Analysis of topic popularity within a child sexual exploitation Tor hidden service

Owens, Jessica N.; Clapp, Karlene; Craun, Sarah W.; Bruggen, Madeleine van der; Balen, Inge van; Bunningen, Arthur van; Talens, Petra

doi:10.1016/j.avb.2022.101808

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…( United States v. Alegre , 2022, p. 66)This fact is further highlighted by the large discrepancies in recidivism rates depending on the data collection method (i.e., official reports vs. self-report; Buschman et al, 2010; Seto et al, 2011). Technological advances will also continue to severely limit law enforcement’s abilities to detect offenses and apprehend offenders (Owens et al, 2023). Future studies of recidivism in this domain should include a self-report or a collateral report component, as has been done by researchers studying the risk of violence committed by discharged psychiatric patients (Hardin & Scurich, 2022; Monahan et al, 2001).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Risk assessment of child-pornography-exclusive offenders.

Scurich

Krauss

2023

Law and Human Behavior

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Objectives: A sizeable percentage of federally sentenced child pornography offenders have no history of other criminal offenses (hereinafter "child-pornography-exclusive offenders"). There is a critical legal need to assess the recidivism risk of this population. The Child Pornography Offender Risk Tool (CPORT) is a commonly used actuarial instrument developed specifically to assess the risk of recidivism among child pornography offenders. Hypotheses: We hypothesized that there would be a sound scientific basis supporting the use of the CPORT in the United States as well as research demonstrating its applicability to child-pornography-exclusive offenders, given that the instrument is currently being used in forensic settings. Method: We critically examined all of the existing empirical studies that constitute the research base of the CPORT. Results: The empirical studies of the CPORT suffer from at least three significant limitations: extremely small samples of recidivists, inordinate amounts of missing data, and potentially outdated samples. Further, none of the studies have tested the CPORT in a sample of offenders in the United States. An illustrative example of how the instrument has been misapplied in forensic settings and courtroom testimony is provided. Conclusions: These issues make it inappropriate to use the CPORT on child-pornography-exclusive offenders in the United States at this time. We conclude by describing avenues for future research that can advance our understanding of this distinct and growing population of offenders. Public Significance StatementA growing number of individuals with no criminal history are sentenced to federal prison each year for child pornography offenses. The Child Pornography Offender Risk Tool (CPORT) is commonly used to assess the risk of recidivism among these offenders. We critically review the research base of the CPORT in this article and discuss how it is insufficient to justify the use of the CPORT in forensic settings and to inform important legal determinations.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Risk assessment of child-pornography-exclusive offenders.

Scurich

Krauss

2023

Law and Human Behavior

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“…Lastly, we complement our analysis with information on the relative popularity of search terms from Google Trends. Specifically, we consider the following set of partially community-specific keywords inspired by Owens et al (2022) and complement them with equivalent terms in the French language: pedoporno, porno mineur, porno enfant, site pedoporno, pre-teen hardcore, zoo preteen, zoo pre-teen, pedomom, pedodad, pthc, boylove, girllove, porno jeune ado, video porno ado, ado porno, porno jeune fille, omegle and hurtcore. We extract the relative popularity values of these search terms for each of the 21 regions of France (excluding Corsica, note that Google Trends still uses the regional delineations prior to the 2015 reform) pooled across the years 2017 to 2021 to avoid excessive data sparsity exhibited when using shorter time intervals that more aligned with the time window of the mobile traffic data.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unveiling local patterns of child pornography consumption in France using Tor

Koebe,

del Villar,

Nutakki

et al. 2024

Humanit Soc Sci Commun

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Child pornography—better known as child sexual abuse material (CSAM)—represents a severe form of exploitation and victimization of children, leaving the victims with emotional and physical trauma. In this study, we aim to analyze local patterns of CSAM consumption across 1341 French communes in 20 metropolitan regions of France between March 16 to May 31, 2019 using fine-grained mobile traffic data of Tor network-related web services. We estimate that approx. 0.08% of Tor mobile download traffic observed in France is linked to the consumption of CSAM by correlating it with local-level temporal porn consumption patterns. This compares to 0.19% of what we conservatively estimate to be the share of CSAM content in global Tor traffic. In line with existing literature on the link between sexual child abuse and the consumption of image-based content thereof, we observe a positive and statistically significant effect of our CSAM consumption estimates on the reported number of victims of sexual violence and vice versa, which validates our findings, after controlling for a set of geographically disaggregated features including socio-demographic characteristics, voting behavior, nearby points of interest and Google Trends queries. While this is a first, exploratory attempt to look at CSAM from a spatial epidemiological angle, we believe this research provides public health officials with valuable information to prioritize target areas for public awareness campaigns as another step to fulfill the global community’s pledge to target 16.2 of the sustainable development goals: “end abuse, exploitation, trafficking and all forms of violence and torture against children".

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