NEWS
25 May 2022
Today, Protect Children published a new ReDirection report examining the effects of child sexual abusers gathering together in online darknet communities. The report finds that such communities reinforce and rationalise offending behaviour, leading to further risk to children.
The report includes two articles examining new data on the effects of darknet online communities of child sexual abusers:
Peer-Support of Child Sexual Abusers in Darknet Online Communities
Dr. Salla Huikuri, Project Manager & Researcher, Police University College of Finland
Contact between CSAM Users as a Risk Factor for Contacting Children Online
Tegan Insoll, Project Researcher & Specialist, Protect Children
“The dark web community chats we analysed deal with peer-support, however, not with a type of peer-support that has to do with refraining from CSA, but rather the contrary. Here, peer-support serves as a reinforcer for CSA as our report elaborates.”
Dr. Salla Huikuri, Project Manager & Researcher, Police University College of Finland
“There is an heightened danger when child sexual abusers gather together in online communities and encourage and endorse each other’s illicit behaviour. Our findings highlight the importance of staging interventions before this point, in order to prevent further risk to children.”
Tegan Insoll, Project Researcher & Specialist, Protect Children
The report was written in collaboration with ReDirection project partner: Police University College of Finland.
