Of Superbots and Techno Fears: Constructing On-line Child Sexual Exploitation in the Media

• In Event: Crime and Media

Abstract

The rise of mass public access to the internet since the late 1990s and the recent proliferation of mobile communications technology have led to new fears about threatened children. While the appearance of new technology has often been accompanied by fears about its potential misuse by predators seeking to harm children, the social construction of technology has not been uniformly negative. Indeed, interest groups who seek to advance claims about child sexual exploitation construct an ambivalent and sometimes contradictory picture of technology, crime and justice.
This paper analyzes rhetoric and claimsmaking by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P) over the past two decades as it has come to define the problem of child sexual exploitation and its relationship to communications technology. I argue that there has been a shift in the way technology is framed in claims about child exploitation and I further argue that this new framing draws symbolic power from popular cultural representations of technology in film, television and other forms of visual media. I conclude by emphasizing the reciprocal relationship between news and fictional stories about crime and crime control and the role of these crime stories in shaping public attitudes and criminal justice policy.

Author

• Steven Kohm, University of Winnipeg