Read Handbook on Sexual Violence Online
Authors: Jennifer Sandra.,Brown Walklate
2000; Wolak
et al
. 2006; Br˚a
2007). Besides sex and age, risk factors for exposure
to online sexual contacts include often visiting chat sites, and using the
Internet to communicate with people one does not already know offline (e.g. Mitchell
et al
. 2001). Researchers have also identified factors that appear to be correlated with the likelihood that young people will develop close friendships or romantic relationships with people they have met online, including poor communication between the child and his or her parents, high levels of intrafamilial conflict, problems in other areas, such as at school, and involvement in crime (Wolak
et al
. 2003). The research also shows that adults intent on sexually abusing young people employ a range of strategies to establish and develop contacts with potential victims, and that such contacts can be established in order to commit both online and offline sexual offences (e.g. O’Connell 2003; Shannon 2008).
The existing research thus contains descriptions of a wide range of different aspects of online sexual contacts (see for example Choo 2009 for a recent
summary), but it is still rare to find a compact, comprehensive overview of the range of different types of sexually abusive and exploitative contacts to which children are being exposed on the Internet. On the basis of four complementary data sets collected by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, the current chapter will attempt to provide a descriptive overview of precisely this kind, examining a range of different types of sexually abusive Internet contacts and providing examples of both different forms of
online
sexual abuse and also of a number of different strategies employed by adults to persuade children to meet them for the purposes of committing
offline
sexual offences.
The data are drawn from the following sources:
an online questionnaire survey conducted among 1,000 15 to 17-year-olds;
a representative national pencil and paper survey of youths in their final year of compulsory education (aged 15); and
two data sets based on police reports and transcripts of police interviews
with young victims of sexual offences.
The next
section describes these data sets in brief and outlines how they are used for the purposes of the remainder of the chapter. The presentation then moves on to illustrate various different types of online sexual contacts that children are exposed to, primarily on the basis of young people’s own descriptions of incidents that they themselves have experienced. Online strategies employed for the purpose of creating opportunities for offline sexual offences are then described, and the chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the question of the likely prevalence of sexually abusive online contacts, and by positing a model of the relative frequency of different types of online sexual abuse.
The data
Of the four data sets employed in this
chapter, two were collected specifically to illuminate the nature of online sexual contacts with children in connection with a piece of research that the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention was instructed to carry out by the Swedish government. The first of these, an online questionnaire survey of young people aged 15 to 17, provided a particularly rich source of insights into the nature of the online sexual contacts experienced by young people. The sample makes no claims to be representative, since once the questionnaire had been developed,
1
the data collection process was subcontracted to an established survey company, who then sent an invitation to participate in the survey to youths in the relevant age range who were (self-selected) members of a large online survey panel. The survey was conducted in the autumn of 2006 and remained open until approximately 1,000 respondents had completed the questionnaire. The data were then analysed by the author at the National Council for Crime Prevention.
Among other things, the online survey gave the respondents the opportunity, under conditions of complete anonymity, to describe in their own
words contacts of a sexual nature that they had had with persons they ‘knew or believed’ to be at least five years older than themselves prior to their 15th birthdays (15 being the age of sexual consent in Sweden). Twenty-one per cent of the respondents (35 per cent of the females, seven per cent of the males) reported an online sexual contact of this kind before the age of 15. The online survey participants’ descriptions of contacts they had themselves experienced are employed in this
chapter as the principal basis for illustrating the different types of sexual contacts to which young people are exposed online. In cases where respondents had experienced more than one such contact prior to their 15th birthdays, they were asked to describe the incident involving the
oldest
person by whom they had been contacted.
The second data set comprises police offence reports and police interviews with victims of suspected sexual offences against persons under 18 years of age where the perpetrator and the victim had been in contact with one another online.
2
The relevant offence reports were identified by means of an electronic search of the offence report databases of 14 of Sweden’s 21 police authorities, including those covering the country’s three metropolitan areas. The search was necessary because at the time of the study, Internet-related sexual offences were not recorded by the Swedish police in a way that made it possible to distinguish them from other offences. The search process identifies relevant incidents by means of a computerised search of what are termed the ‘offence descriptions’ contained in each offence report. These are in effect a summary of the circumstances surrounding the reported incident written in the recording officer’s own words.
The search noted the identity of reports where the offence description contained any of a number of pre-specified search terms indicating that the reported incident might have involved an Internet contact. These were then examined, and irrelevant cases excluded, producing a material comprising 315 offence reports. In cases where the offence report contained information indicating that an
offline
sexual offence had been, or may have been, committed against the victim, documentation from the police investigation into the offence, including police interviews with the victims, was requested from the relevant police authorities.
3
In the current context, these data are employed primarily to describe the strategies used by sex offenders to arrange offline meetings with children. At the same time it should be noted that the descriptions of exclusively online contacts found in the police data matched very well with the descriptions collected in the web survey, although the police data contained more examples of the more serious types of incidents and of offences involving repeated contacts over relatively long periods of time. Another important difference is that the descriptions in the offence reports were written by police officers and simply do not have the same ring of authenticity as those provided by the young respondents in the online survey, and as will become clear, many of the web survey descriptions also provide insights into how the shorter contacts developed, and how the youths dealt with them. Information of this kind is not always available in the police offence reports, where the focus was primarily directed at describing the factors of interest in assessing whether or not a ‘crime’ had taken place.
