Study: A third of child ‘pornography’ watchers abuse children online
According to the Guardian, New survey finds that one-third of respondents attempted to directly contact a child, because of the illegal content they watched online.
Protect Children launched two innovative surveys in the dark web to gather unprecedented data about the habits, thoughts, feelings, and behaviours of individuals who use Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM).
How was the research conducted?
When individuals search for CSAM on the dark web by using certain key words, they were presented with the possibility to answer one of two questions leading to two different surveys: “Help us to help you” or “No need for help”.
Protect Children used the results of the surveys to analyse the respondents’ mentality.
Troubling Results
Collected data found that 40 percent of the participants said that they had seen child sexual abuse material when they were less than 13 years old.
The research also showed that viewing child pornography on the Internet leads to more physical acts of sexual abuse, as the questions addressed the existence of thoughts and fears among these users regarding the commission of crimes of sexual violence against children. The organization stressed the absolute necessity to remove this type of content from the Internet.
52% of the participants said that they fear that viewing these materials may lead to them committing sexual abuse against a child. 44 percent said that as a result of viewing the materials they thought of looking for a way to find direct contact with a child. Concerningly, around 37 percent actually sought direct contact with a child.
Child Abuse in Britain
According to the Guardian, online child abuse is on the rise. In Britain alone, around 850 people are arrested each month, almost all of them men, for crimes linked to child abuse online. The National Crime Agency said the findings of the new report match reality.
Sarah Plait, deputy director of the National Agency, was quoted as saying that there is “a direct link between online offending and contact abuse. In the UK we estimate that there are between 550,000 and 850,000 UK-based individuals posing various degrees of sexual risk to children – a figure which has grown in line with increased online activity.”
Source: Guardian, Protect Children Report
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