How CSAM Fuels Ongoing Abuse

Teresa Huizar: 

Hi, I’m Teresa Huizar, your host of One in Ten. In today’s episode, How CSAM Fuels Ongoing Abuse, I speak with Dr. Ted Cross, Senior Research Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Now, as child abuse professionals, we’re aware of the proliferation of child sexual abuse materials online. But what do we know about the specific vulnerabilities of victims, the characteristics of offenders, and the specific harms that are committed in these images and videos?

A key challenge for researchers is how to explore these important topics without, on the one hand, violating the privacy of victims and on the other, exposing researchers to overwhelming amounts of traumatic material. As you will hear, Ted and his team used an ingenious approach to learn more while addressing these important concerns. What children seem to be most vulnerable to CSAM exploitation? What can we learn about the relationships between the offender and the children that they’re victimizing? And most importantly, how can we work together to identify and protect these victims? I know you’ll find this conversation as valuable as I did. Please take a listen.

Hi Ted, welcome back to One in Ten.

Ted Cross: 

It’s great to be back. Good to see you.

TH: 

So I am curious, today we’re gonna be talking about a very serious subject, and I’m wondering how you came to begin studying child sexual abuse material.

TC:

It was a real partnership among some very dedicated field of people who’ve been working to respond and address child abuse for many years and found each other and formed a partnership building on all of their skills together. There was Camille Cooper who’s been an advocate on behalf of victims for many years crafted many a good deal of legislation to help protect victims who’ve been affected by child sexual abuse material. There was a child rescue coalition, an organization that tracks cases of CSAM on the internet and was able to provide an amazing data set. And of course, as you know, I’ve been doing work in this field for thirty years and my wife Liz Cross has also been a partner with me in on much of this research. And we found a real mutuality of interest and opportunity to bring a lot together in a partnership.

TH: 

So for folks who may not be as familiar with the term CSAM, can you just briefly, what are we talking about?

TC: 

It’s a term that is designed to replace an older, more familiar term, child pornography. And this involves taking images of both stills and videos of children that are sexually explicit for the pleasure of people who are aroused by that. The point of using the term child sexual abuse material and not child pornography is pornography suggests that this may be consensual and that’s not related to child abuse. However, it is child abuse. It requires, for its creation, contact child sexual abuse, and the dissemination of this material further abuses children.

TH: 

We’re going to dive into the study and the study design in a minute. I thought it was just so interesting how you approach this, but I think that you covered in the Lit Review so well, you and your co-authors, what’s known really about this topic. And just sort of level set for listeners who may not be as familiar with it. Can you talk a little bit about, for example, what do we know about who it is that’s actually producing this material?

TC: 

It’s people who are actually committing or conspiring with people who commit child sexual abuse. In order to photograph or video record children in sexually explicit interactions, including penetration, including a wide range of sexual acts, you actually need to perpetrate child sexual abuse and then photograph as a secondary activity to it. So we know the people who are producing this are actually committing child sexual abuse. And then there are others who disseminate it, distribute it, collect it, store it, share it, and so forth. They may not be involved in committing abuse themselves, but they are perpetuating the abuse and the trauma that’s involved in this material being on the internet, being disseminated, and victims knowing about it often. And this occurs for years. This can occur for decades.

TH: 

So in the current study, I mean, I think that one of the difficulties, there are many difficulties in studying CSAM materials, but I think that one of them is just that you always worry that you’re exposing people who investigate these crimes or exposed to these materials anyway. And that causes its own often secondary traumatic stress that relates to that exposure. So even thinking about how to responsibly research a topic like this, I think led you to a pretty ingenious way of approaching, trying to learn more about this topic. And so can you talk to us a little bit about, first of all, what were the research questions you were particularly interested in? And then how did you design your study to examine those questions?

TC: 

We were interested in the nature of the abuse portrayed in the CSAM material, the severity, and which particular categories of children were involved in the most severe abuse represented in the child sexual abuse material. I mean actually looking at the CSAM itself would raise enormous ethical questions.

It would certainly put our own mental health at risk. I mean, this was stressful as it was. So we used a proxy method in which we work with the Child Rescue Coalition, which is intercepting this information continuously, has data on millions of files, millions of postings of this material, and then shares this that information with law enforcement to assist with enforcement and actually identifying and prosecuting offenders. The Child Rescue Coalition, along with capturing the files, in their database captured the file names of the files, just the file names. And those file names that the purveyors of this material create are designed both to kind of describe what’s in the file and market it to other users.

TH: 

Very descriptive these file names, which is why they could serve as a product.

TC: 

Descriptive. I’m paraphrasing one might be watch stepmother get it on with her six-year-old. Many of the file names actually consist of a list of features to make it possible to search and find particular kinds of sex, particular ages and races of victims, and so forth. So there’s a lot of information put into many of these file names. And we used that as a proxy method. We made an assumption, and it’s not a foolproof assumption, but I think it’s a reasonable assumption, that the file name was reasonably descriptive of the content of the child sexual abuse material in the file.

