areas of overlap are neither straightforward nor easy to theorise or explore empirically. Because areas of overlap do exist, however, it is hoped that the generation of knowledge through sustained and focused engagement with the problem of online child sexual abuse will also contribute to a better understanding of child sexual abuse in the physical world.

It would not be possible to conduct any research exploring the problem of child sexual abuse (CSA) without defining key terms and establishing the social, political, cultural and legislative context within which this research fits. Given the ballooning interest in child sexual abuse among researchers with various disciplinary backgrounds, it is important to establish some conceptual order at the outset of this book and systematise key ideas. Therefore, it is the aim of this chapter to establish, first, what we know and what we do not know about the nature and extent of CSA. Secondly, this chapter will identify, define and critically evaluate the relevant key terms and concepts, so as to enable a better understanding of the problem of child sexual abuse as it occurs both in the real world and in cyberspace.

A necessary starting point of this analysis is the problematisation of the concept of childhood. Issues of childhood and child abuse are closely linked and, like most of the key terms addressed in this chapter, ‘childhood’ is a socially constructed and contested term whose meaning may vary significantly across space, time and context.

The second concept that deserves attention is ‘sexual abuse’. This leads to the evaluation of more complex concepts, such as child sexual abuse, the issue of consent, as well as the British legislative and political context in which child sexual abuse is constructed and prosecuted.

Finally, this chapter defines child sexual abuse in the new and much debated context of cyberspace. It distinguishes between the production and distribution of indecent images of children and online grooming and explores the legislation created to prosecute these cyber crimes.

Defining ‘childhood’

Common sense suggests that the notion of childhood is something that has been fixed and permanent throughout history. In fact, quite the opposite is true; childhood is a recent concept, which has been socially constructed over the years (Muncie 2004). The way in which society and law define childhood today is certainly different from the way it was perceived, for instance, in the European Middle Ages. In fact, the concept of childhood was neither understood nor considered during the Middle Ages, where ‘children’, for example, were completely missing from medieval icons, and notions of childhood, as understood today, did not form part of Western culture (Aries in Skelton and Valentine 1998: 3; Aries 1962). Much of the work relating to the sociology of childhood has been inspired by the French social historian Philippe Aries’ Centuries of Childhood (Aries 1962). Aries (1962) observes that this attitude towards the definition of childhood (or the lack thereof) was the outcome of interpreting children as young adults, rather than as conceptually different from adults. De Mause (1976) agrees with Aries’s hypothesis that childhood developed as a separate category from the 16th century onwards but, unlike Aries, he sees this as a highly progressive move. De Mause perceives childhood as a:

‘… [n]ightmare from which we are only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of the child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorised and sexually abused’ (De Mause 1976: 11).

His despairing view of childhood in the past is further separated into stages, ranging from the ‘infanticidal stage’ in the 4th century to the ‘helping stage’ or ‘child saving’, which commenced in the middle of the 20th century. It was through these stages that we have progressed from seeing children as having no particular needs to a distinct social group with a particular set of rights. Anthony Platt (1969) in his book The Child Savers: The Intervention of Delinquency clearly highlights the horrific treatment that many children went through, particularly orphans and those that were poor. Stone (1977) supports de Mause and Platt’s thesis and claims that adults did not invest in children prior to the 16th century because it was not considered worthwhile. Moreover, it was not until the late 16th century that childhood was ‘discovered’ as a distinctive stage in the life cycle and that children began to be seen as ‘different’ from adults, with distinct natures and needs. As Rousseau (1764 in Jenks 1996) once claimed:

‘Nature wants children to be children before they are men. If we deliberately pervert this order, we shall get premature fruits which are neither ripe nor well flavoured, and which soon decay … Childhood has ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling peculiar to itself; nothing can be more foolish than to substitute our ways for them’ (Rousseau 1764 in Jenks 1996: 3).

But how did this process of differentiation between childhood and adulthood commence? The recognition of childhood started, albeit very slowly, through the placing of responsibility on natural parents to provide a safe environment and education before children could take on an adult role and responsibilities (Prout and James 1990 in Skelton and Valentine 1998: 3). Clearly, this produced great disparities amongst children coming from different social classes (Macfarlane 1979). On the one hand, affluent families could afford the ‘luxury of childhood with its demands on material provision, time and emotion’ (Jenks 1996: 6). On the other hand, the majority of children, that is, those coming from financially disadvantaged families, were seen as a vital source of income and were expected to work as soon as they were physically independent and strong. To highlight the disparities amongst the upper class and working class, Muncie (2004) looks at the industrial revolution and points out that the children of the poor formed the bulk of factory labour, as they contributed to maintaining the necessary basic level of income for their families and were a cheap source of labour for factory owners. Therefore, it should not be particularly surprising to find that this situation remained unquestioned for many years. Throughout the 19th century, young people became more separated from the adult world. However, there was an increasing tension between the middle class, which was constantly concerned about being in control in order to protect their children from troublesome undisciplined poor children, and the working class. Pearson (1983 in Skelton and Valentine 1998: 4) points out that this tension has been repeatedly mobilised in definitions of youth and youth culture over the last 150 years and has been the protagonist of ‘moral panics’ about delinquent groups (Cohen 1997; Hall et al. 1978; Waddington 1986), youth crime and violence (Muncie 2004: 49–50; Gillis 1975) and hooliganism (Pearson 1983).

