An exploratory study of public reports to investigate patterns and themes of requests for sexual images of minors online

Abstract

There is a growing body of research on sexually motivated online communication with minors that has been variously described as luring, grooming and solicitation. Evidence from US studies would suggest an increase in aggressive sexual solicitations, with adolescent girls being more likely to be targeted. Existing research has involved adolescent as well as offender populations, and has largely relied on surveys with young people, interviews and official record data with offenders and ethnographic work with police officers. There have also been a number of studies using chat log data between offenders and adults pretending to be children. In addition, while the use of sexual images has been noted in both offender and victim studies, this has not been critically examined. The present study is different as it used reports from the public to Cybertip.ca to make sense of the types of behaviour that alerted concerned adults, and occasionally young people, to make a report; information available about the young person; information about the suspect, and the interaction between the two. The results of this study show strong similarities with previous research in relation to both offender and victim populations. Implications are discussed in relation to the importance of reporting mechanisms, awareness raising with parents and the need to recognize sexual agency and resilience in many adolescents.

Children in Identified Sexual Images – Who Are they? Self‐ and Non‐Self‐Taken Images in the International Child Sexual Exploitation Image Database 2006–2015

“…The results of this study have important implications for law enforcement and child protection agencies. To date, there has been little consideration given to self‐taken images in the context of coercive relationships, even though there is mounting evidence from offender literature and chat log analysis that self‐taken images play a central role in both engaging a child and maintaining contact with them (see Quayle and Newman, ). Much of the debate about sexting activity has placed responsibility for the images being misused squarely on the child.…”

“…Much of this victim‐focused research reflects evidence also seen in offender studies of the use of CSAE images as part of the offence process (Quayle and Newman, ). The US longitudinal National Juvenile Online Victimisation (NJOV) study (Wolak et al ., , , , ) collected arrest data from a national sample of law enforcement agencies at three time points (2000, 2006, 2009).…”

‘So is your mom as cute as you?’: Examining patterns of language use in online sexual grooming of children

“…Unlike offline grooming, for instance, online grooming is not a linear process that goes from an adult befriending a child to engaging him/her in sexual abuse. Instead, online groomers activate a complex 'communicative entrapment network', resorting to overlapping, nonsequential manipulation strategies (Lorenzo-Dus et al, 2016, p. 46; see also, Williams et al, 2013;Van Gijn-Grosvenor and Lamb, 2016;Quayle and Newman, 2017). 2 These strategies inform a number of 'online grooming models' that have been developed within the fields of Psychology and Criminology using primarily a Thematic Analysis methodology and examining relatively small data sets (see, for example, Egan et al, 2011;Kloess et al, 2017;Williams et al, 2013;Quayle & Newman, 2016;Winters et al, 2017).…”

“…Albeit under different labels, use of overt persuasion and extortion has been previously referenced in the online grooming literature. For instance, groomers were found to use threats to ensure compliance (Quayle and Newman, 2017), 'including repetition and entrapment to force the child to talk about sexual topics' (Williams et al, 2013, p. 150) and blackmail to convince the children to engage in sexual activities online (Kloess et al, 2017). Data from Perverted Justice was used in Quayle and Newman (2017) and Williams et al, (2013).…”

Introduction to the special edition ‘Child sexual abuse: analysis and intervention’

“…One such issue that has attracted growing research interest is sexually motivated online communication with children, also known variously as online grooming, luring or solicitation. In their research article, Quayle and Newman (2016) analyse 264 reports of grooming received by a Canadian watchdog (cybertip.ca). They explore factors associated with reporting suspicious online activity of this nature, looking at various parties ' (victim, suspect, reporter) characteristics and the behaviours triggering concern.…”