Growth and change in undercover online child exploitation investigations, 2000–2006

Abstract

This paper documents changes in the rates and characteristics of undercover police investigations against child sexual exploiters on the Internet. Telephone interviews were conducted with law enforcement officials about a nationally representative sample of cases ending in arrest for an Internet-related sex crime against a minor in 2000 and 2006. The survey found a 280% increase in arrests of offenders identified in undercover operations between the two time periods. This translates to an increase in estimated numbers of arrests nationwide from 826 to 3137. Federally funded Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces showed the largest increase in arrests by 988%. The growth in arrests suggests the successful adaptation of new technology and training to improve police effectiveness.

Crime and Justice in Digital Society: Towards a ‘Digital Criminology’?

“…Thus, while financial fraud, data theft, information privacy and identity crime became (and remain now) persistent themes in criminological research, the attention of 'cyber crime' scholars broadened to include interpersonal harms such as online child sexual exploitation and 'child pornography' (see, for example, Armagh 2001;Esposito 1998;Mitchell et al 2010) with both crimes having become the focus of much public and policy concern.…”

Are students really connected? Predicting college adjustment from social network usage

“…It could be the case that social networking users have a false sense of security and recent surveys illustrate that people judge themselves to be less vulnerable than others to online risks (Cho, Lee, & Chung, 2010). However, there are risks to online communications with 9% of youth reporting being stalked online in their lifetime (Mitchell, Finkelhor, Wolak, & Jones, 2011) and research demonstrating the connection between stalking behaviours and threatening personality profiles such as anger related issues (Patton, Nobles, & Fox, 2010). Additionally, women scored significantly higher on the information and friendship dimensions than men and men scored significantly higher on the connection dimension than women.…”

Technical Mapping of the Grooming Anatomy Using Machine Learning Paradigms: An Information Security Approach

“…In this research, the authors decided to use the aforementioned data to evaluate the feasibility of developing a computer system to perform the automatic recognition of sexual attackers online with the use of type (1b) text records. There, it was evidenced that they managed to distinguish automatically between the pseudo-victim and the attacker, with the assumption that a positive result would support the hypothesis that it is possible to mark suspect chats online automatically [29], [30].…”