Children in identified sexual images – who are they? Self‐ and non‐self‐taken images in the International Child Sexual Exploitation Image Database 2006–2015

Ethel Quayle*, Linda S. Jonsson, Karen Cooper, James Traynor, Carl Göran Svedin

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

18 Citations (Scopus)
39 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Child sexual abuse and exploitation material has drawn concern and legislative attention since the turn of the century, and the work to identify children in the images has been a prioritised task through international cooperation. The International Child Sexual Exploitation Image Database (ICSE DB) includes more than 8000 identified victims from nearly 50 countries. The database contains considerable important information about child abuse image crimes. The general aim of this study was to quantify the characteristics of children in identified illegal images from the UK ICSE DB (n = 687) with the subsidiary aim to describe differences between cases of self‐taken images and those whose images had been taken by others. The analysis showed an increase in identified victims during the study years 2006–2015. Almost two‐thirds were female, the majority were white and 44.3 per cent of images were self‐taken (34.4% taken in a coercive and 9.9% in a non‐coercive relationship). Since 2010, the number of self‐taken images each year has exceeded more than 40 per cent of the total number of images in the database. Although self‐taken images may be perceived as less worrisome, two‐thirds were classified as coercive. This is an important argument in favour of continuing to investigate these cases under victim identification programmes.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)223-238
Number of pages16
JournalChild Abuse Review
Volume27
Issue number3
Early online date22 Mar 2018
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 22 Mar 2018
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • sexual images
  • child sexual abuse and exploitation material
  • self-taken
  • children
  • ICSE-DB

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Children in identified sexual images – who are they? Self‐ and non‐self‐taken images in the International Child Sexual Exploitation Image Database 2006–2015'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this