Sexual images depicting children : the EU legal framework and online platforms’ policies

Sexual(ised) images of children may often be posted or shared on social network sites or content sharing platforms. While such material may be the result of abuse or coercion, evidence shows that it may often be linked to contemporary forms of sexual exploration or intimate communication among underage peers. The aim of this paper is to explore the boundaries of the EU legal and policy framework regulating online platforms' liability for hosting or not removing such imagery. Discussing popular online platforms' policies against their imposed responsibility to contribute to the fight against illegal child sexual abuse material (CSAM) revealed a tendency of online intermediaries to restrict more than legally required from them. However justifiable the adoption of this 'better safe than sorry' approach might be, it sparks additional controversy in relation to children's agency. Navigating between the protection and freedom of children, when the issue at stake associates with elements such as gender, morality, and culture, inherently perplexes the performed balancing and cannot guarantee easy public policy or private industry solutions. However, in the absence of clear and sufficient policy guidelines,online platforms have no other choice but to shape their policies based on popular cultural norms, their business plan, and their understanding of how sensitive content should be dealt with

A human-centered systematic literature review of the computational approaches for online sexual risk detection

In the era of big data and artificial intelligence, online risk detection has become a popular research topic. From detecting online harassment to the sexual predation of youth, the state-of-the-art in computational risk detection has the potential to protect particularly vulnerable populations from online victimization. Yet, this is a high-risk, high-reward endeavor that requires a systematic and human-centered approach to synthesize disparate bodies of research across different application domains, so that we can identify best practices, potential gaps, and set a strategic research agenda for leveraging these approaches in a way that betters society. Therefore, we conducted a comprehensive literature review to analyze 73 peer-reviewed articles on computational approaches utilizing text or meta-data/multimedia for online sexual risk detection. We identified sexual grooming (75%), sex trafficking (12%), and sexual harassment and/or abuse (12%) as the three types of sexual risk detection present in the extant literature. Furthermore, we found that the majority (93%) of this work has focused on identifying sexual predators after-the-fact, rather than taking more nuanced approaches to identify potential victims and problematic patterns that could be used to prevent victimization before it occurs. Many studies rely on public datasets (82%) and third-party annotators (33%) to establish ground truth and train their algorithms. Finally, the majority of this work (78%) mostly focused on algorithmic performance evaluation of their model and rarely (4%) evaluate these systems with real users. Thus, we urge computational risk detection researchers to integrate more human-centered approaches to both developing and evaluating sexual risk detection algorithms to ensure the broader societal impacts of this important work.Accepted manuscrip

A Human-Centered Approach to Improving Adolescent Online Sexual Risk Detection Algorithms

Computational risk detection has the potential to protect especially vulnerable populations from online victimization. Conducting a comprehensive literature review on computational approaches for online sexual risk detection led to the identification that the majority of this work has focused on identifying sexual predators after-the-fact. Also, many studies rely on public datasets and third-party annotators to establish ground truth and train their algorithms, which do not accurately represent young social media users and their perspectives to prevent victimization. To address these gaps, this dissertation integrated human-centered approaches to both creating representative datasets and developing sexual risk detection machine learning models to ensure the broader societal impacts of this important work. In order to understand what and how adolescents talk about their online sexual interactions to inform study designs, a thematic content analysis of posts by adolescents on an online peer support mental health was conducted. Then, a user study and web-based platform, Instagram Data Donation (IGDD), was designed to create an ecologically valid dataset. Youth could donate and annotate their Instagram data for online risks. After participating in the study, an interview study was conducted to understand how youth felt annotating data for online risks. Based on private conversations annotated by participants, sexual risk detection classifiers were created. The results indicated Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Random Forest models outperformed in identifying sexual risks at the conversation-level. Our experiments showed that classifiers trained on entire conversations performed better than message-level classifiers. We also trained classifiers to detect the severity risk level of a given message with CNN outperforming other models. We found that contextual (e.g., age, gender, and relationship type) and psycho-linguistic features contributed the most to accurately detecting sexual conversations. Our analysis provides insights into the important factors that enhance automated detection of sexual risks within youths\u27 private conversations

