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

author Nena Decoster
journal RIDP (ISSN: 0223-5404)
volume 2024
issue Researching the boundaries of sexual integrity, gender violence and image-based abuse
section Image-based and online sexual abuse
publicatie datum 20 septembre 2024
langue English
pagina 323
abstract

Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) has exponentially increased in recent years because of tech-nological 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, big tech companies and online service providers 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 this knowledge deficit by critically mapping relevant and available literature.