TH: 

And so as you began to examine these file names, and I can’t remember how many file names you were working with, so you can remind us.

TC: 

Almost three thousand. We started with three thousand. Some of them wound up being, you know, not meeting our criteria, but was it was close to three thousand file names.

TH: 

One of the things that I was, I don’t know if surprised was the word, because everything has gone to video, it seems like people are very video oriented. But in looking at your study, a very high percentage of the file names represented videos versus still images. Did that surprise you at all? Or would you just sort of like in a TikTok world or whatever, there’s going to be predominantly video?

TC: 

I wasn’t surprised, of course we spent a number of months talking about the methodology and learning about the Child Rescue Coalition and learning about the availability of so many videos on the Internet. So I wasn’t surprised when we actually did encounter it when we started going through the 3,000 file names.

TH: 

Yeah. You know, I think it was something like eighty-four percent. So just you can just see how what investigators who’ve been around for a long time and might have been used to a world of more still photography certainly they’re not surprised by these findings either because their world has moved to looking for videos. Talk to me a little bit about some of the demographic breakdown that ties to this. For example, what did you learn about the composition of the victims that are actually depicted in terms of their gender, their age, and any other factors that relate to that?

TC: 

There was a wide distribution. Every child age group was represented, including infants and preschool children, elementary school age children, and adolescents as well. A wide range of racial groups were represented. In fact, that seemed to be a kind of a niche where pe that was used for marketing, people interested in children of racial and ethnic groups.

TH: 

I think that one of the things that I was thinking of when I was looking at some of the breakdown, we know that the majority of kids who were sexually abused are school age, right? So it’s in one sense, it’s not so surprising that the majority of the file names you review tied to kids who were between five and twelve. But it’s still very sobering to think about. Almost 46% of those videos were, and whatever still photography was there, were between the ages of five and twelve. I mean, it’s not so much the older kids. This is really something that, you know, not that there weren’t kids 13 and up. That was, I think, 18.9% in your study, but still just a very large percentage in the school to you know, middle school age period. And tragically, nearly 5% were toddlers or infants.

One of those other things you looked at was this connection to incest and familial relationship. And I’m curious about what you found about that because you know one of the things we know is that much abuse does happen within families. But I think that in the public, people don’t tend to think about children being exploited by their families in this particular way in the development of CSAM materials. And so what did you discover related to that?

TC: 

We studied that cases that we labeled as incest cases where there’s a familial relationship between the perpetrator and the child were common in the sample, I think over 40% if I’m remembering correctly, and that those cases actually tended to feature more severe abuse than non incest cases.

TH: 

You know, and I want to be a little bit careful here and because this material can turn graphic in a hurry. But one of those things that you looked at also was the sort of how common it was for penetrative acts to be as a part of this. And I think part of that is again, I think often in the way that this has been portrayed in the public has been that it’s just a very wide range, and maybe there’s a tiny proportion that’s this.

That doesn’t seem to be what you found. It seems to you found something altogether different.

TC: 

We found a high rate of penetration in the cases that we reviewed. And just looking at this, that over 37% of cases involved sexual activity involving a child or children or both children and adults, or even sadism or penetration of or by an animal. So yeah, penetration was a feature of a substantial portion of these files.

TH: 

So you were talking just a moment ago about race or ethnicity and the fact that there are some offenders who seem to search for, you know, a particular racial or ethnic group or age group or anything else. It seemed as though there was also some increased risk around the severity for kids of color, if I’m remembering right. Can you talk a little bit about that?

TC: 

File names that referenced children of color were more likely to feature penetration than file names that did not reference children of color. So I mean they appeared to be at more risk for more severe abuse represented in these CSAM files.

TH: 

Do you think the sort of practice implications of all of this are, you know, if you’re a multidisciplinary team member that’s out in America and you’re listening to this? I mean, on the one hand, if you’re law enforcement, you’re probably not surprised because you’ve been recovering some of these materials as a part of your investigations. But if you’re a CPS worker, if you’re a forensic interviewer in a Children’s Advocacy Center, how does it influence your work knowing more based on this study about possibly the content of all of the sort of CSAM material that exists related to these cases?

