The policing and reporting of online child sexual abuse material: a scoping review

• In Event: Technology-facilitated Sexual Violence against Women and Children

Abstract

Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) has exponentially increased in recent years because of technological advances and the rise of the internet. The call for new investigative tools became urgent. As a result, automated technologies became indispensable in the field of detection, filtering, classification and prioritization of CSAM. Private tech companies have slowly but surely been dominating the development of those automated tools. Furthermore, private organizations, NGO’s, non-profits and big tech companies through (social) media platforms hold the reins when it comes to selecting which reports to pass on to law enforcement, aided by automatization and their own corporate policies. At the end of the line, the reports and images the police receive, have gone through a major funnel, significantly impacted by private entities. The field of evidence on the policing and reporting of CSAM remains scattered and is characterized by a lack of coherent and integrated literature. This scoping review aims to meet aforementioned knowledge deficit by critically mapping all relevant and available literature.

Author

• Nena Decoster, Ghent University