By David
S. Prescott, LICSW, Kieran McCartan, PhD, & Kasia Uzieblo, PhD
With
endorsements by former Prime Minister Theresa May and Eric Schmidt, an
Executive Chairman for Google, Internet Watch
Foundations (IWF), a charity organization that works to remove child abuse
imagery from the internet, reports having had nearly 133,000 such webpages of
taken down in 2019. IWF’s 2019 data is sobering: 46% of the imagery they report
to law enforcement was of children age ten or younger, 92% was of females, and
1% was of children aged two or younger. Twenty percent showed sexual activity
between adults and children, “including
rape or sexual torture including self-penetration.” Another 20% included
images of non-penetrative sexual activity. What is less clear at present is to
what extent these findings from this spring have outpaced the same period last
year. IWF’s data from 2019 shows the greatest growth in indecent images of children
not falling in the above categories. In the UK this has lead Simon
Bailey, police lead on child sexual exploitation online, to state that we
cannot simply arrest our way out of the issue of child sexual exploitation
material (CSEM) and online sexual exploitation. We need another approach.
With an unseen
number of people around the world confined to their homes, a significant rise
in these numbers is expected. Unfortunately, these worries are being confirmed.
Last week, The Daily Mail, a British newspaper reported
that during the months of March and April of this year, there were 8.8 million
attempts to view child abuse images online from the UK. The increase is not unique
the UK. Countries around the world are
sounding the alarm: they report a staggering demand for child abuse images. For
instance, a recent study by the India
Child Protection Fund noted an increase of almost 200% in access to these
images since a nationwide lockdown was implemented. A higher demand prompts higher
production rates, as observed in countries like the Philippines.
Untold millions of families lost their income during the lockdown, creating an
incentive for peddling child abuse images. Stop
it Now! Flanders (Belgium) signals another worrisome pattern in help-seeking
behavior. Before the pandemic most calls (80%) came from people who were
worried about their own behavior, whereas 20% came from worried family members
and friends. Now an opposite pattern is being observed, with 65% calls coming
from others.
Picking up where
recent blogs have left off, it is clear that these numbers, like the activities
they describe, are completely unacceptable. Understanding them is nearly
paradoxical: On one hand, they make clear what professionals in the field have
known for years: that sexual abuse is not perpetrated by a small number of
individuals but is best considered from a public-health perspective. On the
other hand, the numbers are so vast that it is easy to lose sight of the harm
done to the individuals involved, calling to mind the famous quote from Joseph
Stalin that “one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”
All of this raises
the question of how we can start to combat the challenges of CSEM and online
sexual abuse in the new world order. This is difficult because we do not know
what the new normal will be, but what we do know is that online platforms and
the internet will be a significant element in moving forward. It’s about
collaboration! The notion of the internet as unregulated space will have to
change significantly as we have seen new forms of problematic and anti-social
behavior creeping in, like “Zoombombing”
that won’t simply go away. We think that more than just a criminal justice
approach is needed to combat and prevent online sexual abuse. Any solution
requires a multidisciplinary public health approach. Instead of responding to the offence, we need
to think about how we intervene pre-offence (primary and secondary prevention)
and post offence (tertiary and quandary prevention), as well as a range of
social groups/frames (individual, personal, community and societal). Currently,
we focus on the individual and societal elements, sending out strong primary
and tertiary prevention messages, but we need to do more in helping those at
risk to abuse. The access and impact of CSEM as well as online abuse is going
to continue in an adapted way. Like everything else in a pandemic, life and
behavior find new ways to adapt and thrive. Let’s take stock, reevaluate, and
move forward with purpose.
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