The final two data sets, which were not collected specifically in order to examine the nature of sexually abusive or exploitative online contacts, are employed as a means of placing the findings from the first two data sets in a broader context. The third data set, which focuses on the prevalence of online sexual contacts between adults and children in Sweden, comes from a nationally representative school sample of 15-year-olds. Here the National Council has been able to exploit a recurrent self-report survey on involvement in crime and exposure to victimisation (e.g. Svensson and Ring 2007; Bra˚ 2010), and added an item to the questionnaire used in the 2008 wave of data collection which corresponds to the question posed in the online survey.
4
The fourth data set comprises a systematic sample of the reported offences registered by the Swedish police in 2008 under the crime codes for rape against persons under 18 years of age. The sample comprises 25 per cent of the reported offences against females, and 50 per cent of those against males. The data set once again draws information from both offence reports and police interviews with the young victims of these crimes. These data were collected in order to produce an overview of the nature of the rape offences against children currently coming to the attention of the Swedish justice system. Here the material is employed to provide an indication of the proportion of reported suspected rape offences against young people that originated in an online contact between the perpetrator and the victim.
Different types of online sexual contacts
Analyses of the web survey descriptions and the police data respectively showed that the online contacts could be organised on the basis of a number of different elements which occurred repeatedly in both data sets. Sometimes one of these elements occurred in isolation in the context of a given contact, at other times contacts involved two or more elements. The focus is here directed first and foremost at describing the different elements themselves and to this end the contacts have been organised into five (non-mutually exclusive) categories. The question of the relationship between these five categories of contacts, and of whether they can or should be viewed as different parts of a continuum, or as different ‘stages’ in a general grooming process, is addressed towards the end of the chapter in connection with the presentation of a descriptive model of sexually abusive online contacts.
The five categories of contacts are as follows:
contacts involving sexual questions and ‘dirty talk’;
contacts involving sexual images;
contacts involving web cameras;
contacts that are extended to mobile phones;
contacts involving attempts to arrange offline meetings.
Within these categories of contacts, the data show quite substantial variations in the specific content of the contacts in individual cases. These include variations in for example how the contact was developed and in the type of
The web survey respondents were asked the age of the person they had been in contact with, and this information, along with the age of the respondent at the time of the contact, is presented in connection with each description.
5
The descriptions quoted have in certain cases been shortened somewhat, and the names of specific Internet communities have been removed and replaced with ‘community’ or ‘chat room’, but otherwise they have simply been translated from Swedish to English.
Sexual questions and ‘dirty talk’
The quotation presented at the beginning of this
chapter represents one example of the first type of contact. The two quotes below present additional examples.
It was a 46-year-old man who made sexual remarks and asked if I wanted to see his penis. He also asked if we could meet.
(boy aged 14; man aged over 35)
He started by asking about things like: where do you live, how old are you, how’s it going in school, how many friends have you got, what are things like at home . . . then when we’d chatted for 30 minutes he starts asking if I was a virgin, if I was single, how I wanted it and then if we could meet and so on ...I blocked him of course.
(girl aged 14; man aged over 35)
This last example illustrates the way in which the adult often takes a little time to develop a relationship of trust with the child before moving on to introduce the sexual content into their communication. At the same time, however, the quote clearly indicates that it is the adult who is managing the content of the online conversation, and at the same time acquiring information about the child which may prove helpful in deciding upon a strategy to further his apparent sexual intent, fishing for indications of possible vulnerability. One recurrent theme in both the literature (e.g. Mitchell
et al
. 2001; Alvin Malesky Jr. 2007) and our own data is that many of the children who find themselves getting into serious difficulties online have characteristics that make them
particularly vulnerable to this kind of contact. The next quote shows one of the ways in which such vulnerabilities may be exploited.
Sexual images
Two different men chatted with me on a community and got me to give them my MSN address. I didn’t have many friends, and low self-esteem. They were nice to me and after a while they started asking me to send pictures. I sent a few photos. We chatted more, and they both started asking for a bit more revealing... naked pictures ...I hesitated, but then I thought they’re so nice, so why not, I’m never going to meet them. So I took some more pictures and sent them. After a while I realised what I’d done was wrong and I blocked them both and stopped using that address.
(girl aged 13; men aged over 35)
In this quote, which describes how a girl was persuaded to send sexual images to two adults, we see once again that the adults first take the time to develop a relationship of trust, in this case by ‘being nice’ to the child. And they then get her to do what they want gradually, by stages – first ordinary pictures, then naked pictures.
The above description is also interesting for a number of other reasons. First, it shows how the Internet provides opportunities for people interested in sexual images of children to get children themselves to contribute to the enormous and ever growing number of child exploitation and abuse images circulating on the Internet. It also illustrates where the contact begins and how it develops in the online environment. The girl in this case meets the men on the chat site of an online community, and the communication is then transferred to MSN Messenger, an example of what is known as an instant messaging application. These applications allow you to chat over the Internet, and to send pictures and film clips, and also to use a web camera for video conversations. And they allow you to do these things in private, without being seen by anyone else online, which you cannot do if you are communicating with someone in a public chat room. In both the web survey and the police data, the most common scenario described was for the initial contact to have taken place in the public chat room of one of several popular internet communities, and for the two people involved to agree to move over to MSN Messenger, where their communication became private. And it was usually only after the contact had been shifted over to MSN Messenger that the adults started to introduce the sexual elements into the communication.
Both the web survey and the police material also contained examples of cases where it was the adult who had sent sexual images to the child. In the police material, these included sexual images that were purportedly of the adult him- or (very rarely) herself, photographs of young children in sexual poses, and pornographic film clips where either the adult himself or others, including children, were depicted engaging in a variety of sex acts. The web survey data, however, only contained descriptions of the first type of images, as in the following short example.
I thought he was about the same age as me, then one evening he sent me pictures of himself and his intimate parts. I blocked him and took him off my list!
(girl under 12; man aged 18–24)