Child Abuse and Neglect
Volume 52, 2016, Pages 185-199

Characterization of contact offenders and child exploitation material trafficking on five peer-to-peer networks (Article)

Bissias G. , Levine B.* , Liberatore M. , Lynn B. , Moore J. , Wallach H. , Wolak J.
  • a College of Information and Computer Sciences, Univ. of Massachusetts Amherst, United States
  • b College of Information and Computer Sciences, Univ. of Massachusetts Amherst, United States
  • c College of Information and Computer Sciences, Univ. of Massachusetts Amherst, United States
  • d College of Information and Computer Sciences, Univ. of Massachusetts Amherst, United States
  • e College of Information and Computer Sciences, Univ. of Massachusetts Amherst, United States
  • f College of Information and Computer Sciences, Univ. of Massachusetts Amherst, United States, Microsoft Research New York City, United States
  • g Crimes Against Children Research Center, University of New Hampshire, United States

Abstract

We provide detailed measurement of the illegal trade in child exploitation material (CEM, also known as child pornography) from mid-2011 through 2014 on five popular peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks. We characterize several observations: counts of peers trafficking in CEM; the proportion of arrested traffickers that were identified during the investigation as committing contact sexual offenses against children; trends in the trafficking of sexual images of sadistic acts and infants or toddlers; the relationship between such content and contact offenders; and survival rates of CEM. In the 5 P2P networks we examined, we estimate there were recently about 840,000 unique installations per month of P2P programs sharing CEM worldwide. We estimate that about 3 in 10,000 Internet users worldwide were sharing CEM in a given month; rates vary per country. We found an overall month-to-month decline in trafficking of CEM during our study. By surveying law enforcement we determined that 9.5% of persons arrested for P2P-based CEM trafficking on the studied networks were identified during the investigation as having sexually offended against children offline. Rates per network varied, ranging from 8% of arrests for CEM trafficking on Gnutella to 21% on BitTorrent. Within BitTorrent, where law enforcement applied their own measure of content severity, the rate of contact offenses among peers sharing the most-severe CEM (29%) was higher than those sharing the least-severe CEM (15%). Although the persistence of CEM on the networks varied, it generally survived for long periods of time; e.g., BitTorrent CEM had a survival rate near 100%. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd.

Author Keywords

child sexual exploitation Child pornography Peer-to-peer Internet

Index Keywords

Child Abuse, Sexual Erotica offender survival rate toddler human statistics and numerical data social network Internet Humans Infant peer group child sexual abuse human trafficking legislation and jurisprudence Social Networking utilization sexual crime law enforcement Criminals Child
Link
https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-84959544967&doi=10.1016%2fj.chiabu.2015.10.022&partnerID=40&md5=41b0aa6f35ccedc47688510863e38e3b
DOI: 10.1016/j.chiabu.2015.10.022
ISSN: 01452134
Cited by: 4
Original Language: English