During the 20th century, psychologists gradually clarified the stages of childhood development, with the psychoanalytical work of Sigmund Freud (1946) and Erik Erikson (1982, 1950) achieving a particularly lasting influence.² Freud’s work during the early 20th century sought to systematise and develop an in-depth understanding of the process of human cognitive and moral development and the consequences of early-childhood experiences on later stages of the life cycle. In this context, Freud conceived of the human psyche in terms of the complex and only partially conscious interaction between three psychological instances, the ego, the id and the superego:

‘In his early work, Freud conceived of the ego as differentiating from the id (the inchoate instinctual forces in the individual) as a result of interaction with the environment. It is during this early stage of development that cognition also develops as a primary process (primitive or irrational thought) which is replaced in consciousness by secondary process (rational logical thought). Primary process is not eliminated, but repressed into the unconscious. In his later work, Freud postulated the development of the superego. This component of the personality is the source of much of the motivation for moral judgement and decision-making’ (Knowles and McLean 1992: 49).

Erik Erikson drew upon Freud’s work, among others, to propose an elaborate stage theory of ego development over the life course, with strong implications for an understanding of the emergence and changes in human moral judgment and actions:

‘He postulated a series of eight core developmental conflicts which occur over the life span. As these are resolved, the individual develops psychological virtues (hope, will, purpose, confidence, fidelity, love, care and wisdom). This developmental sequence differs from the psychoanalytic stages in that it focuses on virtue and moral effectiveness and is not limited to infants and children, and it has at its focus the explanation of behaviour which would be considered specifically moral’ (Knowles and McLean 1992: 49–50).

What follows from the work of Freud and Erikson is the important insight that the stages of human psycho-social development do not coincide neatly and necessarily with age; rather, the development of the psyche and the interaction of its different instances with each other is shaped by a variety of social contextual factors. These are brought to bear upon the development of the psyche with particular force during early developmental stages in childhood, but continue to be of lasting influence over the life course.

It is clear that notions of childhood have been gradually discovered, identified and constructed throughout the centuries and that, despite all these attempts at constituting childhood as a clearly bounded social category, it still remains fluid and contested:

‘… The boundary separating child and adult is a decidedly fuzzy one. Adolescence is an ambiguous zone within which the child/adult boundary can be variously located according to who is doing the categorising. Thus, adolescents are denied access to the adult world, but they attempt to distance themselves from the world of the child. At the same time they retain this link with childhood’ (Sibley 1995 in Skelton and Valentine 1998: 4).

These boundaries are even more pronounced if legal classifications are taken into account, such as the age at which young people can smoke, drink, work, earn money, consent to sexual intercourse etc. In this context, James points out that ‘the only boundaries which define the teenage years are boundaries of exclusion which define what young people are not, cannot do or cannot be’ (James 1986 in Skelton and Valentine 1998). Lanning (2005) takes this analysis further and argues that terms such as ‘sexual exploitation of children and youth’ or ‘sexual exploitation of children and adolescents’ imply that a youth or an adolescent is not a child. This begs the question: At what age does a child become a youth or an adolescent? (Waites 2005: 145; Lanning 2005: 51). In answering this question, a number of conflicts emerge between the law and society’s viewpoint that need to be taken into account. The difficulty is that, when children are between the age of 13 and the age of 17, they may often look like adults; they are able to reproduce and may have developed an early sex drive. However, within some societies, they may not be considered to be children in legal terms. National, cultural and ethnic variations exist in attitudes about who is a child (Waites 2005; O’Donnell and Minner 2007). In order to be able to define who is a child, the most straightforward way is to refer to the law. However, in doing so, investi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Establishing the terrain
• 2 A theoretical analysis of real and virtual child sexual abuse
• 3 Young people’s use of the internet
• 4 The legal framework
• 5 Collaborative efforts to protect children from online child sexual abuse
• 6 Observing sex offenders’ online interaction and assessing risk: An empirical overview
• 7 Police challenges and sex offenders’ activities online
• 8 Conclusion
• Index