TC: 

Well, I don’t think we can measure it precisely, but there clearly is a link between contact child sexual abuse and online purveying of child sexual abuse material. And I think one lesson for that is that investigations of contact child sexual abuse investigations that CACs are involved in need to also investigate whether there’s concomitant online sexual abuse. So identifying devices that access the internet and including that in the investigation is very important. Working closely with the state’s Internet Crimes Against Children task force is an important requirement for CACs. I think they need to have their relationship with the acronym is ICAC, Internet Crimes Against Children. I think CACs need to have a relationship with their state ICAC task force and seek their guidance. And I have, not as part of this study, but as part of some related work I’ve done, I’ve communicated with ICAC Task Force members. And what I’ve been told is that the relationship with CACs varies. Some CACs are all in, are really partnering closely with ICAC, and some are not, to the point if ICAC lets them know about an online perpetrator that they they’ve been able to identify and connect to a particular locality, this multidisciplinary team within the CAC may not always be following up on that lead.

TH: 

You know, when a child is coming into a Children’s Advocacy Center, you know, I think that many CACs have had the experience that the multidisciplinary team may well know that there are CSAM materials that relate to that child. But often children are very reluctant to disclose that because I mean it’s hugely, I think they feel a huge amount of shame, even though it certainly isn’t their fault, anything related to it. And I wonder based on the sort of severity of what you found here, if part of that relates to what is being captured. In other words, it’s not just that it’s captured, but what is being captured is very severe abuse. It may include sadism. It may include bestiality, all these other things that would be extremely difficult for any child to talk about.

TC: 

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. It substantially exacerbates the trauma that children can experience. And when you think that these images are circulated on the internet for years and years and years, there are images of children from twenty years ago that are still accessible on the internet. And child victims may have to live with that throughout their childhood and into adulthood. The shame that can be connected to that is kind of incalculable.

TH: 

Yes. And I think it speaks to the need for treatment that is able to address the kind of very serious things that we’re talking about too. When you think about the study and what you found, are there public policy implications that you think attend to this?

TC: 

I’m gonna go back to, I think the support for the gathering of data and investigation of internet crimes and for linkages between practitioners who are working on inner internet crimes online per bang of CSAM and contact sexual abuse is really essential.

And I think any kind of state legislation that can support those links is important. I’m not a real expert on legislation designed to protect child victims and combat CSAM, but there is the whole question about the responsibility of companies that host internet activity in identifying, preventing and mitigating the effects of CSAM.

TH: 

For sure. And that’s a whole episode in and of itself, Ted. Right? I’m wondering what’s next for you research wise? Are you doing more work in this area or have has your attention which I know many researchers have multiple studies going on at all times, has it turned elsewhere?

TC: 

I’ll tell you what I’m interested in. I have so many interests related to CACs, you know that.

TH: 

I do know that. We’re glad of it.

TC: 

Right. But I am very interested in studying the interaction between CAC professionals, MDT members, and those specialists in law enforcement who are really studying and tracking online sexual abuse material and whether those linkages can really be strengthened and more effective. I know there have been model CACs that have really developed that relationship that have internet specialists on their MDT, for example. And I’d like to see how common that is and whether that can be strengthened and then whether that has an impact on outcomes for individual cases.

TH: 

Well, we would love to see that study. And you’re right. It is interesting and variable in the sense that there are some large urban centers in which the ICAC person, the task force commander or staff are actually housed at the CAC, examples of that across the country. And then there are many areas where there might be one ICAC task force for an entire state, and they may or may not be closely connected. And so I really echo your hopes to look further into especially the effectiveness of those that are co housed because I think about the closest connection you can get, right?

TC: 

So I’m really interested in multidisciplinary teams. It’s a little bit tangential, but I’m actually working on a conceptual model for how MDTs actually function down to the individual interactions between the in-case review meetings. I talked about it at the National Children’s Alliance leadership conference last year, and we’re preparing an article that we anticipate completing this year.

TH: 

Excited to see it when it’s done. It’s so interesting. Well, I think there is so much to unpack around multidisciplinary teamwork still, you know, even after all these years. So I appreciate you continuing to dig into all of its various aspects because we certainly, I feel, still don’t know all the elements of what makes that most effective. You know, we know that it’s important, but in terms of exactly what combination of things is most effective, I think is yet to be seen. So is there anything else you wanted to make sure that we talked about related to this paper today, or anything else, you know, that was a question that I should have asked you but didn’t?

TC: 

I do want people to recognize, people who work directly with child sexual abuse victims, people who see firsthand the trauma. I do want them to understand that there’s this whole world of abuse that’s been enabled by the internet that’s worldwide that involves thousands of children. And that actually disproportionately hurts children of color. I want them to be aware that it’s out there and that they need to be connected to it in some way. If it’s only asking questions about that one particular child, is it possible that there’s an image of this child online? And do we need to follow up with that?

TH: 

Well, Ted, it has always been a great conversation and I’m grateful for your continued efforts to try to ensure that we do, in fact, connect those who are interviewing kids and working as victim advocates with this whole realm of expertise technologically and with those law enforcement who do that specialized work. So thank you again for all the research work you’re doing and we really appreciate you.

TC: 

Thank you, I appreciate you too.

TH: 

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