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Affordances, Social Media and the Criminogenic Nature of the Internet: Technology-Mediated Child Sexual Abuse

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Online Child Sexual Exploitation

Abstract

In September 2019, The New York Times reported that in the previous year, technology companies reported to the US National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) over 45 million photographs and videos of children being sexually abused, which was more than double what had been reported in the previous year (Keller & Dance, 2019). This hard-hitting article made reference to a paper completed in collaboration with NCMEC which stated that ‘… online sharing platforms have accelerated the pace of CSAI [child sexual abuse image] content creation and distribution to a breaking point where NCMEC’s manual review capabilities and law enforcement investigations no longer scale’ (Bursztein et al., 2019 p. 1). While meaningful estimates of these crimes are highly problematic, Wager et al. (2018) have argued that there are essentially four ways in which online-facilitated child sexual abuse (OCSA) can be measured: by counting the number of offences committed, the number of perpetrators, the number of victims and the number of images that have been viewed, downloaded and exchanged. However, they note that quantification based on each of these four measures inevitably produces very different figures, partly because they are attempting to count different aspects of OCSA. For example, disaggregated police data in Scotland would indicate that the number and proportion of police-recorded ‘other sexual crimes’ in Scotland which were cyber-enabled (the internet used as a means to commit the crime) had increased significantly over 2 years. In 2016/2017, 51% of ‘other sexual crimes’ were cyber-enabled, up from 38% in 2013/2014. However, a meta-analysis of the prevalence of online solicitation amongst youth (one specific form of OCSA) would indicate that one in nine young people experiences online solicitation but that moderator analyses indicated that prevalence rates had decreased over time (Madigan et al., 2018).

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  1. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland

    Ethel Quayle

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    Ernesto Caffo

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Quayle, E. (2021). Affordances, Social Media and the Criminogenic Nature of the Internet: Technology-Mediated Child Sexual Abuse. In: Caffo, E. (eds) Online Child Sexual Exploitation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66654-5_4

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