Key questions

• 1. Does increased circulation of abusive content increase risk to children?

• 2. Does grooming online extend real-world abuse or does distance reduce risk?

• 3. Do digital networks increase the scope for policing child sexual abuse online or reduce it?

• 4. What are the particular dangers offered by the internet to adolescents, those in transition between childhood and adulthood?

• 5. Do we know more or less than before about those who abuse and/or who consume abusive content?

Links to affordances

The issue of access in relation to child abuse hinges around the extent to which increased digital communication escalates risk when most child sexual abuse occurs within local networks, but where sexual images can be made and circulated remotely. The question of incitement is whether increased access to abusive content increases levels of physical harm or increases the extent of harm caused when an abusive act is circulated more widely. While increased circulation of content does not likely increase the overall number of abusive acts, the likely harm caused by such acts can be increased by wider circulation of those images. Regarding concealment, meanwhile, digital policing and multi-actor and international network policing can draw on the same resources as abusers, and so identification of online producers and consumers is perhaps easier than identifying actors engaged in real-world networks. However, revelation does not always make it possible to prosecute. As such, evasion may remain even when concealment does not, although legal harmonization reduces this problem.

Synopsis

While it is agreed that digital networks increase the scope to circulate abusive images online, even if levels of concealment and evasion are not as high as might commonly be assumed, dispute hinges again over the question of incitement. This is at a number of levels. Does the increased circulation of child abuse imagery increase the production of such content, which is intrinsically harmful to those children made to participate in it? Might increased circulation reduce overall production? Does the increased availability of such content increase the market for such material, and if so, does this increase the likelihood of consumers becoming direct abusers themselves? Even if watching child pornography does not ‘directly’ cause a person to become an abuser, does wider availability ‘normalize’ such action and so disinhibit action by persons already predisposed?