Epistemic practices in social work:hear me out

This PhD by publication explores how ‘knowledges’ in social work research are authorized often to those who use and provide services. It draws together 11 publications, which are a mixture of sole and co authored peer reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and co authored publications for a range of charitable and public bodies both within the UK and Europe. The concept of ‘epistemic injustice’, is used to examine the connections between my published works. Stemming from the tradition of feminist philosophy, epistemic injustice is when the capacity to hear another’s testimony is diminished. With its focus on the interrelationship between hearing and being heard, epistemic justice has an under utilised value in social work practice and research. Building on the central themes of voice and justice, I argue that the discrediting of an individual testimony leads to individual and collective harm, as the opportunities for some to contribute to the common store of social meanings are diminished, including asylum seeking young people, victim and survivors of child sexual exploitation, child sexual abuse and child trafficking. My published works are examined as case studies to consider which and whose knowledge is taken seriously and why. I considers the harms done through the process of being discredited; both to the individual (their testimony and their identity –as sense of self is shaped by these negative associations) and to a developing knowledge (as accounts are missed and the potential growth of connections (be they defeating, justifying or inferential) is lost. Although all knowledge is partial and co-produced, I consider the obligation to make relevant efforts to understand how the world looks from different points of view, especially those who use and provide services

Producers of indecent images of children : a qualitative analysis of the aetiology and development of their offending patterns

The term ‘producers of IIOC’ refers to individuals who create or are involved in the creation of indecent images of children. This thesis is a qualitative analysis of 22 interviews undertaken with individuals who produced IIOC. The production of IIOC is not a new phenomenon. However, producers of IIOC are a group about which little is known, even though they supply a large market. With the advancement of modern technology and the development of the internet, IIOC has become more readily available and easier to produce. Accordingly, it is important to gain a greater understanding of those who create such material in the interests of prevention, child safeguarding and detection. Law enforcement and the legal system worldwide are chasing the ever-advancing means of sexually abusing and exploiting children. Research and safeguarding organisations regularly highlight the exponential number of new IIOC available and the apparent increasing demand for such material. The low-age range of victims of IIOC and extreme abuse being perpetrated have been noted in seized material, and live streaming of child sexual abuse is a concerning development. The participants in this study emerged as a heterogeneous group in terms of social demographics. Their early life experiences were marked by prevalent issues such as neglect, abuse and exposure to violence. A large proportion of them had never had a long-term adult relationship and many others were either separated or divorced. Their grooming techniques were many and varied, and they presented as being able to adapt their grooming process depending upon the environment and victim. IIOC of both known and stranger victims were produced, demonstrating a variation in the relationships between perpetrators and the children who were exploited. The methodology employed to produce IIOC was examined, covering both remote and adjacent producers, as well as those who were covert about their behaviour. The cognitive distortions that supported the behaviour suggest minimising of harm and distancing techniques. The function of the production behaviour was not found to be exclusively sexual and included a variety of other motivating factors, ranging from commercial gain to social status. However, all participants acknowledged a sexual arousal to children. This research has found that the process of producing IIOC appears to be evolving. The advancement of technology, in particular the internet, makes it easier to produce IIOC and share such material with others. As sex offenders seem to be capitalising on new equipment and the increasingly mainstream culture of photographing and recording almost unreservedly, so too must law enforcement and front-line professionals keep pace. Recognising that production of IIOC may be an aspect of an individual’s sexually exploitative behaviour, even when there is initially no apparent evidence, is essential. It appears that it may be an overlooked or undetected area of offending and in turn, not dealt with in assessment, intervention and safeguarding. Future research is advisable to obtain a greater understanding of individuals who produce IIOC, in order to prevent, deter, and deal with the behaviour, as well as to help their victims

Between the Gothic and Surveillance: Gay (Male) Identity, Fiction Film, and Pornography (1970-2015)

In this thesis I make the case for rethinking fictional and explicit queer representation as a form of surveillance. I put recent research in surveillance studies, particularly work on informational doubling, in conversation with the concepts of the uncanny and the doppelgänger to reconsider the legacy of screen theory and cinematic discipline in relation to the ongoing ideological struggle between normativity and queerness. I begin my investigation in and around the Stonewall era examining the gothic roots and incarnation of gay identity. I then trace the formation and development of identity through cinematic and pornographic representation taking critical snapshots of four identifiable epochs organized around a seismic socio-political disjuncture: after Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign in the late 70s and early 80s; during the AIDS crisis between the mid-80s and mid-90s; after the AIDS crisis in the late 90s when family politics took centre stage; and in the midst of the “bareback crisis” in the new millennium. I argue that in order to understand the crisis in contemporary queer cultural politics heavily influenced by the rupture in uniform safer-sex practices we must trace the lineage of figurative identity through fiction and hard core film back to its post-Stonewall incarnation. It is my ultimate contention that the strategic deployment of homogeneous identity via social, personal, and sexual identification with the image double became a way to control the streets without having to be on the streets. Mainstream(ed) representation became, and remains, a brilliantly insidious form of social engineering and not a path toward liberation and freedom. Homosexuality exists outside the field of the visible, but the gay and queer do not. I argue that through film and porn metaphysical identities were strategically manufactured which queer individuals were and are compelled and convinced to identify with and mimic, culminating in an ideological and representational schism in the twenty-first century whose effect on lived experience has had significant consequences